The Beatitudes

Many years ago, in 2002, I stumbled across an old, out-of-print book about the Beatitudes in a used bookstore on the outskirts of Nairobi. Starting my first day in an unfamiliar environment, displaced from my usual frame of reference, I began to read “Living Well” by Robert Warren. And, thus, I stumbled upon an upside-down ladder into an upside-down kingdom.

As I read Scripture and the author’s commentary, people I’d met the year prior during my first trip to Kenya stepped forward in my memories.

After claiming our one-year-old son from a Mother Teresa orphanage in 2001 and while working on his visa process in Nairobi, we attended a service for novitiates of The Missionaries of Charity order, established by Mother Teresa, to pledge their vows. As jubilant, lilting Swahili songs swelled through the church, girls from the orphanage danced and sang, leading a procession of white-draped women to the front pews.

After they’d settled, a priest held up a rose. “Your lives are like this flower.”

He gave it to one of the women and asked her to pass it down the rows. “Your lives will be like this rose, continually passed from person to person. Like the rose, you will become ragged and spent. Your very lives will be your offering. Even so, you will spread hope, beauty, and peace to many.”

On that wooden pew, buried in the slums of Nairobi, a hunger stirred in me for something I hadn’t known before existed. Surrendering their lives to serve the poorest of the poor, pledging to possess nothing themselves, the women emanated an other-worldly joy.

I wanted what they had, and I had no clue how to get it.

Thus, I returned the following year in 2002, as though on a treasure hunt, bringing students I worked with as an InterVarsity campus staff worker. And during that trip, stumbling upon the book, an ancient map unfolded into an upside-down Kingdom as old as time itself.

In the mornings, I began to share a beatitude and it’s enticing promise with the students. Then, strangely, we wrestled with its truth as we served at a Mother Teresa orphanage that day. As though our studies were the class, and our day with the children, the lab.

On the morning we studied “blessed are those who mourn,” we arrived at the orphanage and learned of a baby’s death. On the day we talked about “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” we held a baby who’d been found on a trash heap. We longed for and experienced the Kingdom of God as never before.

Different versions of the Bible translate the beatitudes with the English words “blessed” or “happy.” Ie. “blessed are the poor in spirit” or “happy are the poor in spirit.” But, as I researched the original text, I learned that the original word possesses a much deeper, fuller meaning. Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount at the cross section of traditional Jewish beliefs and the influence of Greek occupation. Both cultures shared a common pursuit of “the good life.” The Greeks believed that pursuing virtue, learning what is good and doing it, would produce happiness. And the Jews believed that obeying God’s version of ethics and wisdom brought about a flourishing life both in the present and in the age to come, when God would rule the earth as King. In the overlap of these two belief systems, we find the Hebrew word “asre” and the Greek word “makarios,” very similar in meaning, both connoting a life that is full and flourishing.

Language flows of out of worldview, and we have no exact translation in English for this concept. “Blessed” connotes a posture of receiving a divine blessing. And “happy” describes a state of being that is usually influenced by circumstances. Both fall short. We simply don’t have a word that means the fullness of living according to what is wise and ethical, resulting in a deep interior sense of wellbeing and harmony with God, completely set apart from outward experiences; and a flourishing that will only reach fruition when God’s Kingdom fully arrives. Jonathan T. Pennington, the author of “The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing,” proposes the word “flourishing.”

In America, many believe that a “happy” or “blessed” life results from power, wealth, and love or sex. In Kenya, I encountered nuns buried in the suffering stench of a slum who possessed none of these, yet their lives sparkled with the joy of the Kingdom. Quite simply, they were flourishing. And as I studied the words Jesus spoke on a hill bordering the Sea of Galilee, the text began to unlock for me the paths to flourishing that they’d discovered.

I imagine how shocking his words must have been to his first listeners. No less human than me, the people perched on the hillside around him must have wondered at the absurdity of his guidelines for a fulfilling life: poverty, mourning, meekness, and so on. But Jesus signaled before he ever said a word that what he was about to say was of the utmost importance. By choosing to teach from a high place, he referenced the giving of the law to Moses. When he sat before he began to preach, according to custom at the time, he communicated without words that he was speaking from a position of authority. And, unlike a formal religious setting like a temple or like Moses on Sinai, the location he chose made his message available to anyone who would come. All were invited.

Twenty-two years after first immersing myself in the beatitudes, as if Jesus sat on a hill in my soul, He once again invited me into the upside-down kingdom in 2024. As I waited in Kenya for a team of Americans to arrive, including my husband, son, and daughter-in-law, they were informed when they arrived at the gates for the flight out of New York City to Nairobi that the airline had no record of their tickets.

In the ensuing chaos, as airline staff herded them to the side and the flight departed without them, I wrestled in prayer in the dark under my mosquito net. Thrust into the part of my brain where trauma is stored, the situation took me right back to the powerlessness I felt during our daughter’s adoption from Kenya in 2005. I arrived in Kenya expecting a six-to-eight-week process to bring her home. But, six months later, after one corrupt lawyer disappeared with all our money, the courts denied our second case, and we waited for a verdict in our third process, I still didn’t know if I would bring her home. All I truly had at that point was faith that God was advocating for me.

As our group entered an altered reality in New York City, and as I wrestled through the ramifications alone in the dark on the other side of the world, it was as if we passed through the wardrobe into Narnia. Where nothing is as it seems, but only as God defines it.

This is the deepest and truest gift bestowed upon me by the Kenyans who have become family over the years. They and the people they serve face unfathomable injustice. So many times, the world’s kingdoms fail them. I only tasted what they endure in their daily lives when I was adopting Lily.

For example, having arrived a few days before the team, I’d visited Mathare Valley slum the day before, where half a million people live in abject poverty. In early 2024, the government bulldozed the homes of 50,000 of the poorest of the poor. Unbearable injustice.

But, oh! the riches God’s children in Kenya possess because they KNOW God is on their side and at the end of the day, He is all they have.

Even today, Jesus motions to you, to me, to each one of us, “Come closer. If you have ears, hear.”

If you are hungry or thirsty for “the good life,” consider His invitation. Listen as he describes a Kingdom where the least are the greatest, the last become first, and the upside down and inside out flourish.

Reflection questions:

As you read the Beatitudes, which one frightens you the most? Why?

As you read the Beatitudes, which one do you most identify with at this moment? Why?

Are you hungry for the Kingdom of God, no matter the cost to yourself? If yes, talk to the Lord about your heart. If not, talk to the Lord about your fears and barriers.

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