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Date: 2009-12-22
Title: The Beatitudes
The beatitudes or "blessings" are among the most famous and admired sayings of Jesus. That is, as long as you quote them from Matthew and not Luke, as long as you don't include the accompanying "woes", as long as you don't try to interpret them literally and as long as you don't spend too much time thinking about them. Like a lot of things Jesus says, the beatitudes are startling until you get used to them and stop pondering what Jesus is actually saying. When we do stop to ponder what Jesus says it is pretty hard to sustain the popular image of Jesus as a nice, comforting moral teacher. The more you ponder Jesus' words the more obvious it becomes why the religious leaders of his day had him killed. I've posted a new slide show to try to put pictures to the words as a way to provoke thought about what Jesus is saying and how his original hearers must have responded.
The slide show can be viewed here: http://www.radicalX.org/beatitudes.html