1.

Introduction

The Beatitudes are probably the most famous part of the Sermon on the Mount (abbreviated
hereafter as the Sermon) and may even be one of the most well-known parts of the New Testament.
The Sermon is the first of the five discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and was probably
written around 50 A.D. The Sermon (Matthew 5 – 7) thus takes place at the beginning of the ministry
of Jesus, right after his baptism by John the Baptist. Even though it was Jesus who first uttered the
Beatitudes it was the apostle and evangelist Matthew who eventually wrote them down. In this
respect I would like to say a few words about the author. In the time of Jesus and Matthew Judea
was ruled by Pontius Pilate a prefect of the Roman empire. During this period of occupation it was
customary that the rights to collect taxes could be bought from the Roman government. Because
Matthew was engaged in this lucrative business he was considered by many to be a collaborator, and
indeed the Pharisees and scribes criticized Jesus for dining with him1. So Matthew (as a tax collector
and later as an apostle) was definitely no poet, and yet, the structure and composition of the
Beatitudes are incredibly sophisticated and in my personal opinion its sheer beauty can only be
matched by 1 Corinthians 13. In this essay I will make a structural analysis of the Beatitudes in an
effort to better understand its meaning. Structuralism began as an intellectual movement in France
in the 1950’s. Its founder, Ferdinand de Saussure, claimed that definitions of concepts could not exist
independently but only as part of a linguistic system that is defined by difference. In effect,
structuralists focus on specific aspects of a text such as parallels, echoes, reflections, patterns and
contrasts. In order to analyze the Beatitudes in a structuralist manner I will also focus on these
aspects of the text.
To save space and words I have divided the Beatitudes on the front page of this essay in nine parts.
For future reference I will be using the titles which are stated above each of the separate verses. So
when I want to make a comment on verse 5:3, for example, I’ll simply refer to ‘the poor in spirit’.

2. A structural analysis of the beatitudes

The name Beatitudes comes from the Latin word beatus or blessed, which of course refers to the first
word at the start of each line. This repeating of the first word blessed is a rhetorical device (or figure
of speech) called anaphora. However, this textual property is not the only thing that distinguishes the
Beatitudes from the rest of the text. Another aspect that grants the Beatitudes a semi-autonomous
unity within the rest of the Sermon is its parallelism. Like the anaphora, parallelism is also a
rhetorical device granting the whole a definite pattern by giving two parts of the sentences a similar
form. With this particular style Jesus and Matthew successfully imitated and emulated an ancient
Semitic and Hebrew art form. Parallelism had already been used extensively in biblical poetry,
especially in the Psalms which are, from beginning to end, made up out of parallelisms. Its main goal
is to establish a sense of harmony by giving the lines roughly the same length and meaning. Now that
we have identified a number of textual properties (which will be important later in my analysis) I
would like to consider some theories concerning the supposed meaning of the text. Modern analyses
of the Sermon have led to a lot of different interpretations: some consider it to be a code of ethics,
others think of it as ‘a vague outline of an ideal’, politicians have claimed to base their policy on the
Sermon and literary critic Andreij Kodjak (who wrote an extensive structural analysis of the Sermon)

1
See Mark 2:13 – 17.
refers to it as an ideology. Personally I think that all these interpretations and applications of the
Sermon are wrong and that there is textual evidence within the beatitudes to prove that they are
wrong. To do this the first thing to do would be to look at the exact words that Jesus used. Close
examination shows us that there is a remarkable discrepancy between the first, eighth and ninth
beatitude and the rest of the verses. When Jesus talks about the poor in spirit (1) and the persecuted
(8) he does not talk in the future tense (shall be) but in the present tense (is): for the poor in spirit
and for the persecuted, theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For the mourning (2), the meek (3), those
who hunger and thirst for righteousness (4), the merciful (5), the pure in heart (6) and the
peacemakers (7) theirs is not the reality of the kingdom of heaven in the present, but either the
divine providence of God, His approval and/or reward expressed by shall be/they shall and thus in
future tense. What is important to realize here is that Jesus does not tell people how to behave at all
in this passage, and so it is actually very hard to think of the beatitudes as a code of ethics or as ‘a
vague outline of an ideal’, let alone a political directive or ideology. Instead the beatitudes seem to
reveal to us what and how things are in the eyes of God and thus how He evaluates what is going on
in the world. In other words: the beatitudes are not a code of ethics, but rather a revelation of truth.
Now the next question, of course, is: what kind of truth? To answer this I would first like to discuss an
observation made by Kodjak:

As soon as the anxiety of death is disclosed, the fundamental invariant of the left part of the Beatitudes
becomes clear: it is the fearlessness of death that all the blessed ones share that constitutes their bliss, their
ability to realize the kingdom of heaven. From the first beatitude (Poor in spirit) to the last (For my sake)
the text refers to those who do not defend themselves against threats and dangers within society and act
as if these dangers do not exist or do not apply to them. Presumably, the only reason for such behavior can
2
be their emancipation from the anxiety of death, demonstrated both internally and externally.

According to Kodjak the organizing principle of the beatitudes is the fearlessness of death on the part
of the blessed ones. But to me this explanation is unsatisfactory, after all, is the defining attribute of
the meek, the mourning and the merciful their ‘fearlessness of death’? That seems a bit farfetched.
But Kodjak does make an interesting observation when he says that the blessed ones ‘do not defend
themselves against threats and dangers within society’. In the beatitudes Jesus reveals a certain truth
and this truth is definitely about the relations between the individual and society. So let’s try to
define the individuals who are blessed according to Jesus:

Beatitude Personal attributes Relation to society Tense

1 The poor in spirit Are victims of injustice Present
2 Those who mourn Long for justice Future
3 The meek Long for justice Future
4 Hunger/thirst for righteousness Long for justice Future
5 The merciful Long for justice Future
6 The pure in heart Long for justice Future
7 The peacemakers Long for justice Future
8 The persecuted Are victims of injustice Present

2
Kodjak, A. – A structural analysis of the sermon on the mount – Blz. 52.
As we can see all the personal attributes of the blessed bear some kind of special relationship to
justice and this relationship also bears a special significance to 1) the way Jesus formulates their
blessing i.e. only those who are already victims of injustice are referred to in present tense, and 2)
the overall structure of the beatitudes i.e. opening and ending with the present and actualized
blessing of the victims of injustice and praising those who long for justice, ensuring them their
potential blessing in the future. But with this we have only analyzed the first part of each beatitude,
thus mainly identifying the blessed, so let us proceed to the second part of the beatitudes:

Beatitude Description Promise Reality

1 The kingdom of heaven is theirs
2 Comforted shall be
3 The land shall possess
4 Their fill shall have
5 Mercy shall obtain
6 God shall see
7 Called children of God shall be
8 The kingdom of heaven is theirs

Only now can we fully appreciate the scale of the parallelism which I mentioned at the beginning of
this essay. Not only are the beatitudes highly structured in their formal presentation but there is also
a paradigmatic inversion of the personal attributes and their juxtaposition in the kingdom of heaven
or in the eyes of God. In other words: they may be poor in spirit and they may be persecuted, but in
reality God is with them and theirs is the kingdom of heaven. In the schemes I have presented above
I intentionally left out the ninth verse because it is this verse where the true meaning of the
Beatitudes is revealed. Kodjak makes an astounding remark concerning the ninth verse:

The time structure of the Beatitudes closely interacts with the composition and grammar, specifically
the pronominal sequence, which stresses the general and concrete aspects of the text. The result is that
the Speaker appears both historical and universal, as well as concrete and abstract, and in both
dimensions is blended with persecution for His sake, that is, with persecution for righteousness and
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with poverty in spirit, the first, fundamental concept in the Beatitudes.

But here this very interesting observation abruptly stops because Kodjak probably knew that in
pursuing this he would have to exceed the boundaries of structural analyses. Structuralism can
mainly elaborate on meaning where oppositions come into play, but it is unable to present the
significance of these oppositions in their social and historical context. Without an accurate
understanding of the background of social relations during the Roman occupation of Judea their
relation to the particular circumstances is lost and in turn their universal dimension becomes
superficial. For example: When Jesus talks about the poor in spirit, the persecuted, the meek and the
peacemakers as loved by God he is, in effect, saying that the wealthy, the persecutors, the
oppressors and the warmongers are not loved by God. Structural analyses can make this observation
but it cannot make us understand what a kind of cultural shock the teachings of Jesus brought about.
At the time when Jesus first uttered the Beatitudes they were literally a trans-valuation of all values
and so when Nietzsche spoke of the Umwertung aller Werte he (of course) wanted the return of the

3
Kodjak, A. – A structural analysis of the sermon on the mount – Blz. 50 - 51.
herrenmoral which was lost after the classical age because of Christianity. With this Nietzsche
adopted a position which was not very different from that of the well-educated Roman
contemporaries of Jesus and Matthew: to them Christianity was a religion for proletarians, which
actively promoted a slave morality by placing an omnipotent, all-seeing and all-knowing God on the
side of the poor and oppressed (in the words of D.T. Niles: “Christianity is one beggar telling another
beggar where he found bread”). What is interesting about this is that in doing so Jesus revealed a
universal truth, namely Gods vision of justice and injustice (especially in a society with deep class
antagonisms) in a specific historical context, namely Judea during the Roman occupation. The
revelation of truth in the Beatitudes thus reveals the true nature of God and his support, care and
love for the oppressed and persecuted.

3. Conclusion

Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus? Which suggests
that slavery is okay. Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from
the faith. Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount? A passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful
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that our own defense department would survive its application.

The statement above was made by U.S. president Barack Obama and I think that it illustrates that the
teachings of Jesus do have political implications but that they cannot be seen as a political directive.
With this we come full circle by returning to the question I posed at the beginning of this essay: what
are the beatitudes? Again I would like to stress that the beatitudes are not a code of ethics, an ideal
or an ideology, but a revelation of truth. However, it is an utterly uncomfortable truth: If God is on
the side of the oppressed and persecuted that would mean that no political authority, no ruling elite
and no governing establishment could ever legitimize their use of power from a religious Christian
standpoint. But what is also interesting is that we could not have come to this conclusion if we had
limited ourselves to a structural analysis of parallels, echoes, reflections, patterns and contrasts. In
the end we needed to take into account historical, political and philosophical data which instead
points us into the direction of traditional hermeneutics. However, through structural analysis we did
uncover a lot of hidden properties of the text which we might not have found otherwise. So in
conclusion I would like to say that structuralism definitely made an important contribution to the
toolkit of literary criticism but that its capacity to uncover the meaning of a text should not be
overestimated.

4
Obama, B. – Call for renewal: Building a covenant for a new America – Speech on 06/28/06