Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (Matthew 5:1-12)
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for you reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Ca yɛ poth mi kueth naath yɛ, kä muɔckɛ yɛ rik, kä la̱tkɛ yɛ jiäk diaal, kɛ ka̱a̱cni kɛ kui̱dä. Dɔalɛ to̱k, kä a lo̱ckun tɛth, kɛ ɣöö mucdun cieŋ nhial ɛ mi di̱i̱t, kä cikɛ göök Kuɔth tëë wal moc rik inɔ.
Prayer: Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
What do you think it means to be “blessed?”
What do you think of if someone asked you what it means to be “blessed?”
In our Gospel reading today for All Saints’ Day, Jesus teaches his church through all time and for all ages what it means to be blessed.
“Blessed, blessed, blessed…” We hear those word ring one after the other.
Blessed are the poor in the Spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst.
Blessed, blessed, blessed… One after the other, Jesus scatters his blessings on each person, on each era of history, on different stages of life.
In the book of Proverbs it says: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”
The writer of the proverb here is asking us to acknowledge God in all our ways: to look back on life and to notice where God’s hand has been at work, even to examine ourselves in the present and to see where God’s hand is still working, still pushing us in one direction, still nudging us over there, still elbowing us over here. In all your ways acknowledge him.
But if we were to look at our lives and think: “Where has God worked? Where has God blessed us? Where has he sent us his blessing?”, we would get the answer totally wrong. We would think that God has most of all blessed us in all those times when things were going well for us. We would think that God has blessed us in all those times when we felt our work was easy, when it was no effort from week to week to do the jobs we needed to do. We would think that God has showered upon us his blessing the most in all those times when we were in good health, when we felt like we “spiritual” and “godly”, when we had everything that we wanted materially, when people said good things about us.
But in actual fact, the times we should consider to be full of blessing are those times when we are the most helpless. We of course always want to be self-sufficient, reliant on no-one, needing no help. But God wants us to be dependent on him. He wants to fill our cups to overflowing, and he can’t do it if we try to fill our own cups with our own cheap stuff.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”
If we think about God’s blessing in this way, in terms of our times of helplessness, we would think, “Why does God do it like this?” “Does he want to push us all away from him?” “Does he want to put us all off completely?” “Don’t you think he would want to teach us something a little more attractive, a little more enjoyable, a little more fun?”
But what we have to understand is that the world was not designed with suffering. Suffering came later – suffering came when sin came. And now, God then has to do things in a new way. Now God has to bring good things out of bad things. At the beginning of the book of Genesis it says: God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. At the end of the book of Genesis, once we’ve read the family histories of people who have lied, been cowardly, murdered, envied, tricked, hated, raped, you name it: at the end of all this, then we read those words that Joseph speaks to his brothers: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
And so, this is where we find God’s blessing: God actively, deliberately turning things around for good, turning upside-down things the right way up.
And so in our Gospel reading today, we read:
Seeing the crowds, [Jesus] went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth and taught them.
See here the sense of occasion. Jesus goes up on the mountain that was there. He sits down. He gathers his disciples around him. And St Matthew even mentions the fact that he “opened his mouth”. Everything here is so deliberate: everything marks the sense that what is about the follow are great words, life-giving words, words for the whole world, words for all times and all places. And so, what does he say?
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
These are the sort of words which need to be memorised and returned to again and again, and year after year, and there is always something new in them. It’s not to say that these words change at different stages of life, but we change so that these words are applied to us in a different way.
But one thing we need to make sure we understand. These words are not a list of prerequisites for being blessed. Jesus is not telling us a list of things which we have to do in order to be blessed. Jesus is not saying: If you want to be blessed, this is what you have to do.
At the beginning of the reading, Jesus draws his disciples to himself. His disciples talk to him. He is speaking to his disciples here. He is speaking to those people whom he has already blessed.
Now he is describing for them what this blessing looks like. He wants to draw them a picture of this blessing.
