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Ambrose: When you have done thus much, attained both poverty and meekness, remember that you are a sinner, mourn your sins, as He proceeds, Blessed are they that mourn. And it is suitable that the third blessing should be of those that mourn for sin, for it is the Trinity that forgives sin. [4]
4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5 Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth. 6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. 7 Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. 8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
As with 5:3 this verse cites the Kingdom of Heaven as the reward, also like that first verse the reward is in the present tense, the other six have it in the future. Kodjak believes that this parallelism with the first verse is to emphasize that this one is the conclusion of the Beatitudes and 5:11-12 should not be considered part of the group. [1]
The Good News: Those who die are never truly gone, because Jesus is the resurrection, and those who believe are granted everlasting life. Woman's Day/Getty Images 2 Corinthians 4:17-18
This verse opens the first of nine statements of who is blessed. Each, except for the last, follows the same pattern of naming a group of people and the reward they will receive. Hans Dieter Betz notes that in Jesus' time blessed was a common way of describing someone who is wealthy.
This verse was famously misprinted in the second edition of the Geneva Bible as "blessed are the placemakers." This was parodied in Monty Python's Life of Brian where the crowd listening to the sermon mishears it as "blessed are the cheesemakers" and then begin to debate the meaning of the phrase. [5]
This verse is generally believed to have been taken from Psalm 24:3–5 either by Jesus or the author of Matthew who was adding this verse that is not found in Luke. A number of scholars have been certain that there were originally seven Beatitudes, as seven was a holy number.
Albright and Mann note that fasting was a common sign of righteousness, and one that Jesus has already endured at Matthew 4:2.The metaphor of God or the messiah as a feast ending a fast occurs several times in the scripture including Isaiah 55:1, Jeremiah 31:25, and Psalm 107:9.