Pulverizing Paradigms and the Kingdom of God

A Contextual Reflection on the Beatitudes

The verses are very familiar, oft quoted, and are even thought by many non-believers to embody a universal social ethic. To disciples of Jesus, they are the epitome of Christian virtue and the standard of what character and behavior should be like in the Kingdom of God. Such has been the impact of Jesus' earth-shattering words that we know as the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) and the Beatitudes Jesus chose to initiate that discourse (Matt. 5: 3-12). Since we need to know what a Scripture passage meant to those who first heard those words before we ask what it means for us today, we need to re-infuse this "familiar" teaching with some of its first-century context.

Let's start by asking a foundational question: What is the most important thing about you? Until recently, I always thought that A.W. Tozer had the best possible answer in his book The Knowledge of the Holy when he observed: W hat comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us. In recent years, after pondering that question more, I now believe that the most important thing about any of us is simply the way we have been conditioned to think by our respective worldviews .

A person's worldview determines everything about him or her, including his or her mindset - how each sees, thinks, and understands things. Contained within a worldview are all the paradigms that go into forming how a person defines his or her world, as well as how each then responds to it. Our worldview and the hundreds of paradigms that comprise it not only profoundly influences how we approach the Scriptures, but how we have been conditioned to filter and reshape God's Word to make it more palatable to our entrenched and well-defended comfort zones.

Our worldview is the "prison" within which we live. In that "cell block" are all the norms, standards, rules, truths, assumptions, presuppositions, thoughts and experiences that we draw upon to make our decisions, evaluations, and judgments, and how we accept, alter or dismiss the ideas that create our attitudes, biases, and prejudices. Yet the most important thing about us, the one thing that we almost never stop and think about is, why do we think the way we think and why we are unknowingly held captive by those paradigms?

A paradigm is a framework of all that we think and feel, and thus hold to be true about some aspect of our life. Each of us has a multiplicity of paradigms that make up our worldview. This includes our financial, environmental, nutritional, and work paradigms, as well as marriage, family and childrearing paradigms. It also includes paradigms about worship, prayer, church, spiritual growth and what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

In first-century Palestine, there were multiple worldviews within Judaism including those of the Sadducees, Zealots, Essenes, Pharisees, ordinary observant Jews and Hellenistic Jews. Each was unknowingly being held captive by their paradigms. When Jesus came with His radical Kingdom of God worldview, His eternal perspective was more than just another competing worldview. It was (and still is) a totally integrated way of seeing reality from God's perspective that is in conflict with every other (fallen) worldview. Unlike all other worldviews, Jesus' Kingdom perspective brings "freedom for the prisoners" and "recovery of sight for the blind" (Luke 4:18).

There were some people in first-century Palestine who had no choice as to their worldview - it was thrust upon them. These "prisoners" included the lame, the blind, those with diseases, the lepers, as well as people with birth defects. These "poor" were told by the religious establishment that they were "sinners," a technical word in observant Judaism that means God doesn't look with favor upon you. According to this view, that is why these "sinners" found themselves in their marginalized, ostracized, shamed predicament.

In a religious culture where mercy was conspicuously absence (if God does not like you, why should we?), these "poor" people had no expectations, no future, and consequently no hope. They became convinced that somehow they deserved their fate. At least that is how the rabbis, those who defined "truth" in this first-century religious culture, authoritatively interpreted God's Word when it came to these "poor."

To understand the seismic impact of the eternal Truth that Jesus revealed on the Mount that day, we need a working understanding of what blessed means. Our Westernized commentaries generally treat blessed as "spiritually happy." While this is true, its meaning is expanded from answering such questions as: Why should I, or will I be happy? What is the source of such happiness? Using David's Hebrew understanding, you are blessed because God will rescue you (Ps 35:17) and restore you (Ps 23:3 & 51:12). Thus blessed means to have a deep-seated sense of joyful satisfaction in your soul because God will rescue you (where it starts) and restore you (a process).

To further understand the context of Jesus' hillside audience that day, it is important to know that in the crowd listening to Jesus were many people familiar with the worldview of the Sadducees - a group with no belief in an afterlife. Therefore, whatever you were going to get out of this life, the Sadducees contended, you had better get it now. Many of them obtained their riches by corruptly running many of the businesses that comprised the Temple scene, e.g., money changing and the selling of sacrificial animals, creatively extorting money from the people. For them, wealth and prosperity were the measuring rods of righteousness, and it did not matter how you became rich. Deceit and deception were all consistent with their smug, self-serving definition of "righteousness."

