If all the Beatitudes told Jesus’ followers to do was be nice to everyone all the time, it would be hard to understand that as a revolutionary sentiment that would result in condemnation and crucifixion.
The Beatitudes are a declaration about the nature of God’s new creation order, an order that God himself has inaugurated.
God’s people are confronted with what seems to be incongruity between the reality Jesus declares and world we see around us and challenges us about which perception we now embrace as real.
There is no way to remove the eschatology of Christian ethics. We have learned that Jesus’ teaching was not first focused on his own status but on the proclamation of the inbreaking kingdom of God, which brought an end to other kingdoms. His teaching, miracles, healings indicate the nature and the presence of the Kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount begins as an announcement of something that God has done to change the history of the world. In the Sermon we see the end of history, an ending made most explicit and visible in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, Christians begin our ethics, not with anxious, self-serving questions of what we ought to do as individuals to make history come out right, because, in Christ, God has already made history come out right.
The Sermon is the inauguration manifesto of how the world looks now that God in Christ has taken matters in hand. And essential to the way that God has taken matters in hand is an invitation to all people to become citizens of a new Kingdom, a messianic community where the world God is creating takes visible, practical form.Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition), Abingdon, 2014, pg. 87.
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