The Fourth Sunday of Epiphany
Matthew 5:1-12 - The Beatitudes
Fr. Oliver Robinson
Matthew 5:1-12 - The Beatitudes
Fr. Oliver Robinson
In our Gospel reading today, we have come to the beginning of the most famous sermon ever preached
in the history of the world.
The words of this sermon have toppled empires, have humbled Kings, have raised up the poor, meek,
and lowly, have converted millions of skeptics, and changed the shape of the world as we know it.
We have before us the opening lines of The Sermon on the Mount. At this point in Matthew’s
Gospel, Christ has been through His baptism, temptation, and has begun His ministry. He has called
His first disciples, and gone throughout Galilee calling for repentance, healing the sick, and casting out
demons.
Large crowds from the surrounding areas have followed Him. He goes up the mountainside and
begins to teach His followers. These chapters in Matthew 5-7 form the main bulk of Christ’s teaching
and His main instructions for how His followers are to live.
His opening words are here before us. This passage is most often referred to as The Beatitudes, taken
from the Latin word for ‘blessings.’ These are ‘The Blessings’ as He begins His sermon.
But they are more than nice words or a catchy introduction. They are radical, world-changing, declarations of spiritual might and power that signal the end of the broken world and the beginning of God’s restoration of all things.
There are many technical words that Biblical scholars use to describe how the beatitudes work:
Programmatic They show us concrete examples of how God’s Kingdom reverses the order of the world.
Eschatological: They are promises of what God will finally bring to completion when Christ comes again.
Ethical: They describe the kind of life the Holy Spirit forms in those who follow Christ.
Messianic: They identify Christ as the promised Messiah because they refer back to the promises in Isaiah of what the Messiah would do: bring good news to the poor, comfort to the mourners, and restoration for God’s people.
Prophetic: They describe the way Christ lives His life on Earth
Performative: By the very act of Christ speaking them, He brings about the reality they declare.
(R. Alan Culpepper, Matthew: A Commentary)
Whole books have been written on these passages alone, and Christians in every age have thought on
and pondered them. But today, I would like us to visit three important aspects of the Beatitudes:
That they are True. That they are Good. And that they are Beautiful.
1. They are TRUE
The Beatitudes make very bold claims. Most people, including pastors, would hesitate to say them to
someone in mourning or going through literal persecution for their faith.
To some, they sound downright outrageous. When we look around us at our world, we do not see
much comfort for people in mourning or the meek and lowly inheriting the earth. Rather, we more
often see peacemakers being chastised or the merciful being taken advantage of.
The Beatitudes do not describe the way the world works. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ doesn’t sound
obvious or self-evident at all.
So the key question is this: why should these words be trusted at all? They don’t seem accurate
to the way the way the world works.
And the answer is: because of who is speaking them.
My colleague at TEDS, Kevin Vanhoozer, writes about Scripture and what’s called speech-act
theory. In essence, it’s the idea that when God speaks, he doesn’t merely describe reality — he brings
reality into being.
“Let there be light” is a phrase, when spoken by the creator, that brings light into existence.
“You will be my people, and I will be your God,” doesn’t just describe a relationship;
it establishes a covenant.
“Your sins are forgiven you,” spoken by Christ, creates the state of ‘having been forgiven’ in us.
The Beatitudes function in the same way,
When Christ says, “Blessed are the meek,” he is not making an observation about how life usually goes.
He is conferring blessing, declaring kingdom status, and creating a new reality in our world
under God’s reign. It is like the author of a story writing himself into the narrative. The characters’ words matter, but they remain bounded by the world of the story. The author’s words, however, shape the story itself. When Christ speaks the Beatitudes, he speaks with that kind of authority. He is not naming what the world is like, but creating a new reality — a kingdom in which the poor in spirit, the meek, and those who
mourn are named blessed.
God’s speech establishes reality. When God calls a people blessed, they become blessed.
The Beatitudes are TRUE because of who is speaking them.
