WHEN SOMEONE SNEEZES in our presence, we might automatically say “Gesundheit!” in response, even if we otherwise don’t speak a word of German. (Of course, if someone sneezes on us directly, we might say something else.) The word basically means “health”; whether we know it or not, we’re wishing good health for the person who sneezed.

Alternatively, we might say, “Bless you!” or even, “God bless you”—again, without pausing to think about what that means. Some suggest that the custom began with the belief that part of a person’s soul escaped when they sneezed, leaving an opening for the devil. But apart from such lingering social customs, I suspect most of us rarely use the language of blessing, much less in its biblical sense.

Nevertheless, some understanding of what it means to be blessed by God is fundamental to the life of faith. The first half of Psalm 1, for example, opens that collection of songs and poems with a vision of blessedness:

Blessed is the one
    who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
    or sit in the company of mockers,
but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and who meditates on his law day and night.
That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
    which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
    whatever they do prospers. (Psalm 1:1-3, NIV)

The other half of the psalm, by contrast, sketches a brief portrait of the fate of the wicked, leading to a final and stark moral contrast between two ways of life: “For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction” (vs. 6). That way of thinking permeates the entire Psalter, even as the other psalms teach that the life of faith is more complicated than that.

Similarly, both the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke begin with what are known as “beatitudes,” or “blessing sayings.” Here’s what Jesus says in Luke:

Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
    for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
    when they exclude you and insult you
    and reject your name as evil,
        because of the Son of Man. (Luke 6:20-22)

Poor, hungry, weeping, and hated. We may not know much about blessing, but surely that doesn’t sound like any kind of blessing we would want, nor would we wish it on others. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t say, “I know that doesn’t sound like much fun, but trust me, that’s what it really means to be blessed. So just grin and bear it.” Rather, he suggests that to be blessed in the way he describes is cause for rejoicing:

Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets. (vs. 23)

How should we understand this?

It’s important to note that despite translations that render the word “blessed” as “happy” instead, blessedness is not the same thing as happiness, or at least happiness as we typically understand it today. We tend to think of happiness as an emotional state that’s largely dependent on our circumstances (side note: research suggests that genetic differences are far more important). But blessedness in the biblical sense has to do with our status before God. It’s not that emotions have nothing to do with it; otherwise, why would Jesus tell his followers to rejoice? But we can be blessed in God’s eyes even when we’re not feeling it.

Here, we need to go back to the Psalms. Despite the seemingly cut-and-dried promise of Psalm 1 that the righteous will be blessed, other psalms are filled with words of lament, that is, with complaints about suffering. Somewhere around two-thirds of the psalms, in fact, contain at least some element of lament. Even when the psalmists suffer serious, ongoing hardship, they strive to remember that God is on the side of the poor and needy, the weak and oppressed. Psalm 140:12, for example, confidently declares, “I know that the LORD secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy,” and numerous other examples could be cited.

Jesus, in other words, is not saying that it’s good or pleasant to be poor, hungry, weeping, or hated. Rather, these people are blessed because God is their God; they are the objects of his care and compassion. Life may be challenging now, and it’s easy to become preoccupied with those challenges. But Jesus is trying to give his followers the bigger picture of the life of faith.

That includes the suggestion that if they continue down the road of discipleship, they should expect to be persecuted, just as Jesus himself was already being persecuted. They will be hated, socially excluded or even kicked out of the synagogue, insulted, and called nasty names because of their allegiance to the Son of Man. What are they to do when that happens? Think backward to the prophets of old, and remember that such was their fate, too. Then think forward to the heavenly reward that awaits the righteous.

If they can learn to see things from God’s perspective, joy is possible, because new meaning is possible, even in the face of suffering. I think here of the story Luke tells in Acts 5, of how the apostles were flogged mercilessly for preaching in the name of Jesus. Afterward, they didn’t slink away in shame. Rather, Luke writes:

The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.  (Acts 5:41)

But just as Psalm 1 turns from the fate of the righteous to the fate of the wicked, so too does Jesus turn from statements of blessing to statements of woe. For it’s not just the poor and needy who need to see the big picture.