[Sermon] The Beatitude Jesus and the Hopeless Unblessables

Jeff Tobin, guest preacher

February 1, 2026 + Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Guest preacher Jeff Tobin invites us to hear the Beatitudes not as abstract ideals, but as good news spoken to weary, struggling people. Jesus is the new Moses, standing on the mountainside to announce God’s blessing upon those the world considers failures or forgotten. The Beatitudes reveal who Jesus is—and who God blesses—challenging the idea that strength, power, or success define worth. Through Scripture and lived reality, we see how Jesus embodies each Beatitude in his own life and ministry. Jeff reassures us that God’s favor rests on those who mourn, hunger for justice, and long for peace. The Beatitude Jesus still speaks blessing over today’s “hopeless unblessables,” including each of us.

Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.

Good morning, friends.

Our gospel text this morning for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany is very familiar—uh, familiar to us. The first twelve verses in Matthew 5 are known as the Beatitudes, which were read, uh, for us already this morning, and they are the introduction to what may be Jesus’ most recognizable teaching: the Sermon on the Mount.

It’s important for Matthew’s purposes, in establishing the identity of Jesus, to place him on a mountain. It was probably a hill in northern Galilee that was a natural amphitheater. Matthew wanted his gospel readers to associate Jesus with Moses—Moses, the great hero of the Exodus, Israel’s escape from Egyptian slavery, and the one who went up the mountain at Sinai to receive the Torah from God, thus establishing an everlasting covenant between himself, Yahweh, and Israel.

Matthew’s Jesus also goes up a mountain and, from there, pronounces God’s blessing on the gathered peoples. And this same Jesus will lead the ultimate exodus for all people from the slavery of sin and death through his life and death and resurrection. For Matthew, then, Jesus is the new and greater Moses—but not in the sense of replacing Moses, but as the Israelite who will complete what Moses began.

Matthew makes another claim about Jesus’ identity in the very way that he has structured his gospel. He’s organized his writing into five sections, such that there are five series of narratives followed by discourses. The Sermon on the Mount is the first and longest of these discourses, and the number five is not an accident. The first five books of our Bible have traditionally been known as the books of Moses, or the Torah.

Torah is often translated “law,” but its meaning is much larger than that. Torah is instruction. It’s wisdom from God on how to live our lives. Matthew wanted his Jewish readers—and us—to see Jesus as the new Torah. Again, not a replacement for an old, obsolete Torah, but its living fulfillment.

So it is this Jesus, the new Moses and the new Torah, who has God’s authorization to speak to the Israelites from the mountainside. Remember the voice at Jesus’ baptism: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

In those days, rabbis taught while seated. And so, on the mountainside, a seated Jesus offers a series of teachings beginning with the word “blessed.” We call this part of the first major discourse the Beatitudes, because the Latin word for beatitude is beatitudo, which can also mean “happy” or “favored by God.”

But upon whom is Jesus pronouncing these blessings?

In our epistle lectionary reading today, from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, he urges them, “Think of what you were when you were first called.” He reminds them of their lowly social status. They were not, says Paul, the wise, the influential, or those of noble birth. And that description could fittingly be applied to the gathered crowds upon whom Jesus is going to announce God’s blessing.

Could we have the first slide, please?

Consider these verses from Matthew 4 that lead us into the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount:

“Jesus went through all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria. And they brought to him the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, people possessed by demons or having epilepsy or afflicted by paralysis. And he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.”

Theologian and author Dallas Willard refers to these crowds that Jesus blesses as the “hopeless unbeatables.” These are the ones crushed by life—those both poor and poor in spirit. These are the meek, those who mourn, the ones hungering to see justice done. In other words, the very ones who appear least likely to have God’s blessing.

As we just read in Matthew 4, many in the crowd had traveled long distances, probably on foot, with all the hardships that that entailed, to sit at Jesus’ feet on the mountainside. And if we can empathize with the life circumstances of these people—real people with names and faces, who had existential worries just as we do—it may help us to avoid thinking of the Beatitudes as prescriptions to follow to gain blessedness, or as some kind of Jacob’s ladder of abstract moral principles by which we climb into the kingdom.

I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.

The Beatitudes were spoken two thousand years ago to flesh-and-blood people who were seeking something. And Jesus looked into their faces. He made eye contact with the men and the women and the children crowding around him, and he gave them news of sheer grace.

According to both John the Baptizer and Jesus, the kingdom of heaven that these Israelites had longed for had now arrived. They were blessed. Jesus, as the new Moses and the new Torah, pronounced God’s favor upon them and gave them the hope that they were, in fact, no longer the hopeless unbeatables.