2. They are GOOD
When Christ speaks of “the Kingdom of Heaven” or “the Kingdom of God,” He is not saying, “When you die and go to heaven, everything will finally be alright.” Rather, He is declaring that “the spiritual realm of God has finally arrived and is breaking into our reality.”
The beatitudes describe what this spiritual reality is like, and how it is being ushered back into the
world. When the world was first created, the earth we live on was exactly as God intended it to be.
There was no poverty, no mourning, no need for peacemaking or mercy — because everything was good, including us.
But when Adam and Eve fell, it was not only humanity that was marred.
The whole of creation became broken.
We became subject to death and toil, pain and sorrow, and Genesis says that even the ground itself was cursed.
The spiritual reality God established in Eden — a world ordered by life, peace, and communion with Him --
became separated from the world as we now experience it.
When Christ came, He began the reunification of these two realities. God’s world, The Kingdom of Heaven, where there is no death, no toil, no crying, and no pain began to overlap once more with our world.
His teaching and preaching, His miracles and healings, and ultimately His death and resurrection, mark the beginning of God restoring and redeeming the world — putting things back the way they were always meant to be.
This is the great project of reversal. The undoing of the brokenness of our world. The old order of things begins to pass away. The rules of the broken world are turned on their head.
The first are made last, and the last are made first.
And in this new reality — the Kingdom of Heaven breaking in — mourners are comforted, the merciful receive mercy, the meek inherit the earth, and even those who suffer and are persecuted are called blessed.
The Beatitudes are GOOD because they undo the evil in the world.
When Christ speaks them, evil begins to lose its power. The old, broken order of the world begins to
fade, and the Kingdom of heaven begins to press in upon the world.
3. They are BEAUTIFUL
Judy and I have been watching the new TV series The Pendragon Cycle, a fantasy adventure epic based on Arthurian myth — King Arthur, Excalibur, the Knights of the Round Table. For the first time since The Lord of the Rings and Narnia, we are seeing an explicitly Christian ethic and worldview portrayed within a fantasy story. (It’s beautiful! We see baptisms, marriage, and Godliness in a TV show today – who would have thought!)
In it, one of the main characters, Taliesin — a bard and servant of the old pagan gods — has an encounter with Christ. He sees the power of the old gods beginning to wane and receives a vision of what the land might become if all people lived under Christ’s love and rule.
He calls it “the Kingdom of Summer.”
“I have seen a land shining with goodness, where each man protects his brother’s dignity as readily as his own, where war and want have ceased and all races live under the same law of love and honor. I have seen a land bright with truth, where a man’s word is his pledge and falsehood is banished, where children sleep safe in their mother’s arms and never know fear or pain. I have seen a land where kings extend their hands in justice rather than reach for the sword; where mercy, kindness, and compassion flow like deep water over the land, and men
revere virtue, revere truth, revere beauty, above comfort, pleasure or selfish gain… where the True God is worshipped and his ways acclaimed by all.” (Stephen R. Lawhead)
The Kingdom of heaven breaking back into our world. It is so good and so holy that merely hearing of
it in the Beatitudes awakens a deep longing in us. It stirs the restlessness of the human heart that things
here and now are not the way they are supposed to be.
We recognize it because this is the Kingdom we were made for. Our souls delight in the promise of comfort, justice, mercy, and great reward and our hearts ache for the Kingdom the Beatitudes describe.
The Beatitudes are beautiful because they awaken in us a deep longing for the world
we were created for.
The vision Christ sets out in the Beatitudes — a vision of truth, goodness, and beauty — is also a description of what human life looks like in the Kingdom of God, and what we are being formed to become as that Kingdom breaks into the world.
We cannot live this way by sheer effort or moral strength.
And yet, because Christ has come, we are no longer who we once were.
The Beatitudes are a description of what we become when we participate in that Kingdom and follow
Christ. For those of us here who follow Christ, they become a description of us.
The Beatitudes are written ABOUT you. Here Christ describes what the community of His followers
are like.
Yes, they are for us - because when Christ talks about the poor in spirit, he is talking about us!
We are the poor in spirit — burdened by pride, despair, social media, addiction to our smartphones,
and our own egos.
And yet, to us, Christ gives the Kingdom of Heaven.
We are those who mourn because who among us has not, at some point, cried out to God in despair and asked, “Why did You let this happen?”
He promises us comfort
We are the meek because all of us are affected by the thoughts and opinions of others, and oh how rarely have those others been kind to us.
We will inherit the Earth
We hunger and thirst for righteousness as we see the injustices of the world around us. We long for God to come and make things right. For the end of war and strife, for the closure of abortion clinics and the silencing of churches that preach heresy and sexual sin.
Our hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled
We are the merciful because in following Christ, we have promised to forgive the sins of others - no matter how terrible they might have been against us, and against the ones we love.
We will be shown mercy
We are the pure in heart because, through our baptism, God has put a new Spirit within us, cleansed
us from our sin, and is slowly conforming us to the likeness of His Son.
One day we will see God.
We are peacemakers because we carry the Spirit of Peace with us wherever we go. We are careful with
our words and are attentive to the hearts of others, as we have promised to treat others just as we wish
to be treated.
We are called "children of God"
And we are the persecuted and insulted. Christians around the world continue to suffer ridicule, exclusion, and violence. Faithfulness is often misunderstood, dismissed, or mocked.
The Kingdom of Heaven is given to us, and there our reward will be great!
In our reading today, Christ has announced the return of His Kingdom. The broken age of this world is drawing to a close. His Kingdom has come and one day His Kingdom will come in fullness.
The Beatitudes are TRUE because of who is speaking them.
They are GOOD because they undo the evil in the world.
And they are BEAUTIFUL because they awaken in us a deep longing for the world we were created for.
They have been written for us, in our lives, right now at this moment and this season.
God is speaking to us. Let us open our hearts and listen.
As we take these next few moments in silence, I encourage you to read over these words in front of you
again, and receive them fresh in your hearts today.
Amen.
in the history of the world.
The words of this sermon have toppled empires, have humbled Kings, have raised up the poor, meek,
and lowly, have converted millions of skeptics, and changed the shape of the world as we know it.
We have before us the opening lines of The Sermon on the Mount. At this point in Matthew’s
Gospel, Christ has been through His baptism, temptation, and has begun His ministry. He has called
His first disciples, and gone throughout Galilee calling for repentance, healing the sick, and casting out
demons.
Large crowds from the surrounding areas have followed Him. He goes up the mountainside and
begins to teach His followers. These chapters in Matthew 5-7 form the main bulk of Christ’s teaching
and His main instructions for how His followers are to live.
His opening words are here before us. This passage is most often referred to as The Beatitudes, taken
from the Latin word for ‘blessings.’ These are ‘The Blessings’ as He begins His sermon.
But they are more than nice words or a catchy introduction. They are radical, world-changing, declarations of spiritual might and power that signal the end of the broken world and the beginning of God’s restoration of all things.
There are many technical words that Biblical scholars use to describe how the beatitudes work:
Programmatic They show us concrete examples of how God’s Kingdom reverses the order of the world.
Eschatological: They are promises of what God will finally bring to completion when Christ comes again.
Ethical: They describe the kind of life the Holy Spirit forms in those who follow Christ.
Messianic: They identify Christ as the promised Messiah because they refer back to the promises in Isaiah of what the Messiah would do: bring good news to the poor, comfort to the mourners, and restoration for God’s people.
Prophetic: They describe the way Christ lives His life on Earth
Performative: By the very act of Christ speaking them, He brings about the reality they declare.
(R. Alan Culpepper, Matthew: A Commentary)
Whole books have been written on these passages alone, and Christians in every age have thought on
and pondered them. But today, I would like us to visit three important aspects of the Beatitudes:
That they are True. That they are Good. And that they are Beautiful.
1. They are TRUE
The Beatitudes make very bold claims. Most people, including pastors, would hesitate to say them to
someone in mourning or going through literal persecution for their faith.
To some, they sound downright outrageous. When we look around us at our world, we do not see
much comfort for people in mourning or the meek and lowly inheriting the earth. Rather, we more
often see peacemakers being chastised or the merciful being taken advantage of.
The Beatitudes do not describe the way the world works. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ doesn’t sound
obvious or self-evident at all.
So the key question is this: why should these words be trusted at all? They don’t seem accurate
to the way the way the world works.
And the answer is: because of who is speaking them.
My colleague at TEDS, Kevin Vanhoozer, writes about Scripture and what’s called speech-act
theory. In essence, it’s the idea that when God speaks, he doesn’t merely describe reality — he brings
reality into being.
“Let there be light” is a phrase, when spoken by the creator, that brings light into existence.
“You will be my people, and I will be your God,” doesn’t just describe a relationship;
it establishes a covenant.
“Your sins are forgiven you,” spoken by Christ, creates the state of ‘having been forgiven’ in us.
The Beatitudes function in the same way,
When Christ says, “Blessed are the meek,” he is not making an observation about how life usually goes.
He is conferring blessing, declaring kingdom status, and creating a new reality in our world
under God’s reign. It is like the author of a story writing himself into the narrative. The characters’ words matter, but they remain bounded by the world of the story. The author’s words, however, shape the story itself. When Christ speaks the Beatitudes, he speaks with that kind of authority. He is not naming what the world is like, but creating a new reality — a kingdom in which the poor in spirit, the meek, and those who
mourn are named blessed.
God’s speech establishes reality. When God calls a people blessed, they become blessed.
The Beatitudes are TRUE because of who is speaking them.
2. They are GOOD
When Christ speaks of “the Kingdom of Heaven” or “the Kingdom of God,” He is not saying, “When you die and go to heaven, everything will finally be alright.” Rather, He is declaring that “the spiritual realm of God has finally arrived and is breaking into our reality.”
The beatitudes describe what this spiritual reality is like, and how it is being ushered back into the
world. When the world was first created, the earth we live on was exactly as God intended it to be.
There was no poverty, no mourning, no need for peacemaking or mercy — because everything was good, including us.
But when Adam and Eve fell, it was not only humanity that was marred.
The whole of creation became broken.
We became subject to death and toil, pain and sorrow, and Genesis says that even the ground itself was cursed.
The spiritual reality God established in Eden — a world ordered by life, peace, and communion with Him --
became separated from the world as we now experience it.
When Christ came, He began the reunification of these two realities. God’s world, The Kingdom of Heaven, where there is no death, no toil, no crying, and no pain began to overlap once more with our world.
His teaching and preaching, His miracles and healings, and ultimately His death and resurrection, mark the beginning of God restoring and redeeming the world — putting things back the way they were always meant to be.
This is the great project of reversal. The undoing of the brokenness of our world. The old order of things begins to pass away. The rules of the broken world are turned on their head.
The first are made last, and the last are made first.
And in this new reality — the Kingdom of Heaven breaking in — mourners are comforted, the merciful receive mercy, the meek inherit the earth, and even those who suffer and are persecuted are called blessed.
The Beatitudes are GOOD because they undo the evil in the world.
When Christ speaks them, evil begins to lose its power. The old, broken order of the world begins to
fade, and the Kingdom of heaven begins to press in upon the world.
3. They are BEAUTIFUL
Judy and I have been watching the new TV series The Pendragon Cycle, a fantasy adventure epic based on Arthurian myth — King Arthur, Excalibur, the Knights of the Round Table. For the first time since The Lord of the Rings and Narnia, we are seeing an explicitly Christian ethic and worldview portrayed within a fantasy story. (It’s beautiful! We see baptisms, marriage, and Godliness in a TV show today – who would have thought!)