Thus when Jesus said blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5:3) and blessed are those of you who are poor for yours is the Kingdom of God (Luke 6:20) , Jesus went for the jugular vein of the Sadduceean worldview. He took their foundational paradigm and pulverized it. The Sadducees did not realize it but Jesus was actually inviting them to unlock the door of their worldview prison.

When Jesus said, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted ( mourning because of the ostracized, no-hope condition of their life), He went for the jugular vein of the observant Jewish worldview. Jesus took their foundational theological paradigm and challenged it so they too could be set free. But there was more to come! He wanted to offer His keys of rescue and restoration to other "prisoners" as well.

Next came the Zealots whose value system held that Rome was the Kingdom of Evil and anyone who worked for Rome deserved to die. These Zealots were engaged in guerilla warfare killing Roman officials and soldiers to "honor" God. So when Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God , He sent a heat-seeking missile right to the core of the Zealots' worldview.

In His "Sermon," Jesus also eradicated the core paradigms of others. One of the Essene's essential paradigms was that a disciple needed to be on a multi-year probation before being fully accepted in their ascetic community. Jesus rejected that notion by inviting His disciples to be part of His traveling band with no probationary period - a direct rebuke to the Essene way of doing things.

Gleefully watching Jesus demolish all these key paradigms of other sects were the super-smug Pharisees. Because they considered themselves to be the spiritual crème de la crème of Israel, attaining their "righteousness" by scrupulous behavior, they saw themselves as the apples of God's eye. Thus they had to be in shock when Jesus turned His paradigm-pulverizing gaze on them by declaring that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will not enter the Kingdom of God (Matt. 5:20). With that declaration, Jesus gives us a glimpse into God's anger toward those who reject His will and ways as embodied in His Son - they will NOT enter His Kingdom. In the midst of a compassionate, freeing new perspective there is also a warning of God's impending judgment for those who spurn His Son and His freeing Kingdom way of doing things.

For those with Jesus on the hillside that day, there were penetrating paradigm rebukes for almost everyone except the "poor." Whether they were Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenees, Zealots, or ordinary observant Jews, they all had to be thinking, feeling or saying something to themselves (in Aramaic of course!) along these lines:

You have got to be kidding me!

None of this makes any sense!

Get real Jesus, that's not the way the world works!

Rabbi, you don't really know what you are talking about on this one.

Whatever you're selling Jesus I'm not buying!

One group of people on the hillside that day who would have given Jesus' teaching an emphatic YES were those "poor" listening to His life-giving words. Their hearts must have leapt for joy and their souls stirred and soothed by Jesus' affirming words. Jesus was inviting them to give up their "no hope" paradigm prison and embrace His new Community of Hope. Long deprived of any compassion from the religious establishment, these "poor" heard Jesus' redemptive mercy-bringing declarations and soaked them up like water on a dry sponge.

What is really going on here in Jesus' introduction to His Sermon on the Mount? Nothing less than a frontal assault on the essential paradigms of all the major compassionless worldviews of His day. Jesus knew that if people were ever going to understand and embrace the Kingdom of God, everyone in His new redemptive community would need to be detoxed from everything their religious belief system had taught them to be "right" and "true." As the Gospels vividly record, His disciples were certainly not exempt from this transformational process.

Jesus knew that He had to remove the religious and cultural paradigms of the Twelve as part of totally remaking their minds, hearts and identities. He needed to change the way they perceived everything if they were to be transformed to understand His spiritual Kingdom of heart and mind. For all that to happen, these disciples needed to be remade from the inside out. And that is exactly what Jesus did! He knew it would not be easy, so He emphasized a " do and teach " - watch Me touch and heal a leper, we'll talk about it later - shock-therapy methodology (Acts 1:1), so unlike the " teach and maybe do " approach of much of Western evangelicalism today.

Before Jesus called His disciples, they were deeply mired in their observant Jewish worldview with all of its flawed ways of thinking. Some of the "truths" that Jesus would peel away from them included:

Extreme cultural prejudices toward Gentiles and Samaritans.
A belief that an earthly messiah was needed to overthrow Roman occupation.
A ritualistic notion of prayer with a prescribed "blest" prayer for every function and task.
A view of God that caused them to fear ever mentioning one of His names.
A blessing notion that reasoned if you were pleasing God, life would be good for you. Birth defects, chronic disease and barren wombs were indications of God's disfavor.
A social perspective that had a self-serving concern for status and reciprocal hospitality.

