The Empire of God - Reflections on Matthew 5:1-12, Fourth Sunday After Epiphany, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Sunday, November 16, 2025
Matthew’s beatitudes of chapter 5 have played an outsized role in the ongoing life of Christian theology. They raise significant questions concerning their provenance and intention. Are they initiation rules for entrance into the coming kingdom of God, or are they guidelines for living here and now? Are they somehow both of these? The fact that Matthew cites Jesus’ teaching on a mountain calls forth connections with the famous gift of the Ten Words of YHWH to Moses from the sacred mountain of Sinai. Note, however, that Moses receives the ten from YHWH while Jesus offers his list to the crowds around the mountain in Galilee. Matthew is intent, as always, to connect his story of Jesus to the Jewish tradition that preceded it, but he is equally concerned to make plain just how Jesus went beyond that earlier teaching, however much he honored its language in his own.
Too often, the Beatitudes of Matthew have been reduced to phrases of simple and eternal piety, or “words to live by,” aphorisms that can be readily needlepointed for framing and memorized in catechism classes. However, we need to recognize that these ancient words possess an unmistakable power, and, when pitted against the Roman society of the time, take to task some central claims of that society. In short, the words can be explosive and dangerous when read squarely within the Roman communities of the day.
Matthew 5-7 comprises the Sermon on the Mount, the first of Matthew’s five collections of Jesus’s teaching ( see also chaps.10;13;18; 24-25) that are in effect the revelation of God’s will for the world. That is their intent, namely to instruct disciples and would-be followers of Jesus, shaping their identity and their style of living. However, if that is all they are—instructions for the good life—they could be reduced to mottoes, tag-lines for sayings, refrigerator magnet material. There are surely more. They are, it should be said, visions for the coming empire of God, that time when God will rule in life, not the Romans, nor any Roman-like people in the future. The Beatitudes sketch life in an alternative community of God, demonstrated by justice, altered social relations, fresh practices of piety, and shared resources available to all. Like so much of the biblical record, they provide another way of thinking of the world we know, another kind of life than we imagine we must live and always will live. Rome’s way of ordering the world, with huge disparities of power and wealth, with injustices perpetrated on the weak by the strong, with the very few dictating the way of things for the many, and with the many having little say in the structure of things, is not the only way to make a world. The Beatitudes simply must be heard in that living context of Roman hegemony if we are to receive their strength for their time and for ours.
The early beatitudes begin famously with a rather complex word: blessed (makarios). This word surely means blessed in the sense of a divine gift, often provided by a priest or king or parent, or someone in authority. However, the word can equally mean “happy,” that is, joyous in the sense of richly favored, gifted for contentment and gratification. That second meaning of the word provides a fuller idea of what we should hear in these statements. The Beatitudes are not merely claims of divine blessedness, though they clearly are that, but also they offer joy, real happiness, to those who receive them. Thus, “Blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” suggests more than the reality of the poor, the marginalized, the outcasts being somehow blessed, or somehow happy. Why should a poor one (the word often implies “beggar” in the New Testament) feel either blessed or happy, given their difficult circumstances? Matthew wants us to remember the Hebrew Bible’s special concern for the poor in numerous passages from Exodus to Amos to Isaiah to Deuteronomy, and claims that it is the poor who recognize God’s gift of the kingdom, precisely because they can see it only as gift and nothing they can force or demand.
Still, this notion of the poor receiving the kingdom of God flies directly in the face of the world of Roman heirarchy. In that world the poor are nothing, forgotten people in a world controlled by the wealth and power of the elite, the non-poor, those who genuinely run things. Jesus gazes at the poor, and the crowds around him always included a large number of them, and tells them that they are blessed and happy, and as a result will see and possess the kingdom of God, or as Matthew prefers it, the kingdom of heaven. In the religious and cultural heirarchy of that time, the very last group to see and possess God’s realm, God’s rule, will be the poor. Not so, says Jesus. They, through no effort of their own, are blessed and will indeed see God’s heavenly kingdom.
And that leads us back to our earlier question; is this a reference to “pie in the sky, bye and bye,” some celestial garden after death, or does Jesus mean that even now, today, the poor are blessed and happy, precisely because “theirs is the kingdom of heaven?” I tend to think that both notions are true. There is in the bulk of Matthew’s Gospel the idea that the rule and reign of God is both here and now and in the future all at once. So, the ones who mourn now, are hungry now, will find succor and food both now and in the future. After all, if the beloved community, augured by the Beatitudes, begins to appear, the mourners will find aid and the hungry will be fed. And in the future of God’s reign both will be true in spades.
“Blessed (happy) are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” (Mt.5:9). I will never forget the time, during my first visit to Israel, over 40 years ago, on the traditional site of the sermon on the mount, our group was regaled by a harrowing account of a ferocious tank battle between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights; our guide was a former Israeli tank commander. As he concluded his story, he moved slightly to his left and revealed a plaque with the words “Blessed are the peacemakers.” It was plain then, and remains so now, that the hope of the Beatitudes remains only a hope. Still, these marvelous words are for us guides and goads for the certainty of God’s rule and reign in our world. May it be so!