Introduction
For weeks, we’ve been standing in the temple with Jesus.
We’ve heard questions about his authority, parables about sons and tenants and a wedding banquet, and attempts to trap him with questions about taxes. We’ve heard him identify love of God and neighbor as the commandments on which all the Law and the Prophets hang. The tension has continued to build, and we know where this is going.
Then suddenly All Saints Sunday takes us all the way back to a mountain in Galilee.
Jesus sits down. His disciples come to him. And he begins to speak.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
It feels like a flashback. And as with a good flashback, we return to an earlier scene carrying everything we’ve learned since. Here, nine months after the first time, we hear familiar words differently because we’ve seen what happens when Jesus lives them.
Narrative Context
Within Matthew’s narrative, the Beatitudes introduce Jesus’ first extended teaching with the Sermon on the Mount. To this point he has been baptized, endured temptation in the wilderness, announced the nearness of the kingdom, and called his first disciples.
Immediately before this scene, Matthew describes Jesus traveling throughout Galilee, teaching, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing. People bring him those experiencing illness and pain, and large crowds follow him from across the region (4:23–25). The disciples approach him on the mountain, while the conclusion of the sermon makes clear that the crowds have also heard his teaching (7:28–29).
These blessings are spoken into a gathering already marked by human need. People have come seeking relief, healing, and hope.
But listen to the reasons Jesus gives for calling them blessed. Those who mourn will be comforted. The meek will inherit the earth. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled. Each blessing directs us toward what God promises these people.
They’re still mourning. They’re still hungry for righteousness. Much of what Jesus promises remains beyond their present experience.
Yet the first and eighth blessings both announce that the kingdom of heaven already belongs to those he names (5:3, 10). They can trust that they belong to God even while they await what God has promised.
The rest of Matthew’s Gospel will give them plenty of reasons to wonder whether they can believe that.
Acting on the Promise
Returning to the mountain helps us remember what Jesus has been doing throughout the longer narrative.
As we heard throughout this summer, he announces God’s promised future and begins bringing healing, forgiveness, food, and restoration into people’s lives. And throughout these many chapters, these people suffering in body and spirit receive his attention. The needs surrounding him at the beginning continue to matter throughout his ministry and he responds to them directly.
That remains true when he arrives in Jerusalem. Before the debates begin, people who are blind or lame come to Jesus in the temple, and he heals them. Children respond with praise, provoking the anger of the chief priests and scribes (21:14–16).
By the next day, the chief priests and elders are asking who gave him authority to do these things.
We’ve spent weeks following the questions and parables that unfold from there. The Beatitudes help us recognize the people whose lives are at stake in those exchanges. Questions about authority concern what happens to the people entrusted to someone’s care. Questions about the vineyard’s fruit concern what that care actually produces.
Jesus has announced comfort for those who mourn, mercy for the merciful, and satisfaction for those who hunger for righteousness. His ministry up to this point gives people a foretaste of those promises. Now, those entrusted with tending God’s people are being asked to account for what their leadership has produced.
As leaders of the Church, we enter these readings as people who also exercise religious authority and bear responsibility for our neighbors.
We, too, can become so occupied with preserving the church’s resources, reputation, or influence that the people those things are meant to serve become secondary. A congregation can be successful at maintaining itself while losing sight of the people who need its care.
The Beatitudes keep those people before us. God’s promised future gives their lives a claim on our attention now. The question of fruit becomes concrete: Where are people receiving mercy? Whose grief is being accompanied? What are we doing about the conditions that leave our neighbors hungry for righteousness?
When the Promise Becomes Hard to Believe
But the flashback also makes us hear a difficulty that has grown as the story has continued.
Jesus promises the earth to the meek. But in Jerusalem, those willing to threaten and eventually kill him appear to have the power and control over what happens next.
Jesus blesses the merciful. Yet, his own acts of mercy have done little to protect him from the hostility gathering around him.
Jesus blesses those persecuted for righteousness’ sake. And indeed, we’re approaching the part of the story in which that persecution will lead to his death.
