EPILOGUE to Jesus’ Spiritual Laws

EPILOGUE You Will Be Glad

Rejoice and be glad.

Remember to look up!

God’s Power displayed in the world is nothing but his good­ness strongly reaching all things from height to depth ... and irresistibly imparting itself to every thing.

—Ralph Cudworth, 1647.

God is the fellow sufferer who understands ...

—Norman Pittenger, quoting Alfred North Whitehead.

Your sorrow will be turned to joy ... I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.

—John 16:20, 22, 24.

No matter how we may have gotten to the place where we now find ourselves; despite any sorrows we have known; and in spite of other people and their actions, these final words of Jesus’ admonitions called the “Beatitudes” can be for us:

“Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”

Underlying all of Jesus’ spiritual laws we find one motif: You are the blessed ones when you follow in this way. Remember God, and the rest of life will begin to order itself properly.

Remember to look up!

There is always reason to turn back to God, when we are thankful (which should be every day), when we are discouraged, or when life seems to lose meaning and spirit for us. Yet this is not a plea for cheap grace or superficial cheerfulness.

Rather, the fruit of this stage is true fulfillment that comes to us as a result of having sought to live in God’s way. We will see that it is a joy that admits and embraces the reality of pain and suffering in the world, and goes on to choose life.

Somehow, we are called to live with our feet firmly placed on the solid ground beneath us, yet always keeping an eye on the “heavens.” Such a stance requires sure, steady guidelines—awareness of our own footsteps even as we seek God’s leading. Where do our feet take us? And how is God’s will being revealed to us more and more on the way?

Oscar Stephen Brooks in The Sermon on the Mount points out that Jesus has been describing a believer in God as one who “has a distinctive disposition.” Here is how the “profile of the ideal person begins to emerge,” according to Brooks. That person is one who has had a deep experience that has led him or her to have a “right relationship” with God and others.

In the words of theologian Jurgen Moltmann, a God who has suf­fered with us and for us offers us “friendship with God,” a fellowship with God and others: “The friend of God does not live any longer ‘under God’ but with and in God.” This model of “friendship” is a profound and encouraging metaphor, to be taken along with all of the other biblical pictures of life with God.

We have closely examined Jesus’ spiritual laws as offered to us in the Beatitudes in Matthew chapter 5. Therefore, it should come as no surprise at this point that what God offers us finally is joy itself. Though we are not the perfect personality or the ideal keeper of Jesus’ precepts, we have grown to understand that we are part of a story that is, ultimately, to have a happy ending—“ever after.”

If we think that we can logically figure out God and God’s purposes in the world, we are headed for disillusionment. But we can, as we wor­ship God, and call upon God to permeate our human choices and activ­ities, enter into blessedness, along with Jesus.

The inevitability of Jesus’ invitation here to rejoice—not because everything is all settled, but because God is God—is clear. Yet this is a “hard saying.” We are called to rejoice even though we acknowledge the existence of evil in the world—of sinfulness and failure in ourselves and others, and of our inability to better ourselves through our own strength.

Perhaps it is through rejoicing even in the midst of real troubles that we are most effective in reaching out to other hurting persons. We know that “there but for the grace of God”