We can’t take these things as a list of prerequisites. For example, you can’t say, “If I want to enter the kingdom of heaven, I have to make sure I’m persecuted.” God will send you persecution in his own time, you don’t have to go looking for it! Some Christians almost carry on as if every time someone says something bad about them that this is a “persecution, persecution!” But Jesus says: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” Do you hear that word? Falsely! That doesn’t include being persecuted for being a stuck-up pain in the neck! And also Jesus says “on my account”. Yes: not on account of the fact that you went out of your way to annoy people or whatever. Jesus says in another place: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.”
That’s what it means to be persecuted falsely on account of Jesus. It means to be persecuted for the same reason as Jesus was persecuted.
But listen to each of these blessings:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who are not rich in spirit. Blessed are those who are helpless before God.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
We might think that this is particularly strange, but those who mourn are the only ones who can be comforted. And here we’re not just talking about mourning over people who have died, but acknowledging here a deep sense that God himself is the one who comforts us, and fills the empty cup.
And this list of blessings continues. Blessed are the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted.
Listen to each of these blessings and listen very carefully to the blessing which is found in each of these things. This list of blessings, or the Beatitudes as they are sometimes called, are a set of great, mysterious and profound truth that you will continue to fathom your whole life long, until the time when you meet your maker face to face, not with your own purity, but with the purity which God himself gives you, and you will see that God was actually right after all. There was great blessing. There was profound blessing in times when I often didn’t see it.
That’s what it means: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
It doesn’t mean that your own personal purity will allow you to see God. If that were the case, then none of us would see God. In fact, this blessing, probably even more than the others, shows us our sinful condition. We realise when we hear those words that we’re not pure in heart.
But that’s precisely what Jesus came for. He didn’t come to leave us to purify our own hearts by himself. He came to die for the sins of the world, rise from the dead, and purify the hearts of the world himself, with his own power, with his own cleansing and forgiving blood. He’s the one who does the purifying. We are helpless. He is the one who opens the door then for us through the forgiveness of sins and allows us to see God.
Then we can say: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, means trust in the Lord in all your helplessness. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. Look back on your life, and see where his hand is at work. See God, you who are pure in heart. See him, and acknowledge him.
On this All Saints’ Day, we come together as a church particularly to remember those words which we say in the Apostles’ Creed. I believe in the communion of saints. We come not just to acknowledge God and see God at work in our own lives, but in the lives of all those who have lived and died in the faith before us. Because each person who is baptised gives a distinctive witness to the faith, each person’s life is seasoned with salt in a different way, and each person receives a crown of victory in a different way, with different desires fulfilled, with different pains brought to an end, with different sins forgiven. And each person in Christian history, the great saints of history, the great teachers of the faith, the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs, and even those more recently who were close to us, all give a unique witness. Each person displays the blessing of God in a unique way to them, but in a way which is united under the cross of Christ.
You notice that whenever we give a blessing in the church, we always make a sign of the cross. And the sign of the cross is a sign of such great blessing, as we know, but which we know is a sign of great suffering. Every church is marked with one. And every Christian is marked with that sign at holy baptism. It’s that cross which Christ calls us to take up and follow him with which comes out in each of these blessings in our reading today.
As St Peter says: “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time, he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him for he cares for you.” Or listen to the words of St Paul in Romans 5: “Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings.”
And so, we gather together today to celebrate the Lord’s Supper and give thanks to God, and to acknowledge him in all our ways, with the angels, the archangels and all the company of heaven. We come together as a united communion of saints, we are saints who hear, they are the saints who see. In the divine service, we see God at work only by faith, but they see God at work with their own eyes. But we’re all part of the one and the same divine service. Those who have died in the faith are here with us because they are with Jesus, and Jesus is with us, in the flesh, with his body and blood, and life and death in his hands. It’s all the one and the same wedding banquet of heaven.
And so he comes into our midst, he enters his sanctuary, he walks up his mountain and sits down, and he opens his mouth and he teach us. Blessed, blessed, blessed. One blessing after another, one toll of the bell after another. Blessed, blessed, blessed. Blessed are you. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
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