Pentecost 12
9 August 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
Series: The Sermon on the Mount
THE BLESSED LIFE: THE BEATITUDES AS DOORS TO THE KINGDOM OF GOD
Matthew 5.1-12, 7.21-28
Immediately after being named the chancellor of Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed a chaplain named Ludwig Müller to be head Bishop of the German church. Müller was a devoted member of the Nazi party and one of his first acts as Bishop of the Third Reich was to re-write or, as he called it, “Germanize” the Sermon on the Mount into the current way of thinking so it may be understood anew and grasped by German hearts.”1 Poverty, mourning, meekness, and mercy were not acceptable Nazi values, so Müller removed them from his translation. And there would be no room in Nazi society for those who reflected poverty, mourning, meekness, and mercy – people like the Jews, the disabled, the gay, the communist, or the immigrant. In Müller’s version, Jesus says: “Happy is the man who bears suffering like a man; for he will find the strength never to sink into despair.” And instead of “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Muller’s version said: “Happy are those who are at peace with their fellow Germans; for they do God’s will.”2
As Americans we are also tempted to Americanize the Sermon on the Mount according to American values that are quite different from the values Jesus sets forth in his sermon.
The setting for the Sermon on the Mount takes us back to Moses. Some 1200 years before Jesus God called Moses out of Egypt up to Mount Sinai to give him the Torah, the Law that was to govern the lives of God’s people. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is the fulfillment of Moses called out of Egypt standing up on a mount to deliver to the people the deeper meaning of the Law that would usher in the kingdom of God.
In Matthew chapters 5-7, we have a collection of Jesus’ teachings we call The Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus lays out the vision of what God wants the world to look like and how he wants his followers to live. For the next nine months, with periodic breaks, we will be looking closely at these revolutionary teachings of Jesus in the hopes of seeing more clearly than ever what it looks like to be followers of Jesus.
But may I warn you now: these words of Jesus will sound like utter foolishness to those of us who find the American way of life reasonable and appealing. We will be considering a radically new way to see and live in the world. The values of Jesus are diametrically opposed to our dominant American values.
American novelist Kurt Vonnegut pointed out that Christians often ask for The Ten Commandments to be posted in public places, but never The Beatitudes: “‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ at the Pentagon? I don’t think so!”3
A sure sign that we’ve misunderstood Jesus is that we do not find him shocking. To many of us his words are like stones rubbed smooth by centuries of handling – turned into devotional sentiment or just disregarded as impractical in the real world. Yet when Jesus spoke these words for the first time, jaws dropped, eyes widened, heads turned.
Shane Claiborne was once invited to give the keynote address at a national youth conference. When he arrived, he quickly realized it was one of those conferences well-planned by wonderful people with good intentions, but filled with a bunch of clutter and glitz, smoke and noise. Shane felt led to introduce some simplicity into that environment. So when his time came to speak he scrapped the sermon that he had prepared, went up to the microphone, opened up the Bible to Matthew, and for the next 20 minutes read the entire Sermon on the Mount. Then he sat down. The people at the conference were astonished and did not know what to do. Some said it was the most profound moment they’d ever experienced. Others wanted their money back.
What would you have thought? I sometimes wonder if we have lost the ability to be moved simply by hearing the words of Jesus and need a modern preacher to water them down for us and make them comfortably practical? Do we really buy into the teachings of Jesus? Have we really listened to what he has to say?
Among his most arresting words are the ones he opened with in his first public address. According to Matthew as the crowd arrives: He climbs to the top of a hill to make sure they can see and hear him. He sees their tired and broken bodies. He sees their fearful faces. He sees their torn clothing and empty bags. His heart breaks because gathered in front of him are those the rest of the world ignores. He knows their poverty, their empty stomachs, their grief, their abuse, their trauma. He knows the empire that bears down on them. He’s felt it himself. He knows they’re here because they’re desperate for relief. He knows what they need.
“Blessed are you,” he begins. It’s not trite. It’s not a sweet Southern “bless your heart!” With wet piercing eyes he says, “Blessed are you.” And something like a miracle happens. Because there’s power in hearing your worth from someone else, especially when you don’t believe it yourself. Jesus sees them. He knows they have gifts to share, no matter how trampled on they feel. He sees them, and believes in them, and he tells them so: “Blessed are you.”
Blessed. What does that word mean exactly? We hear it all the time. Someone will say, “Have a blessed day!” Or when we say that we have been blessed we almost always mean it in an economic way or to express gratitude for our health: “We have everything we need and the family is well. We are so blessed.” If financial struggle or grave illness has come to our family we may still say we are blessed but we mean blessed in spite of the hardship. Jesus says we are “blessed” in the midst of the hardship.
Kate Bowler is a Duke Divinity School professor and writer who says: “We live in a culture of “hashtag Blessed.” #Blessed is attached to anything from a birth announcement, to a new boyfriend, to a rental car upgrade, to a good parking space.” Kate Bowler, by the way, wrote her dissertation on the prosperity gospel in America, and a few years ago was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer as a young mother in her 30s. She has thought quite deeply and personally about what it means to be “blessed.”
No English word really captures the true meaning. “Blessedness” was a spiritual state important in the Hebrew scriptures and in particular the psalms. Psalm 1 begins the whole book with this theme: Blessed is the one who walks not in the counsel of the wicked . . . nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but whose delight is in the teaching of the Lord.
Sometimes the Greek word for “blessed” in the beatitudes is translated “happy”: “Happy are they . . .” A famous T.V. preacher wrote a book on the Beatitudes entitled, “The Be Happy Attitudes” as if Jesus was offering us a way to cultivate a better outlook on life through positive thinking. But poverty and mourning are not attitudes. To our ears, “happy” is a word for good feelings. What Jesus means is far beyond feelings. He did not come to aid us in our pursuit of happiness. Jesus wants something deeper than what we want for our children or ourselves when we say: “We just want them to be happy.” “I just want to be happy.”
The word that Jesus spoke in Aramaic, but got written down in Greek and eventually translated into English as “blessed” is makarios. This is a blessing that stays deep down, no matter the emotions we feel. Max Lucado describes it as “sacred delight,”4 where God is near even in the darkness and the shadows. When Jesus says, “Blessed are you . . .” : He isn’t commanding us to be something they are not. He’s not giving us life instructions or a list of aspirational qualities. The word makarios has a sense of hearty congratulations, of honoring and cheering, of powerfully lifting someone up, of pronouncing the smile of God upon them.
But the real shocker comes in the kind of people Jesus is cheering, because by many standards it’s “a list of losers,”5 those who go mostly unnoticed. Jesus’ ideas about who is and is not blessed may cause us to scratch our heads. Jesus blesses those whom no one else blessed. Jesus is lifting up their reality, telling them that God is with them where they are, no matter how discouraged or abandoned or dehumanized they feel. Even at our lowest, even when we’ve lost everything, even when we can’t figure out how to take a step or even get out of bed, Jesus says that God is very near us.
“Beatitude” is a word that comes from the same root as the word “beautiful.” So Jesus says: “Blessed and beautiful are the lives of those marked by mercy and mourning, gentleness and peace-making, purity and the hunger for justice, persecution for doing the right thing.”6
The Beatitudes of Jesus are not Hallmark greeting card inscriptions, no matter how beautiful the artwork. Jesus sings blessing over people who live at the bottom of the heap. They are words of hope for those hard times “when the fundamental picture we had relied on – our sense of how everything holds together – falls apart.”7
Jesus is talking about life in the kingdom of God, and his is an “upside-down kingdom”. It’s values and the values of the world rarely match up. When Jesus said to Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world”, he did not mean my kingdom is not in this world, but that its values were different from the prevailing values of power in the world. In the context of the Roman Empire, Jesus’ Beatitudes were dangerous, disruptive, and revolutionary. But to those to whom Jesus was speaking his words were hopeful. In spite of the way things feel, Jesus is proclaiming: “A different world is possible. God’s kingdom is coming.”
The people listening to Jesus’ sermon that day were the very ones who did not feel blessed at all. And in the weeks ahead, as we make it through this list of Beatitudes, you will notice Jesus left some good people out. He doesn’t say: “Blessed are the hard workers, the disciplined, the honest, the well-behaved.” No. It’s the spiritual beggars, the mourners, the gentle, those who crave justice and righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemaker, and the persecuted whom he lifts up and points to and says: “These are the favored ones! These are the blessed!”
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove was teaching a Bible study on the Beatitudes at a local homeless shelter. It was a class where half the participants were residents in the shelter and the other half were seminary students and members of churches in the community. Jonathan started by reading the Beatitudes out loud and because the class was so diverse he decided to ask them all to share what they heard as good news in the passage. One man who lived at the shelter sat up on the edge of his chair, smiling and excited and yelled out, “Jesus is talkin’ to us, man!” We’re the poor. We’re the ones who are crying and hungry and thirsty for justice. And Jesus says we’re blessed! Now think about that!”
The good news in these strange words comes not so much in “rewards” but in the blessed reality Jesus promises in each Beatitude: the kingdom of heaven, comfort, mercy, inheriting the earth, to be filled, to see God, to be called children of God. This blessed kingdom reality begins imperfectly in this life and can be had perfectly and completely in the life to come. We will look more closely at the blessed reality of each Beatitude in the weeks to come. They lead us on what one has called “the eight-fold path of Jesus.” They are doors that lead us into the kingdom of God.
We will find that these Beatitudes are anything but simple. There are no instructions in the Beatitudes. They don’t tell us what to do or how to act.
And the good news to remember about these beatitudes is that they are not just blessings on certain wonderful people, they are invitations to come forward and take our place among them. Jesus is offering us a way of living together where we elevate people the world wants to suppress, and where we embrace the lowliest among us and the most desperate part of ourselves. We are called to live as an alternative community that doesn’t bless what the world blesses or live as the world lives, but loves with the compassion of Jesus in such a radically powerful and compelling way that people look at us and say, “Who are those people and what are they doing?
If you have felt that your life is out of sync with God, discontent, incomplete, I invite you to come and stand among the spiritual beggars, the mourners, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, and those hungry for justice – those lifted up by Jesus as portraits of a human being fully and beautifully alive – and hear Jesus say to you: “Congratulations! Listen to ‘The Applause of Heaven!’8 Welcome to the Kingdom of God!”
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- Ludwig Muller, God’s Word in German, 1936
- Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, Princeton University Press, 2010
- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, ed. Daniel Simon, Seven Stories Press, 2005, 98
- Max Lucado, The Applause of Heaven, Word Publishing, 1990
- Barbara Brown Taylor, “Blessed Are the Upside Down,” Gospel Medicine, Cowley Publications, 1995, 146
- Karen Swallow Prior, You Have a Calling
- Jason Adam Miller, When the World Breaks, FaithWords, 2023, 4
- The title of Max Lucado’s book on the Beatitudes