Today we’ll be wrapping up our time spent in the Beatitudes. First read Matthew 5:10-12, and then read the following excerpt from Clarence Jordan’s book Sermon on the Mount, and do the exercises below:

It is difficult to be indifferent to a wide awake Christian, a real live child of God. It is even more difficult to be indifferent to a whole body of Christians. You can hate them, or you can love them, but one thing is certain – you can’t ignore them. There’s something about them that won’t let you. It isn’t so much what they say or what they do. The thing that seems to haunt you is what they are. You can’t put them out of your mind anymore than you can shake off your shadow.

Read Isaiah 61 and do the following exercises:

• Compare Isaiah 61 to the Matthew 5:1-12 and Luke 4:14-20. What do you think Jesus is trying to say in Matthew and Luke? How is that different than your previous ideas about the beatitudes?
• If Jesus were to come today, do you think he would be bringing the message of the kingdom to the same groups (the poor, the mourners, the blind, the lame, etc.), or are there new groups present today that Jesus would be pointing out as “blessed” by the coming of the kingdom? If so, who?
• Yesterday we read Clarence Jordan’s mid-century “southern” version of the beatitudes. Take some time to craft your own version of the beatitudes in language that you think might make sense to people today and have the same kind of impact.

Read Matthew 5:1-12 and do the following exercises:

There’s only one exercise today, but it takes a little explaining. Clarence Jordan was an American New Testament scholar who lived in the first half of the 20th century. Among other accomplishments, he wrote a series of translations of several NT books called “The Cotton Patch translations.” Being from the south, Jordan felt the words of the New Testament we’re especially applicable to the turmoil that was occurring there at that time (1940’s through 1960’s), and so, should be written and read in the vernacular of the south. And so, Jordan wrote several translations of NT books in the slang of the south, even substituting place names for familiar areas on the Southern United States. In the Cotton Patch version of Luke Jordan renders Luke’s version of the beatitudes in a mid-century southern accent: