Year A: Epiphany 02 | Matthew 5:1-12
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
January 18, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
Due to technical difficulties, there is no video or audio available for this sermon.
Growing up, I absolutely hated the word “blessing.” People in our church community essentially used it as a euphemism for saying “thank you” or “good job” in religious- or service-related situations. Play sports? They could praise you all they wanted. Play music at church or help install and air conditioner? “Such a blessing.” It was as if people were afraid that if they openly thanked or encouraged another human being under certain circumstances, God would somehow snatch away whatever goodness might have been in store for the subject of their gratitude or whoever had provided them a moment of enjoyment. It made God into a selfish, egotistical jerk, and even as a kid, I knew that couldn’t be right. If that’s what God was like, then might made right; the universe was based on greed and had no choice but ultimately to consume itself through selfishness. Not having the framework to distinguish between gods, I turned my distain for this being people said they loved but actually viewed with fear into hatred for the word that encapsulated him.
It wasn’t until my late 20’s while living in China that my feelings toward “bless” and its offshoots began to change. The Mandarin word for blessing, fú,[1] which felt like it popped up everywhere, had far more depth to it than the largely vapid term I had grown up with. Essentially comprised of sub-characters that translate as “one mouth in a garden with God” or “one mouth in a garden: divine,” Chinese “blessing” was substantial—even gooey, but in a good way. It wasn’t just some sort of empty, magical term that tricked an angry God into being okay with whatever was said. It involved real life—health, prosperity, ease, peace, joy, good fortune—pretty much everything one could imagine as good all wrapped up in one word. Once I understood that concept of “blessing,” the Bible’s usage began to make a whole lot more sense.
But that’s also part of why the Beatitudes are so confusing.
The word Jesus uses actually means something closer to “venerable” or “at rest”—I typically translate it as “blissful.” It was a term people used to describe the happy and fortunate dead. But the Church has proved itself highly averse to changing beloved terminology in favor of words that currently reflect the correct meaning, so for generation upon generation, a passive and largely empty idea of “blessedness” is what English-speaking Christians know in this passage. And with that usage, I still have quite a problem.
Modern American Christianity likes to pick and choose between what parts of the Bible people are supposed to follow to the letter and what parts it’s more appropriate to “spiritualize”—to take metaphorically or, preferably, simply ignore. Around ancient rules and regulations, we sound like Daleks—“Obey! Obey!”—yet somehow expect our anxiety and yelling to get results. Turning to truly weighty matters, however, like love, mercy, and aligning our character with God’s (the idea behind what we read as “justice”), “it’s what’s inside that counts.” This allows all kinds of things—cruelty, oppression, aggression, nationalism, and the like—to masquerade as “Christian” when their nature and practices are not only harmful to people but inherently anti-Christ.
But what happens when we take the real idea of blessing—a kind of goodness that sticks to you and who’s pressure and presence you can smell and taste and feel, like swimming through honey or thick chocolate—and apply that to Jesus’ words?
Well, the first thing we do is run into some pretty heavy cognitive dissonance. Poverty, grief, starvation, and persecution aren’t exactly things we associate with positive outcomes. And it’s even worse once we remove our nostalgic or spiritualized—our “blessed”—lenses from what we read.
For example, “poor in spirit” isn’t a reference to humility. It isn’t some passive, demure way of being that you hope others will imagine to be godliness. “Poor” here means “indigent”—utterly lacking in everything. The Greek word itself is essentially an onomatopoeia for spitting, because that’s all these people deserved to receive from anyone else. And “in spirit” takes on a much more sinister air when brought into cultural context. If the crowd Jesus was speaking to was primarily Aramaic, the image they would have heard is that of someone stepping or kneeling on someone else’s neck, depriving them of breath by crushing their windpipe. These “blessed” people are the ones society treads upon with no thought whatsoever, the bodies we heap up and cast aside in the name of ideals or progress or God or freedom or what have you.
Equally problematic is our romanticization of persecution. Our national myths are rooted in imagery of people escaping subjugation—whether religious, legal, or physical. Some of that was real, but most of it was, in truth, hyperbole or even fantasy—individualism, pride, and inflexible piety dressed up so as to evoke pity. Any true persecution was, in fact, political. Under Christendom, where the Church fawns at the feet of State, it’s impossible to differentiate religion from law.
Persecution, as we see it in the New Testament, is not simply the result of disagreement. Nor is it the social consequences that result from committing oneself to an unpopular position, rejecting reality, trying to force everyone else to follow your rules, or simply behaving like a jerk. Persecution is, quite literally, being hunted. Christian persecution, in particular, is being hunted because your actions reflect Jesus—you’re loving people or protecting them or treating them with mercy or attempting to help them and someone guns you down for it anyway. It’s authority murdering someone for being kind and then publicly denigrating the victim.
So how, then, are any of these people Jesus is talking about “blessed”? In what way is a weighty, impenetrable layer of goodness enveloping them?
Basically, God—the one true God of mercy, kindness, generosity, love, and life—is already with them; God is on their side. “Blessed ARE the poor…those who mourn…the meek…the merciful...the peacemakers…” and so on. Despite appearances or human efforts to shame and subdue, God’s goodness, respect, and love are already upon them. Yes, they may reap certain benefits in the future, but the actual blessing is God’s presence and support here and now.
So what happens when we, as Christians, make the effort to recognize and live by this deeper reality? What happens when we actually listen to Jesus and see people as he describes them? What happens when we venerate those Jesus is talking about?
The world turns upside down.
The crushed become the honorable, the mourning receive comfort, those resilient in the face of oppression find the land opened to them, those who seek justice—the kind that reflects the nature of the Creator God—receive the same in return, and those who refine themselves to become that same form of justice in the world encounter, embrace, and already dwell within the Celestial Reign.
So who will you be? Who will you honor? Will you passively kneel before a false, selfish god and those who worship it, or will you respect, serve, and uplift those Jesus declares to already hold God’s blessing? What we, as Christians, do matters. How we live matters. Who we love matters. And the god we venerate through our actions is the god we actually serve.
[1] 福