In the third chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River. In the fourth chapter, he is tempted by Satan in the desert. He returns from the desert, he proclaims that the kingdom of heaven has come near, and he gathers his disciples around him. Then he begins to teach and heal and minister to the people, and, Matthew tells us “they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan” (Mt.4:24-5).
And then we begin Matthew chapter five, our Gospel passage for this morning: “When Jesus saw the crowds,” Matthew says, “he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them.”
When Jesus goes up onto the mountain and begins to speak, he is speaking from the center of a great crowd. People from all over. People with—or newly cured of—diseases of all kinds. A great throng. We’ve heard very little from him so far in this Gospel, and now here he is, seated on a mountain and teaching like a new Moses. And so what he says to his followers must be some kind of concentrated wisdom. He delivers not a set of laws, but a list of ways to be blessed, a description of the blessedness he sees already, perhaps, in the faces that look up to him.
I’ve learned that it’s important to think of the Beatitudes in that way, as descriptions of blessedness rather than as rules for becoming blessed. Maybe it’s just that I spent half my seminary career among Lutherans, and they get cranky if you read the Bible in ways that suggest that we can earn the grace of God. These are not rules; they are blessings. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is not a command about trying to get poor in spirit so that we can win the kingdom of heaven. If we could accomplish such a thing, we wouldn’t be poor in spirit. We would be too proud of our spiritual accomplishments. That’s how Lutherans get you. Every time.
No, Jesus is not exactly telling us what to do or how to do it. He is telling us what he does, and what he sees. What he does, is to reach a hand out to the poor, to those who mourn, to the meek, to lift them up. To identify with them and to give his life for them. For us.
But what he sees, I think, is also crucial for us to understand. Here in what feels like his first big speech in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus isn’t just describing what blessedness is in the abstract. He is naming what he sees in the moment, what is happening in the crowd all around him. He is telling us what he has experienced as he has moved throughout the region healing the people and speaking in their synagogues. He is telling us how the Spirit has been moving through him, how it is moving right now, how his own words in the moment are reaching his hearers and converting their meekness into a glorious inheritance, their persecutions into enfranchisement, their hunger for righteousness into satisfaction.
Jesus is bringing them into the kingdom, into a realm of blessing, and he is also, very importantly giving them a vision of themselves as blessed. He is contemplating the action of God in them, through himself, and sharing the fruits of that contemplation with them.
Have you ever had this experience? Have you ever had the opportunity to sit with someone who could see God working in you, could see your blessedness, and could speak it back to you, so that you could see them seeing it? Maybe this sounds a little grandiose, but when someone gets you spiritually, or sees how far God has brought you, or acknowledges your God-given courage or humility or honesty, doesn’t heaven open up a little bit in the skies above you? Doesn’t the good they see in you grow stronger? Don’t barriers of isolation and fear and doubt fall away a little when you are known and named, when someone tells you you are pure of heart? That you’re the salt of the earth? That you are the light of the world?
Jesus puts this experience right up front in Matthew’s Gospel. Yes, he has been teaching and healing on a grand scale, but Matthew covers that in a few verses. Jesus goes from calling his disciples to follow him, almost directly to this moment when he is surrounded by a crowd and he is telling them what blessedness is among them as they grow into the kingdom of God. It’s almost as though the healing and teaching he has been doing aren’t complete until they have been seen and named by Jesus in this concentrated way. It’s almost as though Jesus knows that we must have this shared awareness, that he must share his vision of us, with us, if he is to reach us deeply. He must contemplate our blessedness with us. So that we see ourselves in the eyes of God, see ourselves as God sees us. So that we see God seeing and loving us, now in this life when we are still anxiously searching and yearning for him. Oh blessed reassurance.
That’s what the saints are for, too. That’s what this feast day, All Saints’ Day, is for. Blessed reassurance. It’s for taking a long, loving, look at all the blessedness that can be seen on human faces. It’s for acknowledging, seeing and knowing and naming, the beauty of the holiness of the ones who have gone before us. Like Jesus on that mountain, we are given that vision today, of the transformation God has wrought in human lives. The mourning converted into joy. The humility, the prophetic endurance, the sharing of peace and mercy in the name of God. This priceless vision that Jesus was so eager to give us, we receive from him again today in the life of the church. And we glory in human life that reflects God. We contemplate the face of Jesus in the faces of those who love him. We know that we never love him enough, or well enough, but look: someone does. By the grace of God, some people like us have lived and died as pure reflections of the light of Christ. And we get to name those people, and cherish them, and befriend them and call on them as companions.
Just as the heavens open up for us a bit when someone sees and names our blessedness, so too we get to be part of the opening of the heavens when we name the saints and love them, for no other reason than that we love their love of God. There is nothing in it for us. We can’t bribe them to do us favors, though history suggests that some have tried. We really can’t win them over or bargain with them. They don’t need anything from us. We simply love them, because they love God. Because God loves them. We see how beautiful they are. And that is our profound gift.
And before we know it, we are seeing with God’s eyes. Some of our mourning has been converted into laughter. Some of our meekness has been turned into a rich inheritance. Some of what oppresses us has been turned into belonging. Because we can sit with Jesus on that mountain and enumerate the ways in which God’s children are blessed. His vision is our vision on this feast day.
I don’t know the full power of that beatific vision. I don’t know everything that might happen when we go forward from this mountaintop, from this glimpse of human sanctity though the eyes of God. I know what it looks like when we see others being degraded. Shot down in the street. We all know what it is to have our worst failings confirmed over and over again on the nightly news.
But today we know that Jesus believes in the power of this vision. Enough that he delivers it like a new set of commandments from on high. Enough that he dares to speak to us—to us!—of our beauty and our truth and our godliness. Enough that he wills to make this vision real by living and dying among us, and telling us what we don’t know. That we are blessed. Children of God. Saints of the kingdom. That we inherit the earth.
Sit with Jesus today. Tell the world about its blessedness. Speak the names of the saints with love and awe. These friends of ours to whom we owe nothing but a vision of shared love: let them be on our lips and in our hearts. Let Jesus’s vision of us be our healing vision of the world.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
1 November 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia