The Beatitudes

While reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “The Cost of Discipleship” I stumbled upon a realization concerning the Sermon on the Mount that despite my hours of contemplation on the matter that I had never come to terms with. This startling revelation came to me as I realized that the beatitudes were not describing people who already existed but that the beatitudes describe what a follower of Christ will one day through the mystery of grace become those things. The believer will begin slowly to look a little more like Jesus. The principles in the sermon on the mount are idealist, they are impossible to attain, well they would be if they were left to human nature or human devices. However, they (being the attributes descried) are not left to us, they are given to us freely through no work of our own by the spirit of God and we receive them through the God who is not free from humanity but the God that is free for humanity, in this freedom for humanity God’s deity can be seen as the transcendent God transversing God’s own transcendence so much so that the transcendent became the immanent, in this immanence God Humanity is given all the beauties of Christ, which entails all the attributes of the triune God. God is free for us so that God can enter into fellowship with us and give to us freely these qualities. The freedom that God has for humanity is so that humanity can be free for God, and in that freedom for God we participate in the very nature of the triune God becoming micro-chasms as it were of the Blessed Trinity. Therefore with the full assurance that God is free for humanity we have the full assurance to be free for God and thus we as humanity are free for humanity or rather free for the other. This freedom leaves us in with the ability to pour forth the free love to our fellow humans in an excess that not even the most gluttonous, drunkard could be accused of. This freedom is so glorious that any words are pale and fragile in its presence, only the action of love and the beautification of Christ in community can capture the love I speak of.