There are two versions of the Beatitudes, which is fascinating to me. There are many differences between the Gospels that reflect differences in the writers’ outlooks, target audiences, and goals, but none is more striking than these two accounts of a sermon that begins, “Blessed are the poor.”
This is not just a case of selecting different stories or including or leaving out or altering certain details. This is something more deliberately, and even aggressively, ideological, and this is true whether you believe Jesus simply preached two different sermons or the Gospel writers deliberately skewed an existing sermon in a certain direction. Either way, the composer of one sermon clearly had the other one in mind, and was clearly conjuring an alternative vision – to the point that each account goes out of its way to locate itself in the opposite geographical setting from the other. (“Have you heard the Sermon on the Mount? Now I’m going to give you the Sermon on the Plain.” Or vice versa.)
The sermon delivered in “a level place” is the Revolutionary one. (Practically in the Marxist sense of word.) The poor will be rewarded and the rich will be condemned, not just in the afterlife but, in seems, in this one. (The hungry will become the well-fed, and the well-fed will go hungry.) The sermon on the mountain on the other hand, entirely spiritualizes all the qualities and conditions being listed. (And eliminates the judgmental half entirely.) The poor are now the poor in the spirit, the hungry are those who hunger after righteousness, and so forth and so on. And this is more than just a neutral different direction. It’s in direct opposition to the spirit of the other version, as any good Revolutionary will tell you. To turn the thoughts of the people to heavenly things is to distract them from their earthly condition, helping them to endure hardship and be less likely to try overthrowing the world order that imposes it on them. Religion is the opiate of the masses.
That the Gospels contain both of these sermons is a wonderful thing. That a given person, church, or society is bound to prefer one of them over the other is understandable. Which one do you (or your church, or your society) prefer, and why?