Sermons
May 31, 2026 (Trinity Sunday)
Congratulations!
Matthew 5:1-12
What does it mean to be happy? It tends to be situational, doesn’t it? We’re happy when we’re having fun, when things are going our way, when people like us, when we’re healthy, when our worries and stresses about jobs and money and the like are at a minimum. Take any of those out of the equation, and would we be happy?
We know what happiness is, and I think most of us have a pretty fair idea what it isn’t. When life is a struggle, when we’re grieving, when people aren’t treating us like we’d like, when we’re sick or in pain, well, we’d be hard-pressed to call ourselves happy then. So what do we make of Jesus’ statements in today’s reading, which begin the first of five long blocks of teaching from Jesus in Matthew’s Gospels, about the nature of happiness?
Maybe you’re saying, “What are you talking about?” The Beatitudes don’t say anything about being happy; both the NRSV we have in our pews and the old King James Bible—in fact, most of the English translations we have access to—talk about what it means to be blessed, not happy. As a matter of fact, that’s what the word beatitude means!
Of the English Bibles I’ve got in my office, only the 2011 Common English Bible substitutes the word happy where others say blessed.
But actually, the Greek word that’s translated in these verses, makarioi, is the same one used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible in places like Psalm 84:4, which says, in the New Revised Standard Bible, “Happy are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise.” (King James and the New International Version both say blessed here, too, though, to be fair.) And maybe as we look at the Beatitudes today, since they are so familiar and so spiritualized, we’d do better to use happy, because it might help us to realize just how shocking these statements are.
We know what it is to be happy, and I think we have a fair idea what it isn’t. So what do we make of Jesus telling us we’re happy when we are hopeless (most of the familiar versions, of course, render this first Beatitude as “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” but one commentary I read said we could as easily read it as “Happy are those whose breath comes in sobs,” since the word translated as spirit, as we learned last week, can also mean breath)? How can we be happy when we’re in the midst of grief—and I’m not just talking about the substantial grief we feel when we lose someone we love; Matthew’s original hearers would have been grieving an even greater loss, the destruction of their temple, for the second time, this time forever.
Happy are those who grieve because an oppressive empire has destroyed the house of their God and with it the entire system of worship and sacrifice that made it possible for them to have a relationship with God?
The next Beatitude isn’t all that much better. We’re most familiar with it this way: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” But again, if we go behind this into the Greek, the word translated as comforted can have a slightly different meaning. “Blessed are those whose holy place has been destroyed by an oppressor, for they will be called as witnesses when that oppressor is finally brought to justice.”
It might be comforting, but it could also be excruciating.
Many years ago, when I lived in the dorms at Wichita State, I woke up just after 3 a.m. because the door to my room was standing open. I had a friend who would occasionally stop by to talk at all hours of the night, so I just reached for my glasses and prepared to see what she wanted. But before I could get them on, a man popped up from where he had been crouched by the bed, and he asked, “Is Jesse here?” I don’t know if it was just the first thing that came into his mind, or if he was on drugs and not thinking clearly.
My first response was to yell out—bad words that aren’t appropriate in church. He then responded, “Jesse’s not here,” and ran out of my room, slamming the door behind him. From there he went two floors up, where another girl woke up when he grabbed her leg.
When I had collected myself, I called my friend down the hall, who called the R.A., who called campus police. A couple days later I was summoned to look through a mugshot book—which was a complete waste of time; I hadn’t gotten a good look at the man because it was dark and I was hopelessly nearsighted without my glasses. The other girl must have, because someone was arrested and a trial was scheduled for late the following summer. I got a summons to come and testify, but the trial was cancelled just before it was scheduled to start.
I am not sure “happy” or “blessed” would exactly describe how I felt at the prospect of seeing and hearing the voice of the man accused of walking into my dorm room intent on who knows what,[1] even if I was seeing and hearing him in a courtroom where I might have been part of his being convicted and sentenced for what he did.
Jesus continues his unbelievable, outrageous list: Happy are the humble—or the meek, or the gentle, depending on the translation—because they will inherit the earth? These are the people this world has a tendency to ignore, to trample on, to take advantage of, to bruise and batter until (as in the first Beatitude) their breath comes in sobs. How are they happy, and how can they inherit the earth when their faces have been ground into it?
The last one could be the worst. Happy are those who are harassed (the Greek word means something more like hunted down) because they are righteous—in other words, because they gladly observe all of God’s commandments. You work hard, play by the rules, keep the commandments, care for the poor, love your neighbor as yourself, worship and serve only God; and there are people out there who want to hurt you, who stalk you and chase you to the ends of the earth because of it—and you’re supposed to be happy?
In fact, Jesus says, be full of joy, rejoice, be glad; because this is how the prophets were treated a lot of the time. Yeah, I should be thrilled to be like Jeremiah, who was thrown into a cistern, ridiculed, and put under house arrest; who had his books burned by the king; and who tried repeatedly to resign as God’s prophet but couldn’t because if he didn’t speak God’s word it gave him a major case of heartburn. I think not.
Yet this is Jesus’ recipe for happiness. This is what we get if we walk his Way. What in the world is he talking about?
There’s nothing happy about being a victim, about being crushed and oppressed, about turning the other cheek so often that it’s black and bruised and torn,[2] about doing the best we can and having even our friends misunderstand[3]…is there?
The Sermon on the Mount is the first major block of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of Matthew, but it’s not the first thing he says. The Gospel of Matthew records Jesus’ first sermon a chapter or two earlier. It’s exactly the same as what John the Baptist had preached: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Jesus was all about proclaiming the kingdom of heaven, and explaining (in stories, mostly; the kingdom of heaven is not exposed through proposition, but glimpsed through parable) what life is like in that kingdom. It’s not a thing like life here on this earth, where human nature and the reality of sin hold sway. It’s a place where everything is turned upside down, where the last are first, the lost are found, the outcast are brought in and seated at the head table.
When Jesus tells us that the last, the least, the lost, the broken, the sobbing, the persecuted are happy and blessed, it’s because the kingdom of heaven doesn’t work the same way that the kingdoms of earth work.
Does that settle the question?
Well, it doesn’t for me, not completely. I still live on earth, and the kingdom of heaven is a long ways from being fully realized here.
Perhaps, though, we who call ourselves followers of Jesus, who seek to walk the path he walked before us, who live in this world as citizens of the kingdom of heaven even though it can’t be found on a map, could set our minds on living out the reasons why Jesus calls these downtrodden and persecuted people blessed: comforting those who mourn, whose breath comes in sobs; showing mercy to those who have turned the other cheek so often that their jaws are broken on both sides; or standing with those who are persecuted and reviled and taken advantage of.
[1] Since he apparently took my Walkman off my bedside table, and had rifled through my wallet looking for money (I didn’t have any), it’s possible I just interrupted his theft when I woke up. But the experience of the girl upstairs, as well as another girl on my floor who’d been startled by the same man one night after supper, leads me to suspect other, more sinister motives.
[2] h/t to The Police.
[3] h/t to Mr. Tindley.