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​Devotional: Down From The Mountain

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By David Wong Hsien Ming
 

In our first conversation on religion, my wife told me she once witnessed a middle-aged woman attempt to shove a bible into the hands of a salaryman at a subway platform in Seoul, and how, upon failing, the woman proceeded to slap the bible against the man’s back as he entered a cabin.

 

I found myself at one of those platforms in Seoul eventually, and wondered if the Sermon on the Mount, charged with imperatives from start to finish, would be seen as anything other than yet another imposition from an overzealous evangelist.

 

Still, as a Christian, I’m convinced that Jesus’ sermon would be as impactful if delivered today, with Jesus speaking to the lunch crowd in the business district, or perhaps to workers on a break in the middle of some industrial nexus; why?

 

Why not the scorn and avoidance we reserve for the aforementioned doomsday prophets and tract-warriors?

 

It’s easy to say that Jesus was simply a particularly charismatic hierophant. But before the commands to do or refrain, before the calls to action and authoritative warnings, are simple declarations of blessing – the Beatitudes – that carry none of the bombast and grandeur we’ve seen from charlatans across history.

 

If Jesus were merely a power-hungry political dissident, “blessed are the poor” would do more to rile up populist rage than “blessed are the poor in spirit”.

 

The latter invites interpretation. Importantly, it also invites the interpreter to act. To be blessed for being ‘poor’ is to be blessed for passively meeting a description or criteria. In contrast, whatever qualifies as being ‘poor in spirit’ requires engagement with ‘spirit’. Those who are “blessed” move towards a dynamic response to an unchanging truth by combining both theological understanding and personal experience.

 

No surprise then that the other beatitudes invoke actions (mourning, peacemaking), and any return to passive nouns or descriptors (meek, merciful) are met with others’ actions (inherit, receive mercy). There’s etymological evidence for this line of thinking about being ‘blessed’ not as a description but as a verb. Delving into what influenced the construction of the word ‘bless’ quickly brings us to Greek and Hebrew words that mean “to speak well of, praise, or eulogize” and “to bend” respectively.

 

The joy I find in the Beatitudes as a call to action is that it asks us to connect the personal to the divine, to have our broken, infinitesimal human understanding be the very bridge to wholeness in Christ.

 

This, I feel, is what April brings out when she sings of the blessed – an interior faith that is rooted in the intimacy of bending over the Word or being bent by it, and an exterior practice of faith that is as fiercely obedient as it is individualistic.

 

Of course, we have the concrete moral imperatives that subsequently appear in the Sermon on the Mount, but the primacy of the beatitudes suggests that once again, Jesus’ message is focused on God’s desire to relate to every individual.

 

In this way, translating the Sermon on the Mount into action becomes not an exercise in spiritual bureaucracy, but a radically empowering process of contributing one’s voice to that of the overall body of believers – a kind of radical democracy where Christians set out into the world with approaches to justice and peacemaking that diverge and converge, that are in conversation as much as they are in competition.

 

All this does not mean that God and the Word are changing, but only that our faith remains necessarily personal. We are blessed with a chance to deliberate on the divine as a means of intimacy with Christ – to this end at least, God does not work in such mysterious ways. Like an open book exam, the destination is set but the path may be chosen.

 

So when Jesus blessed the crowd, they were not merely comforted nor relieved of responsibility; his blessing was not a capstone to their lives, but the prologue to it.

 

I wonder about these people; what they went on to do after that day on the mountain; what cruelties, failures, miracles and mundanities they journeyed through. What is clear to me, however, is that from that point all the way to our current vantage point in history, the voice of that one who had authority (Matthew 7:29) is still either woven into or unwound from a life’s journey. All are called, in some way, in some moment, to seek the root of goodness and reckon with what is found.

 

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Prayer

 

Lord, we come to you in this moment, some of us having washed off the burdens of the day, some of us still mired in it. Whatever our state, we come in recognition of your grace and your mercy. Help us to remember your Word and help us help us find new wonders in it as we carry it with us. Help us bring these wonders to those around us as we seek justice and peace to our immediate communities. Lord, help us draw strength from each other, no matter how far afield we may be in this time of uncertainty and instability, that we may then give to those in need. Amen.
 

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About David Wong Hsien Ming

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David Wong Hsien Ming discovered poetry as a child at a Sunday lunch. His work explores the dualities and contradictions of being, and has appeared in publications like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Mascara Literary Review. His first collection, For the End Comes Reaching (2015) is a meditation on the sense of loss that accompanies each having. He worships at Yio Chu Kang Chapel. Visit davidwonghsienming.wordpress.com for more.

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