In it, one of the main characters, Taliesin — a bard and servant of the old pagan gods — has an encounter with Christ. He sees the power of the old gods beginning to wane and receives a vision of what the land might become if all people lived under Christ’s love and rule.
He calls it “the Kingdom of Summer.”
“I have seen a land shining with goodness, where each man protects his brother’s dignity as readily as his own, where war and want have ceased and all races live under the same law of love and honor. I have seen a land bright with truth, where a man’s word is his pledge and falsehood is banished, where children sleep safe in their mother’s arms and never know fear or pain. I have seen a land where kings extend their hands in justice rather than reach for the sword; where mercy, kindness, and compassion flow like deep water over the land, and men
revere virtue, revere truth, revere beauty, above comfort, pleasure or selfish gain… where the True God is worshipped and his ways acclaimed by all.” (Stephen R. Lawhead)
The Kingdom of heaven breaking back into our world. It is so good and so holy that merely hearing of
it in the Beatitudes awakens a deep longing in us. It stirs the restlessness of the human heart that things
here and now are not the way they are supposed to be.
We recognize it because this is the Kingdom we were made for. Our souls delight in the promise of comfort, justice, mercy, and great reward and our hearts ache for the Kingdom the Beatitudes describe.
The Beatitudes are beautiful because they awaken in us a deep longing for the world
we were created for.
The vision Christ sets out in the Beatitudes — a vision of truth, goodness, and beauty — is also a description of what human life looks like in the Kingdom of God, and what we are being formed to become as that Kingdom breaks into the world.
We cannot live this way by sheer effort or moral strength.
And yet, because Christ has come, we are no longer who we once were.
The Beatitudes are a description of what we become when we participate in that Kingdom and follow
Christ. For those of us here who follow Christ, they become a description of us.
The Beatitudes are written ABOUT you. Here Christ describes what the community of His followers
are like.
- they describe you
- They describe your community
- They describe your church
Yes, they are for us - because when Christ talks about the poor in spirit, he is talking about us!
We are the poor in spirit — burdened by pride, despair, social media, addiction to our smartphones,
and our own egos.
And yet, to us, Christ gives the Kingdom of Heaven.
We are those who mourn because who among us has not, at some point, cried out to God in despair and asked, “Why did You let this happen?”
He promises us comfort
We are the meek because all of us are affected by the thoughts and opinions of others, and oh how rarely have those others been kind to us.
We will inherit the Earth
We hunger and thirst for righteousness as we see the injustices of the world around us. We long for God to come and make things right. For the end of war and strife, for the closure of abortion clinics and the silencing of churches that preach heresy and sexual sin.
Our hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled
We are the merciful because in following Christ, we have promised to forgive the sins of others - no matter how terrible they might have been against us, and against the ones we love.
We will be shown mercy
We are the pure in heart because, through our baptism, God has put a new Spirit within us, cleansed
us from our sin, and is slowly conforming us to the likeness of His Son.
One day we will see God.
We are peacemakers because we carry the Spirit of Peace with us wherever we go. We are careful with
our words and are attentive to the hearts of others, as we have promised to treat others just as we wish
to be treated.
We are called "children of God"
And we are the persecuted and insulted. Christians around the world continue to suffer ridicule, exclusion, and violence. Faithfulness is often misunderstood, dismissed, or mocked.
The Kingdom of Heaven is given to us, and there our reward will be great!
In our reading today, Christ has announced the return of His Kingdom. The broken age of this world is drawing to a close. His Kingdom has come and one day His Kingdom will come in fullness.
The Beatitudes are TRUE because of who is speaking them.
They are GOOD because they undo the evil in the world.
And they are BEAUTIFUL because they awaken in us a deep longing for the world we were created for.
They have been written for us, in our lives, right now at this moment and this season.
God is speaking to us. Let us open our hearts and listen.
As we take these next few moments in silence, I encourage you to read over these words in front of you
again, and receive them fresh in your hearts today.
Amen.
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