Quotes from Scot McKnight

Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation.

Prayer is not informing God of something unknown but drawing oneself in the divine life of the Trinity and into the very mission of God in this world — this God loves us and invites us into his presence with our petitions.

For Jesus the word kingdom meant "God's dream for this world come true.

There is nothing complex about this most simple of moral maxims; its difficulty is in the doing, not in the knowing.

Every Jew in Galilee and everywhere else, and I mean every one of them, when they heard Jesus say "the kingdom," looked for three things: king, land, citizens.

As the priest and Levite thought they could follow the Torah and not offer aid to the stranded, dying man (Luke 10:25—37), so Isaiah's community thought they could abstain from food and pass by the needs of others on their way to God. Fasting never stands alone. Fasting, if it is genuine, brings us into a communal spirituality because it is a response to the lack of justice in the community.

If we add all this together, we get something like this: a "blessed" person is someone who, because of a heart for God, is promised and enjoys God's favor regardless of that person's status or countercultural condition.

we need to think about that future more often. I confess I don't. My mind is tied too much to the here and now and not enough to God's future kingdom.

are challenged in this passage to discern who it is whom we treat as enemies—those we claim to love but don't, those who never sit at table with us, those we label and libel—and to convert enemies into neighbors by simply extending love to them. Love is to treat others as we treat ourselves, and it is the rugged commitment to be with someone as someone who is for them in order to foster Christlikeness.

As John Howard Yoder has said, "If in society we believe in the rights of employees, then the church should be the first employer to deal with workers fairly. If in the wider society we call for the overcoming of racism or sexism or materialism, then the church should be the place where that possibility first becomes real.

It is important to know the blessings and to rely on God's promises. Please don't misunderstand my point. But the blessings and promises of God in the Bible emerge from a real life's story that also knows that we live in a broken world and some days are tough. The stories of real lives in the Bible know that we are surrounded by hurting people for whom Psalm 22:1 echoes their normal day.

Another suggestion has come from Mark Allan Powell, who believes the first four beatitudes promise reversal for those who are unfortunate (vv. 3—6) while the second four promise eschatological rewards to the virtuous (vv. 7—10), with verses 11—12 functioning as a concluding comment. He believes the second four blessings are addressing those who show mercy to the unfortunate ones in the first four.19