The final Beatitudes prepare the disciples for this possibility. Jesus addresses them directly, telling them that they may be reviled, persecuted, and falsely accused on his account. Their suffering will place them alongside the prophets who came before them (5:11–12).
Yet knowing that suffering may come doesn’t make it easy to reconcile with the promise. What does it mean to say that the kingdom belongs to people who can still be driven out, silenced, or killed?
At the cross, the accusation becomes explicit. Among those mocking Jesus are religious leaders who say, “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now” (27:43).
Their argument is that his suffering exposes the emptiness of his claim. If he belongs to God, where is God’s help?
That accusation reaches back toward the mountain. What confidence can the mourning, the meek, or the persecuted place in Jesus’ promises when the one who spoke them is hanging on a cross?
We know something about that difficulty. We hear promises of comfort and continue to grieve. We pray for righteousness and watch people suffer from outcomes they had no power to prevent. We show mercy and sometimes find ourselves with less security than we had before.
The distance between promise and experience can make us wonder whether we’ve trusted something that cannot be true. Jesus enters that distance himself. He has already told his disciples that he will be raised, but Matthew still brings us to the cross, where that promise seems hardest to believe. The Gospel makes us face his death before showing us what becomes of the promise.
Trusting the One
By the time we return to the mountain, we’ve seen how difficult it can be to recognize God’s blessing. Jesus’ opponents will point to his suffering as evidence that God has abandoned him. We can make similar judgments about ourselves and others. When grief persists, when our strength fails, when doing what is right seems to accomplish little, we wonder where God has gone.
The cross brings God into the very place we’ve taken as evidence of God’s absence. In Jesus, God enters our suffering, bears our sin, and goes into the death we cannot overcome. God raises him from the dead, opening a future we could never secure for ourselves.
That changes how we hear the blessings.
Those who mourn don’t have to overcome their grief before God draws near. The poor in spirit don’t have to discover some remaining reserve of spiritual strength. The meek don’t have to become powerful enough to fight for their own inheritance.
In Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, God acts to bring God’s people into that promised future.
This is also why the Beatitudes cannot become a call to martyrdom, to seek suffering or prove our faithfulness by enduring harm. Suffering has no power to make us worthy of God’s love. The promise rests on Christ’s faithfulness to us, including when our own faith falters.
And that promise frees us to attend to the suffering before us. We can seek help for ourselves and offer it to our neighbors. We can comfort those who mourn, protect people from harm, practice mercy, and work for righteousness. These are ways of participating in the care God has already turned toward us. These are ways of seeing the kingdom of heaven now.
But the resurrection also gives that work a future beyond what we can presently accomplish. We will leave things unfinished. Our strength will give out. There will be people we cannot save and losses we cannot repair.
But the one who calls us blessed has taken responsibility for a future beyond those limits. He has entered our death and risen, and he promises us a share in his life.
Preaching Possibility
Hearing the Promise Among the Names
All Saints places us within this distance between promise and experience.
We bring names with us. People we love have died. Some of those deaths came after long lives, and some came far too soon. Even when we can give thanks for much, there are things we wish had been different. Relief for the suffering they went through. A chance to say the words that weren’t spoken. A chance to restore relationships that remained unresolved.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
This Sunday, we might linger over the difficulty of hearing that promise while we’re still mourning. We name people we love, and they don’t answer. Their absence continues to shape our lives. Comfort may come in short moments, while the grief remains. It can feel like an endless cycle with no hopeful end.
Then the flashback brings us back to the one speaking.
After following Jesus toward Jerusalem, we hear his promise with some knowledge of what it will cost him to remain with us. Reading the whole Gospel, we also know that the cost, the suffering, even death, will not have the last word. Christ overcomes it all. For us.
That is our reason for entrusting these names to him. The saints we remember had failures, needs, and unfinished lives of their own. God’s mercy sustained them, and we entrust them to that mercy still. The same mercy sustains those of us who remain. Christ knows the grief into which he speaks. He has entered the death we fear.
And the risen Christ promises that there is still a future for those we mourn, and comfort still to come for us.
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