We have our next slide, please.

In a recent interview reported in The New York Times, a highly placed member of the current administration in Washington, DC, said this:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world—the real world—that’s governed by strength, that’s governed by force, that’s governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time: strength, force, power.”

In other words, might makes right.

Jesus himself lived under the oppressive iron law of the Roman Empire. He knew firsthand what “might makes right” looked and felt like. And in the Beatitudes, he clearly rejected that way of being in the world.

Next slide, please.

To put that rejection into sharper focus, consider these anti-Beatitudes:

Blessed are the rich.

Blessed are those who cause others to mourn.

Blessed are the violent, the oppressors, those who dominate others or run the domination systems.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for injustice.

Blessed are those who show no mercy.

Blessed are the impure of heart.

Blessed are the warmakers.

Blessed are those who are never persecuted, who never struggle for justice, who never rock the boat on behalf of the poor and the disenfranchised, who are never insulted because of their allegiance to the nonviolent Jesus.

Priest and author Henri Nouwen suggests we reckon the Beatitudes in what may be, for us, a new way. Nouwen suggests that we think of the Beatitudes as if they were actually Jesus’ self-portrait—a revealing of both who he was and what was important to him. And if Nouwen is correct, the Beatitude life that Jesus lived was itself a repudiation of “might makes right” and those anti-Beatitudes.

As was read earlier, the Beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel begin, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, the first Beatitude is simply, “Blessed are the poor.”

If “poor in spirit” was actually part of Jesus’ self-portrait, what did that look like? How did he live that out?

Consider these words of Paul in his letter to the Philippian church: “Though he, Jesus, was in the form of God, he did not regard the honor of equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” In setting aside his honor, he was choosing the poverty of spirit of a servant.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” reads the second Beatitude. Jesus, the blessed one, mourned and wept at the death of his friend Lazarus. And he mourned and wept as he entered Jerusalem for the final time, because he said they had failed to recognize the things that make for peace. And like Israel’s prophets of old, he grieved and lamented his society’s violence and greed—man’s inhumanity to man.

And that’s why Jesus himself hungered and thirsted for righteousness, for mishpat, the Hebrew word meaning restorative justice.

Jesus, the beloved one of God, was merciful. Mercy is not pity, but compassion that acts. We saw that earlier in Matthew 4, in those verses recounting Jesus’ many healings. The gospels tell us also that, on another occasion, when Jesus saw the crowds, he was moved with compassion, for the scripture says they appeared to him as sheep without a shepherd. And his mercy led to the famous feeding of the five thousand.

Jesus, the blessed one, was pure in heart. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian, defined purity of heart as “willing one thing,” by which he meant unifying one’s whole being—one’s internal and external life—around a central, meaningful goal. And for Jesus, that was to be God’s faithful Son and servant.

Jesus, the very embodiment of the Beatitudes, is the peacemaker, the reconciler. Biblical peace, shalom, is communal as well as individual. And we reinforce that truth every Sunday in our worship by passing God’s peace to one another.

In stark contrast to our current American climate of divide and conquer and us-versus-them, we have in the book of Revelation a picture of shalom that some scholars call God’s dream—a vision of peace. We read in chapter 7: “There was a great multitude from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing together before the throne and before Jesus the Lamb, and together they chanted praises to God.” The passage notes that this multitude were all dressed in identical white robes, and each carried a palm branch, a symbol of peace.

In other words, there were no distinctions and no divisions among the people based on national identity, ethnicity, or language. God’s dream indeed.

Jesus, upon whom God’s favor rested like a dove, was persecuted. He not only hungered and thirsted for righteousness; he was persecuted for it. Because besides meaning personal piety, biblical righteousness means putting things to right. And for those then—and now—who have a vested interest in perverting justice, Jesus, like Israel’s prophets of old, was a threat.

And as we know, the exaltation of strength and force and power that we read about earlier became a weapon wielded by the religious establishment and the Roman state, resulting in the persecution of this threatening Jesus—persecution all the way to the cross.

Long ago, needy, adoring crowds came to the mountain and experienced a new exodus from illness and hopelessness, led by Jesus, the new Moses. They came to listen and be instructed by Jesus, who was the very word of God to them, the new Torah.

And in a few moments, we will be invited to receive bread and wine at the table—to take into our bodies and minds the Beatitude Jesus: the one poor in spirit, the merciful one, the one hungry to realize God’s dream for all people, the one who once blessed the hopeless unbeatables and still does so for today’s unbeatables, like you and me.

The Beatitude Jesus is the good news. And that’s the gospel.

Thanks be to God.