Sermon for 13 September 2026 from Rev’d Vanessa Elston (Isaiah 61.1-4 and Matthew 5.1-16)
I am delighted to be introducing a new series of lay sermons on the beatitudes. Sue Chin, Krista Ovist, Ian Shaw and Ian Dunlop are all going to be sharing their reflections with you over the coming weeks.
At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus announces what we call the gospel. Gospel means good news, something that we are going to want to hear, something we are going to delight in knowing, something fresh, something powerful. Jesus begins his teaching with a series of pronouncements we call the beatitudes: Blessed are… Blessed are… Blessed are… Jesus is inviting us to a different way of seeing the world, he is inviting us to a fundamentally different way of understanding who is truly fortunate, who is lucky, happy, or truly blessed.
Jesus begins his ministry, before we get to the Beatitudes, by announcing the availability of something he calls the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom of God as it is referred to in the other gospels. Jesus is announcing a new state of affairs, he is saying there is a new government, like after the night of an election, a new day is dawning, the situation of humanity is changing, something new is breaking in, something is now arriving with the presence and ministry of Jesus. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
A new world order is breaking into the old. A new possibility that was always there but is now being manifested in a new way. The Kingdom of God is breaking into the kingdom of this world. The kingdom of this world is the sphere of power and influence given to humanity. Right back at the beginning of the story of creation, God takes this tremendous risk, he gives humanity a huge amount of power and influence over his creation. And this is the kingdom of this world that we now inhabit, it’s the rule of what the Bible calls this current age or epoch and, as we know all too well, it is a world dominated by conflict, often ruled by violence, selfishness and greed, what we call the zero-sum game, where my advancement, my gain, means your diminishment, your loss. This is the world of realpolitick, where we need to be realistic about the threats that others pose to us. The gospel is very realistic about the reality of this world; it acknowledges its harmful and destructive power. To be a Christian is not to be naïve or simplistic, it’s actually to be deeply realistic about the state of human affairs.
The good news that Jesus announces is that another world is now breaking in, a world run on different rules, God’s rules, not those of fallen, sinful humanity. He is saying that for those with open hearts and minds God’s power and activity is at work in new ways. Jesus is the newly anointed king, he is one on whom God’s favour rests, the truly blessed one, and he has come to call people into his kingdom, into a different way of relating, a different way of living, a different way of being human. He is presenting us with a choice. Which kingdom we will belong to? Which kingdom will we be citizens of?
To enter this kingdom, which is now at hand, within reach, all around us, we need to repent. That word that Jesus starts his ministry with, metanoia, it literally means to change our minds, to turn around, to see our world differently. For us in late modernity, soaked in a godless secular materialism that is all about human power, control, and autonomy, this is an immense challenge. We are like the camel trying to go through the eye of the needle. Something deep has to shift. This transforming of our minds, our ability to see differently, is something we are going to be exploring in the following weeks. It is a transformation that requires us to give up the illusion of autonomy and control and separateness. It requires humility and honesty. It requires an opening of our heart and mind.
Jesus is announcing those who are truly blessed in God’s kingdom: they are the poor in spirit; they are those who weep and mourn; those without worldly power and status; those who long for justice and fairness; those who practice mercy, kindness, forgiveness; those who long for God, who long for that inner transformation that might bring about true purity of motive; those who are willing to stand in the middle in order to make peace; and finally those who are willing to suffer in this age for the coming reality of God’s kingdom. Those who live for the ultimate values of the kingdom rather than the short-term gain of wealth, fame, power and status.
It is a radical call; it inverts the values of this world. To be blessed is to enter and participate in this kingdom now and the call is for now not later. If we want to be truly blessed we should not delay.
The Greek word for blessed is makarios. Makar was associated with the immortal Gods. Kari means fate or death but with the negative prefix ma the word means being deathless, no longer subject to fate, or luck, or fortune in a worldly sense, a condition both inaccessible and longed for by mortals. It was because of their immortality that the gods, the Makarioi, were considered the blessed ones. (Reference: Jim Forest, The Ladder of the Beatitudes, Orbis Books 1999, p. 20).*
Jesus is announcing a new understanding of makarios, because he is announcing a new path, a new way into eternal life, into a state where we are no longer just subject to fate or fortune as the world understands it, because he is inviting us into a relationship with God that never ends. Jesus is inviting us into a sharing in the very life of God, the ultimate joy and bliss, without the fault lines of happenstance running through it. There is no higher gift than to belong in God’s Kingdom. There is no higher blessing than to participate in the communion of the Holy Trinity, in the love shared between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, even to the point of sharing in God’s immortality and being blessed with qualities that seem humanly impossible.
Ultimately the beatitudes are speaking to us of Christ himself because he is the one who is poor, who weeps, who embraces powerlessness before the violence of the Roman Empire, Christ hungers and thirsts, he is merciful, pure in heart, the true peacemaker, reconciler and ultimately suffers persecution for his message of another kingdom coming on earth.
The door to the Kingdom is Christ, to participate in the kingdom is to participate in Christ, to belong to Christ, to walk with Christ, to become a friend of Christ. To live in the Kingdom is to learn a whole new way of relating to one another, a way of true reciprocity and mutuality, where we can begin to put one another first because we belong in God, we are no longer fearful and fighting for all we can get for ourselves.
As we begin this new series exploring this teaching, this new way of seeing and relating in our world, I am going to invite those who wish to stand with me and pray the prayer printed on the sheet in your pew sheet entitled ‘The Nine Beats Meditation’. We do this as a sign that we want to participate more fully and deeply in the kingdom that Christ is inviting us into, this deeper transformation, this way of seeing and living that Christ wants to open to us, this door that Christ is inviting us to walk through. If you want to live this out more fully, in this place of Southfields, please stand and pray this prayer with me.
*Since I preached this sermon, Krista has checked on the etymology for the Greek word makarios, which I came across in Jim Forest’s book The Ladder of the Beatitudes (1999). Thanks to her research we have discovered that this is a clever, but unfortunately incorrect, medieval folk etymology. It seems that Forest must have encountered it in his own reading and mistakenly took it at face value – and I, in turn, accepted it on his authority. I found it plausible because there is, indeed, a negative particle μή (mé) in Greek that means ‘not’, so I didn’t question that it could combine with a noun meaning ‘death’ to make a word meaning ‘without death’, or ‘immortal’. It turns out, however, that μή (mé) is never used in Greek as a negative prefix; instead, Greek always uses the letter alpha (a) as a negative prefix (which gives us all our Greek-based English words like amoral, atheist, atypical, etc.)
Interestingly, this folk etymology has a long history in Christian literature and goes back to the 12th-century scholar Eustathius of Thessalonica. He first proposed it in his commentaries on the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. He understood from close study of these epics that the ancient Greeks regarded the gods as supremely happy because they were immortal, so he hypothesized that makarios might be a compound of μή (mé) and Kήρ (Kér), the singular form of Κῆρες (the Keres in Greek cosmology were a category of fate or death-dealing female spirits, rather like the Furies and Harpies). By this reasoning, Eustathius suggested that makarios literally means ‘not-death’. Today, however, most historical linguists think that makarios is built on a root makar of uncertain origin, possibly borrowed into ancient Greek from the language of an earlier population.
Apologies for a long explanation. I wanted to correct this technical error but also observe that Eustathius’s etymological invention was motivated by a real insight: the ancient Greeks did regard the gods as the Makarioi, the Blessed Ones, largely because they were understood to be immune to death.
