What Does It Mean to Be Blessed?
Heaven begins now, for any saints willing to sign up.
—Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest
Spiritual writer Barbara Brown Taylor considers the promise of “blessing” that is central to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
We don’t have to wonder what a blessed life looks like. Jesus laid that out right at the beginning of his most famous sermon, though his description is so far from what some of us had hoped that we would rather discuss the teaching than act on it…. In this life, most of us pedal pretty hard to avoid going in the direction of Jesus’ Beatitudes. We read books that promise to enrich our spirits. We find all kinds of ways to sedate our mournfulness.
According to Jesus, the blessings of the kingdom are available here and now—and later:
The first words out of Jesus’ mouth are not “Blessed shall be” but “Blessed are.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—not because of something that will happen to them later but because of what their poverty opens up in them right now. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”—not because God is going to fill them up later but because their appetites are so fine-tuned right now….
When people who can’t stop crying hear Jesus call them blessed right in the basement of their grief, they realize this isn’t something they are supposed to get over soon. This is what it looks like to have a blessed and broken heart….
When people who are getting beat up for doing the right thing hear Jesus call them blessed while the blows are still coming, they are freed to feel the pain in a different way. The bruises won’t hurt any less, but the new meaning in them can make them easier to bear. Who knows? They may even change the hearts of those landing the blows, while they bring the black-and-blue into communion with each other like almost nothing else can.
This is what the Beatitudes have to do with real life. They describe a view of reality in which the least likely candidates are revealed to be extremely fortunate in the divine economy of things, not only later but right now. They are Jesus’ truth claims for all time, the basis of everything that follows, which everyone who hears them is free to accept, reject, or neglect. Whatever you believe about him, believe this about you: the things that seem to be going most wrong for you may in fact be the things that are going most right. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix them. It just means they may need blessing as much as they need fixing, since the blessing is already right there.
If you can breathe into it—well, that’s when heaven comes to earth, because earth is where heaven starts, for all who are willing to live into it right now.
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Everything in Its Right Place
Creation and the book of Job
Everything fits together perfectly. Job’s world makes sense. He fears God, shuns evil, and is blameless and upright. He even sacrifices after feast days for his children, just in case any of them happen to sin. What a guy! As a reflection of Job’s life, the natural world fits together perfectly as well—at least the portions of it within Job’s control.
Domesticated animals live fruitful lives under Job’s watch. In his house, 7,000 sheep graze, 3,000 camels roam, and 500 yoke of oxen work the fields. Job is a good and righteous man. He’s a wise choice for a church moderator, a town selectman, or a local non-profit board member. The chaos of creation has not yet hit him; the shattering power of storms and disasters and crushing loss have held themselves at bay. Everything in Job’s world, as Thom Yorke from Radiohead sings, is in its right place.
The Protective Fence Falls
But we know the story. The Adversary, Satan, presents himself before God in the heavenly court as a “prosecuting attorney.” Satan makes the accusation that Job’s fear of God depends on God’s protection. “You have fenced him in,” the Satan points out to God, “but if you take away all that he has, Job will surely blaspheme you to your face.” And so God grants the adversary-accuser permission to turn Job’s life over to forces of chaos. God removes the protective fence around Job, and his household begins to disintegrate.
Fire falls from heaven; it burns Job’s sheep and his servants. Bandits raid the camels and put Job’s other men to the sword. A mighty wind disrupts a family feast, causing a building to collapse on the remaining family; a severe inflammation spreads through Job’s entire body. His friends later will strive hard to explain away Job’s plight, but when they first witness Job’s suffering, they can only sit in silence and weep.
Instead of ‘Let there be light,’ Job declares, ‘Let there be darkness.’”
Job’s despair and anger eventually overcome his pious reputation. He curses the day he was born. But what’s more is that he curses creation itself. He sings a lament in chapter 3, full of depression and self-absorption, identifying his own life’s collapse with the undoing and destruction of God’s very good creation.
Instead of “Let there be light,” Job declares, “Let there be darkness!” (Job 3:4). Instead of two great lights separating night and day, Job curses stars to fall. Instead of sea monsters swimming and creatures creeping and wild birds flying, Job calls for Leviathan—the primordial monster—to be captured and put down. And instead of Sabbath rest on the seventh day, Job only has eyes for the repose of the grave.
God’s protective fence around Job’s life has become a suffocating prison.
Our hearts go out to Job, and we only have silence and tears to offer when the lives of people we love fall apart. We dare not attempt, like Job’s friends in the rest of the book, the false comfort of religious answers. The first lesson they teach budding ministers in hospital chaplaincy is simply to shut up and listen.
And yet Job’s wisdom folktale asks more than the perennial question of innocent suffering. Sermons will continue to be preached about the unanswerable groan, “Why, God?” But, in a time of environmental catastrophe, when, as Bill McKibben puts it, we are running Genesis backwards, this Hebrew tale also tells of the universe and the human’s place within it
“In a time of environmental catastrophe, when we are running Genesis backwards, Job tells us of the universe and the human’s place within it.”
Job’s happy days, it turns out, glided along on the dangerous belief that nature’s role is to serve, to be domesticated for human purpose. The only non-human living beings identified in Job chapter 1 are the sheep, camels, oxen, and donkeys that toil on Job’s land. Just as Job is fenced in, protected, and blessed, the wild and unkempt aspects of creation are fenced out and ignored.
In a consumerist economy such as ours, Job’s and our ignorant bliss is sustained at the expense of the unseen earth and its living creatures. If nature only exists to enhance the temporary stability of our lives, nature becomes merely an extension of our own ego’s consciousness. It becomes permissible, then, to scour the globe for oil, remove environmental protections, and rollback use of renewable energies.
To be honest, Job’s narcissism didn’t diminish once his life fell apart. In Job’s lamentation he still places himself as the center around which creation revolves. Job certainly could not have envisioned the era of the Anthropocene—and yet even today, it is perhaps the height of arrogant anthropomorphism to think that the universe will cease breathing simply because we will.
God in the Whirlwind
Yet 35 chapters, two soliloquies, and three cycles of rambling dialogue later, God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. God’s voice thunders through creation itself to tell another creation story through pointed rhetorical questions: “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations? Who set its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together?” In modern language: Where were you at the Big Bang? Where was Western Civilization during the Ice Age? It’s God who birthed gushing waters and swaddled them in clouds, God who assigned dawn its place, God who peered into the gates of deep darkness and death—not Job, not us.
Behind the terror of Job’s plight and the tempest containing God’s voice lies a humbler view of humanity’s place on earth. Multiple Bible passages such as Genesis 1 picture humanity as the “crown” of creation, the rulers or stewards of earth, the mini-kings and queens in God’s image, watching over earth’s realm with either benevolence or terror. And yet after several thousand years of empire-building, resource procuring, world creating, and earth destroying, God’s whirlwind speech downsizes us to a smaller cosmic role.
We consistently confuse our place with God’s place, but humanity in Job’s book is not the crown of creation. Rather, we are simply one part of creation’s expansive, wild, diverse community.
