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All right, let's talk about one single word, “blessed.” It's a word we throw around all the time, right? We think we know what it means: success, the good life, maybe fame, or being the best. But what if that’s not quite right or at least not what God thinks? Today we’re going to discover what happens when Jesus comes on the scene and flips this word on its head in way that might just change how we look at everything.
You know, it's surprisingly easy to get a word totally wrong. I have a funny story. My wife, who’s not a native English speaker, once yelled, "What a humdinger!" at someone who cut us off in traffic. She thought it was like a major insult. I had to gently explain that a “humdinger” is actually something or someone remarkable. We had a good laugh about it, but seriously, it makes you think. If we can get a simple word like that wrong, what happens when we misunderstand a word that literally shapes our entire world view. Okay, so to really get what Jesus did, we’ve got to rewind a bit.
We need to understand what “blessed” meant before he ever showed up. So let's jump back in time and check out the original context. So the word at the absolute heart of all this is an ancient Greek term makarios. Now this is the word that gets translated as “blessed” in the New Testament. And trust me, it did not show up as a blank slate. It came with a ton of cultural baggage. In the Greek world, makarios was for the A-listers, the rich, the powerful, the winners. It was basically a divine thumbs up from the gods. The ones who used this word were basically on team Pantheon and sat at the Mt. Olympus table at lunch with their best friend Hercules.
Now in the Old Testament, the Septuagint, which translated the Hebrew into Greek, it was a slightly different. Like the original version, it was still seen as a reward and favor from God but here God's favor demanded an ethical component – righteousness gained by following the law (Psalm 1). And it connected back to the blessings and curses pronounced by Moses (Deuteronomy 11:26-28), But here's the dangerous flip side. If your life was hard, well, people just assumed you were cursed (remember Job’s friends). And hey, let's be real for a second. That idea is still very much alive and kicking today, isn't it? I mean, we might roll our eyes at the whole health and wealth gospel you see on TV. But how many of us deep down when something great happens have that little thought, well, “I'm so blessed. God must like me right now.” And of course, when things go wrong, we immediately start wondering, “What did I do to deserve this?” So into this world, a world where “blessed” basically meant you were on top, that's when Jesus arrives. And he doesn't just, you know, tweak the definition a little bit. Oh no, he takes the entire concept, the whole shebang, and flips it completely upside down. Think about it. The world had a really simple scorecard. The blessed, they were the people who had it all: the wealth, the health, the power, and the righteousness. They were the undisputed winners of the game of life. But then Jesus comes along and he walks right past the winner circle. He doesn't even give them a second glance. Instead, he turns his attention to the very people everyone else had written off. The ones everyone thought were cursed: the poor, the grieving, the outcasts. Those beset by “impure spirits” would have been thought to have been impure themselves, the poor were often considered lazy (Psalm 10), at best, or wicked at worst, and “Tyre and Sidon” were two Phoenician coastal cities filled with idolatrous Canaanites, Luke 6:17-20. Basically, Jesus goes to those who were absolutely not winning at life and then says something that must have sounded completely insane to everyone listening. He looks right at this crowd of so-called losers and says, “Y'all, are makarios. You are the blessed ones.”
Listen, Jesus isn't saying, “Hey, hang in there. You'll be blessed one day.” No, he says, “Yours IS the kingdom of heaven.” That's present tense and he will also say “now.” It's not a future IOU. It's a declaration of a present reality right now in your brokenness, in your grief, you are in the place of God's favor and love. Jesus is saying, “The destitute, the downtrodden, the dark-hearted, the seemingly cursed, are not abandoned by God but noticed by God, favored by God, and beloved by God - now.”
Okay, so wait, if the poor are blessed, does that mean Jesus is like cursing the rich when he says “woe to you”? That's a super common way to read it, but it kind of misses the heart of what's really going on. Let's take a closer look.
The Greek word he uses here is translated as “woe” is ouai. And this is crucial. It's not a word of damnation. It's not like “to hell with you.” It's a cry of compassionate urgency. It's more like shouting, "Watch out!" to a friend who's about to step into traffic. It's a “Yikes!” or a “Whoa!,” a warning that comes from a place of deep care, not a curse that comes from anger. So, why the warning then? Well, because all the things we usually think of as advantages, you know, wealth, comfort, being totally self-sufficient, they can actually be spiritual traps – not just in some far-off afterlife but right here and right now. They can isolate us and kill our souls by stopping us from ever recognizing just how much we need grace and how much we are loved when we are at our very worst.
So, why does any of this ancient Greek stuff actually matter to us? Well it’s this: God's kingdom, true blessedness, is not found when you've got it all together. It's found in the exact opposite place, in the places of our need. The kingdom of God is built specifically for the frail and the fragile. It's a space where it's genuinely 100% okay to not be okay. I heard a story that nails this idea perfectly. There was a woman who lost her job and she felt like a total failure, completely shattered. But here's the thing. Instead of being abandoned, her church just rallied. They wrapped their arms around her, brought over food, offered financial support. They were just there with her right in the middle of the mess. And right there, in that moment, she had this profound realization. Her big takeaway wasn't about finding a new job. It was this. She said, “I realized that I was blessed because I could be shattered and not be let go.” Now, that that is makarios. The blessing wasn't in her eventual success. It was in the love she received right in the middle of her failure. So, in the end, this whole upside-down blessedness thing, it's all about relationships. It's found in communities where our needs are met with grace instead of judgment, and love even when we’re losing. It’s when just standing with people matters way more than any personal success. It's that deep profound blessing of knowing that no matter how broken you feel, you will not be let go. And that really leaves us with a final kind of challenging question, doesn't it? If Jesus is saying “woe” or watch out to the people who think they've got it all together, well, maybe that warning is for us - for those of us who are too scared to be vulnerable, too proud to admit we need help. It really makes you wonder, by refusing to risk that kind of fragility, what incredible life-changing blessedness are we all missing out on?
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