The last beatitude, number eight, says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.” This beatitude is stated briefly in verse 10, but then verses 11 and 12 elaborate on it, changing the pronouns from the third person to the second person (from “those who are persecuted” to “you who are persecuted”). These refocuses everything, becoming now not a general principle about persecution but something that is brought to bear upon the disciples themselves and, of course, upon us as well.
The fourth beatitude says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Now at this point it's very natural to think of righteousness as that divine, imputed righteousness of Jesus, which is given to us in the process that we call “justification.” But that's not actually what it's talking about here. I've already pointed out that Matthew doesn't use the word “righteousness” that way. Matthew talks about actual righteousness. We're going to see as we go on in the sermon that what Jesus is saying here is that the people who are blessed by God in this beatitude are those who actually want to be righteous—that is, actually try to do what is right—and also long to see upright behavior in other people.
The second beatitude is “Blessed are those who mourn.” Mourn for what? Well, if the first beatitude has to do with spiritual poverty and the hopeless state of a human being before God, then this has to be mourning for sin. If that is right, then the comfort that is offered, the second half of the beatitude, must be the comfort of the gospel.
It is a new humanity because when you begin to read the Sermon on the Mount, the first thing you discover is that this thinking is utterly different from the thinking of the world. It begins by talking about the "blessed” man, and really answers the question of who the blessed ones are. Today, people might use the word “happy.” It's not a very good substitution, but that is how the world thinks. It equates blessedness with happiness, which produces ideas that are not what Jesus was talking about when referring to those who are blessed.
The Sermon on the Mount is found in Matthew 5 through 7, and it's the best known and probably the most extensively studied discourse in all the history of the world. Literally, thousands of books have been written about this sermon. In fact, now there are actually books about the books—that is, books that analyze the books so that the student of the Sermon on the Mount can begin to get a handle on what has been said before he actually begins to study the sermon itself.
