Just reading through Chris Marshall's essay: The Moral Vision of the Beatitudes: The Blessings of Revolution, and after my last blog, this quote smacks me in the face.......
The most dangerous passages in the Bible are the familiar ones, because we do not really listen to them. The sharp stone of God’s Word, smoothed down by the river of time, no longer cuts. Instead of being challenged by hard thought or hard choices, we lean back and savour pretty words. No pericope in the Gospels is more exposed to this familiarity, that contentment, than the beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel. Nine beatitudes, nine spiritual bonbons. No sooner is “Blessed are the poor...” intoned than eyes become glassy or moist, the heart is strangely warmed, and no one notices that Jesus the revolutionary is heaving a verbal grenade into our homiletic garden”.[i]
[i] J. P. Meier, “Matthew 5:3-12”, Interpretation 44/3 (1990), 281. Italics mine.
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