#Blessedd

If you google #blessed, you’ll get an astounding 1,220,000,000 results. That’s 1.22 billion. With a b.

#Blessed is a popular meme generally meant to express to the world gratitude for—or sometimes brag about—the good things one has going for them. It’s “a good thing” (a much lesser meme at only 363,000,000 hits) to be genuinely grateful. We should, after all, count our blessings...as the Sunday School song emphatically instructs.

But what if Jesus has an entirely different notion than we generally do of which life is the good life? What if it’s a lot closer to what Paul Simon wrote in the song, “Blessed”: “Blessed are the sat upon, the spat upon, the ratted on.”?

Is this the kind of life we should aspire to?

This isn’t an idle question. Misunderstanding of the “blesseds” given by Jesus in the Sermon in the Mount have caused intense pain and confusion down through the ages and continue to do so today. Strangely enough, the blesseds haven’t uniformly been a blessing. So,

• Who is it, according to Jesus, that has the good life?

• What is it to be #blessed?

• And most importantly, how does it help frame the power of the Gospel?