THERE WERE LOTS of outwardly pious folk in Jesus’ day, and many of them angrily stood against him on religious grounds. What kind of teacher is this, they fumed, who doesn’t even keep the rules of Sabbath, who dares to upset business in the temple, who has the cheek to publicly challenge our authority? Never mind that Jesus did incontrovertibly miraculous works of healing that could only come from God. The people knew it. But all the Pharisees cared about was that Jesus was breaking the rules by healing on the Sabbath — sometimes right under their very noses. The nerve of that guy! Does he think that he’s greater than Moses? Does he intend to overthrow the whole law that God gave through Moses, the law we’ve worked so hard to teach others?

No, Jesus insists in the Sermon on the Mount, as if to answer that challenge. But he will do something nearly as subversive: he will teach that the vaunted righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is little more than religious role play. They’re good at coming up with endless rules and making a show of keeping them. But they’re also deluding themselves into believing that this is the kind of righteousness God wants from his people.

In some ways, what Jesus teaches is not new. Centuries before, the prophet Micah had prophesied the downfall of the kingdom of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. They were to be punished for their rampant disobedience and idolatry. The prophet insisted that none of this could be avoided through even the most lavish show of ceremonial piety:

With what shall I come before the LORD
    and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
    with calves a year old?
Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God. (Mic 6:6-8, NIV)

You can dream up the most extravagant offering you want, Micah seems to say, but it won’t do you any good. There was no intrinsic value in the mere external observance of religious rituals which were never intended to be ends in themselves. Sacrifices were meant to be expressions of heartfelt repentance or gratitude, and in the case of repentance, a desire to be reconciled to God.

So what does God really want? Micah asks rhetorically, before answering his own question. God wants a humble people. God wants people who will do justice, who will love extending mercy to others. After all, why did God choose a people for his own in the first place? It was for them to serve the priestly function of demonstrating God’s righteous character to the rest of the world by the way they live.

That was the plan, and as the prophets said again and again, the people failed miserably. But as Jesus teaches in the Beatitudes, it’s still the plan.

AS WE’VE SEEN, in the first three beatitudes, Jesus describes people who have been humbled by life: people who are poor in spirit, mourning, and meek. But Jesus pronounces them blessed because as the Hebrew Scriptures repeatedly assert, God cares for the poor and needy, the weak and defenseless. The fourth Beatitude then bundles the first three into a statement about how such a humble stance forms a disciple’s character: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matt 5:6). In other words, when you clearly see and grieve everything that’s wrong, you long for God to make it right.

The second half of the Beatitudes then shifts gears, facing outward to how disciples comport themselves in relationship to others:

Blessed are the merciful,
    for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
    for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
    for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 5:7-10, NIV)

We’ll look at what Jesus says about mercy, purity of heart, and peacemaking shortly. For now, I want you to notice the wording of that eighth beatitude: “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” As we saw earlier, the phrase “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” forms a matching bookend with same phrase at the end of the first beatitude. All of the beatitudes, taken together, can be read as something like a psalm, a wisdom teaching about the kingdom of heaven.

But there’s another pair of bookends here: the word righteousness. In verse 6, Jesus said that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed; here, in verse 10, he says that those who are persecuted for righteousness are blessed. The repetition isn’t accidental. The structure suggests that the beatitudes about mercy, purity, and peacemaking are describing how God’s righteousness or justice is demonstrated in a disciple’s life.

Moreover, we don’t want to miss the implied progression from the first half of the Beatitudes to the second. Why are people being “persecuted because of righteousness”? Because those who humbly acknowledge their own brokenness and that of the world around them, who hunger to see God bring justice and make everything right, aren’t just sitting around passively waiting for God to do something. When in humility and good conscience they pray for God to act, they consider their own actions. They ask themselves, “If that’s the world I want to see, then how should I live?” In response, they seek to be people of justice and mercy themselves, the people who embody the righteous character of the God on whom they wait with expectancy and hope.

Micah, I think, would have approved. And apparently, so did Jesus.