Having just appointed twelve men to be his apostles, symbolically “reconstituting” the people of God, Jesus now begins to lay out a picture of the character of his kingdom, the character of life in his kingdom and the character of those who are part of his people. The first beatitude he shares, gets at the very heart of the gospel, and when the gospel takes root in the hearts of people, the following beatitudes naturally take shape in the lives of kingdom people. What, at first, looks upside-down, we discover, is actually right-side up.