Jesus came with a whole new Kingdom worldview that inverted all the foundational religious paradigms of His day. In fact, transformation can be viewed as a new way of seeing things with your heart and mind - replacing constraining "religious" paradigms with a new freeing Kingdom of God way of understanding reality. The Kingdom perspective that His disciples would eventually be transformed to embrace included:

A view of God as Father that said it was acceptable to call God, Abba (Hebrew form of Daddy), what some have called the most radical verse in the Bible for a first-century Jew.
More concern about the condition (soil) of your heart rather than your scrupulous behavior.
An emphasis that the "last shall be first" and that a servant's humble, compassionate heart pleases His Father.
A heartfelt concern and agape love for Samaritans and Gentiles.
An emphasis on a Kingdom of the heart and mind rather than a political kingdom of this earth.

Some Things to Ponder Those in the medical profession remind us that 90% of an effective therapy always starts with a sound diagnosis. Perhaps what follows can help us ponder some of that diagnostic truth as we examine the condition of today's evangelical patient.

Has anything really changed in 2000 years? Are we today somehow exempt from this necessary process of having all of our cultural and "religious" debris stripped away so we can fathom the full extent of the Kingdom of God? Or do we still have a tendency to cling to our flawed secular paradigms of success, achievement, significance, prestige and importance - all defective notions that need to be first challenged and then pulverized by Jesus?
One of the flaws in Western discipling today is that we often take a new believer from our narcissistic culture, and cover him/her with a veneer of Jesus "Principles." Usually this leaves the core of a new believer untouched and unchallenged. This flawed approach can easily result in cultural Christians with pronounced spiritual narcissistic tendencies - what's in it for me? This is not the kind of disciple Jesus requires for His Kingdom of servants and shepherds of the flock.
If Jesus walked into your church or Para-church ministry next week and selected a new group of disciples from your fellowship, which of the first dozen "religious" paradigms of your church/denomination/ministry would He start to tear down and remake? Would He remake our self-serving view of God, a view of God that we have constructed to conform to our felt needs? Would our compromised notions of God's holiness or our convenient notions of submission to Him come under His this-needs-to-change gaze? Would Jesus challenge our performance and achievement paradigms, and particularly our frenetic lifestyle paradigm? Might Jesus find our flawed but cherished notions of what constitutes body life, church growth, "real" worship (and the music that goes with it!), "Quiet Time" and in-depth Bible to be woefully anemic.

Might Jesus address our spiritually narcissistic vocabulary by severely restricting the use of the personal pronouns "me" and "my" in our church hallways replacing them instead with "Him" and "His?" Might He ban the use of the word "principles" from ever again being uttered in the Kingdom of God? . "Principle" is a non-biblical word and a non-biblical notion. You cannot take a personal, intimate, vital relationship with the Living God and trivialize it by reducing that to an impersonal "principle" or philosophy.
How much detoxing would Jesus say still needs to be done in your life today? What paradigms might still be holding you captive? Where might you still be blind? Are you asking the Holy Spirit to reveal to you those paradigms that need to change as well as those areas in your life where you are still blind? Meaningful change always starts with a sincere desire to want to change. What do you do when you find that desire missing (as it often is). Are you praying for the desire "to have the desire" to want to have those barriers and impediments removed by the Spirit?

Closing The next time you hear the Beatitudes recited or someone quoting from the Sermon on the Mount, remember part of their contextual purpose: to detox the listener from what "religion" and secular culture has done to them and to destroy the paradigms of each person's before-Jesus worldview. Jesus' words on the Mount that day were intended to set every captive free from his/her prison of preconceived beliefs. Doing so would free them up to live abundantly in His abiding (John 15) love. He is still extending that same freeing invitation today. Sadly, many who heard Jesus' words that first-century day chose not to be liberated. And that is still happening today.

Doing what we do because context always matters when engaging the Scriptures. SHALOM, SHALOM

Resources: If you would like more contextual background on the importance of paradigms and how Jesus remade the Twelve, see Making Disciples Jesus Way; Wisdom We Have Missed , particularly Chapter 5, "Do and Teach," as well as Chapter 8, "Paradigms: Barriers to Spiritual Growth." See our website www.preservingbibletimes.org for more details regarding this paradigm-changing publication.

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