Sunday, February 1, 2026: "Beatitudes: Gentle and Righteous"
The First United Presbyterian Church
“Beatitudes: Gentle and Righteous”
Rev. Amy Morgan
February 1, 2026
Matthew 5:5-6
Jesus taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
Order matters. As Presbyterians, of course, we delight in doing things “decently and in order,” but Biblical scholars also relish the opportunity to dissect a passage of scripture, revealing its structural framework. Oftentimes, what they find is that the Biblical writer was very intentional about the orderly placement of each phrase and the use of a particular word.
But New Testament scholar David Wenham admits that some might view Matthew’s rendering of Jesus’s Beatitudes as “a bit of a mess, a jumbled-up collection of blessed thoughts.” He notes, “there is repetition with two of them having the identical promise ‘for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ – did the author run out of promises?” Some of the promises are in the present tense, and others future. There is duplication and swapping between third and second person. Compared with Luke’s neat and tidy 4 blessings and 4 woes, Matthew’s 9 Beatitudes feel rambling and disorganized.
Wenham thinks that they’re just misunderstood. He notes that if the ninth Beatitude, which we’ll get to in a few weeks, is understood as a transitional piece, the first eight blessings have remarkable coherence, structure, and balance. The first four Beatitudes are made up of 36 words in Greek, and the second four are also 36 words. They begin and end with promises of the kingdom of heaven. The first four address the longing, waiting, “not yet” circumstances of the reign of God, and the second four describe people living into the righteousness of that reign.
Beatitudes are not original to Jesus; he wasn’t the first person to come up with these kinds of sayings. In the ancient Near East, beatitudes expressed attitudes, circumstances, or ways of living that would help people attain a better life. They could be civil or religious in nature and promised good fortune, personal fulfillment, and societal harmony.
We find beatitudes scattered throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, especially in the Psalms, which begin with, in Psalm 1, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked.” The Hebrew beatitudes typically either pronounce blessing on those God has graced in some way, as in Psalm 33, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,” or who have demonstrated faithful living, as in the example of Psalm 1.
But Jesus’s beatitudes are different in that he does not pronounce blessedness on those who have clearly been the recipients of God’s favor, nor does he set requirements for entry into the kingdom of God. Instead, as Wenham writes, Jesus “affirm[s] his disciples in their spiritual and psychological state of being and acting by assuring them that they are divinely privileged in their active participation in God’s Reign.”
Matthew’s Beatitudes are a very carefully constructed, counter-cultural, spiritually provocative prologue to the rest of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which expands upon that active participation in God’s reign.
It’s important for us to notice this intentional structure in Matthew’s Beatitudes, because order is especially meaningful when we consider this second pair of the first set of four. Last week, we explored the first two blessings, on those who are poor in spirit and those who mourn. These paired blessings promise that those who are in close proximity to the world’s pain have an ownership stake in God’s reign and will know the comfort of that community. Today, we hear that those who are gentle will inherit the physical, tangible earth, and that those who are starving and parched by the lack of right living and right relationship will be satisfied.
The word translated as “gentle,” or sometimes, “meek” or “humble,” indicates a person who is not weak or vulnerable per se but chooses to not assert themselves or retaliate against attack. Thomas Merton understands this term in the context of Christian non-violence and asserts that “this does not mean ‘blessed are they who are endowed with a tranquil natural temperament, who are not easily moved to anger, who are always quiet and obedient, who do not naturally resist!’ Still less does it mean ‘blessed are they who passively submit without protest to unjust oppression.’” Instead, it implies, according to Merton, “a particular understanding of the power of human poverty and powerlessness when they are united with the invisible strength of Christ.”
The gentle or meek exhibit a humility that acknowledges God’s power, strength, and righteousness. This word, praeis in Greek, is only found 4 times in the New Testament, and 3 of those occurrences are in Matthew. None of the other gospel writers use this term. The other two times it’s found in Matthew’s gospel, it is describing Jesus. This is not a passive state of being or person with low self-confidence. It is someone who recognizes that in God’s realm, “non-violence has great power, provided that it really witnesses to truth and not just to self-righteousness.”
And that’s why this blessing is placed before the blessing on those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Righteousness, dikaiosuné in Greek, is a judicial term having to do with a just and equitable ruling. Biblically, it generally refers to something God judges to be right and good. So those who are hungering and thirsting for this righteousness can only do so from a position of self-restraint, of humility before God’s righteousness. Otherwise, it quickly becomes self-righteous condemnation. And that craving, it would seem, can never be satisfied in humans. This is because, as Mother Theresa said, “God cannot fill what is full. [God] can fill only emptiness – deep poverty – and your “yes” [to Jesus] is the beginning of being or becoming empty.”
We must be emptied of all ego, self-justification, and conceit before we can experience a true longing for righteousness. A hunger and thirst for righteousness cannot be satisfied through vindication, retribution, or humiliation. Righteousness does not mean everyone does what we think is right. In fact, a true desire for righteousness invites God or others to correct and re-direct us, to show us our own faults and flaws and mis-guided assumptions. It is grounded in genuine humility – in gentleness and meekness, self-restraint and self-examination.
In Thomas Merton’s essay on the Beatitudes and Christian non-violence, he declares that “our authentic interest in the common good above all will help us to be humble, and to distrust our own hidden drive to self-assertion. A test of our sincerity in the practice of nonviolence is this: are we willing to learn something from the adversary? If a new truth is made known to us by him or through him, will we admit it? Are we willing to admit that he is not totally inhumane, wrong, unreasonable, cruel?... It is the refusal of alternatives – a compulsive state of mind which one might call the “ultimatum complex” – which makes wars in order to force the unconditional acceptance of one oversimplified interpretation of reality. The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.”
Most of us in America today will not admit that someone else might be right and we might have it wrong. We have a rigidity of thought that conditions us to label one another irrational, brutal, moronic, and outright evil. We are totally unwilling to learn anything from anyone who disagrees with our definition of what is right and good. And, as Merton wrote, “if we are obviously unwilling to accept any truth that we have not first discovered and declared ourselves, we show by that very fact that we are interested not in the truth so much as in ‘being right.’ Since the adversary is presumably interested in being right also, and in proving himself right by what he considers the superior argument of force, we end up where we started.”
We confuse righteousness with “being right,” and they are not the same thing. Righteousness, in the context of Jesus’s beatitudes at least, relies on God’s inscrutable judgement, which we can do our level best to sort out and apply to any given situation or circumstance but which will, ultimately, be wrapped up in the mystery of the divine. Anyone who claims to know in full the righteous will of God in all times and places is selling something. So hungering and thirsting for righteousness is to starve for something we can’t cook up for ourselves. It is only God who can satisfy that craving, and Jesus promises that those with a true need for this righteousness will get to gorge themselves on the feast of righteousness God provides.
So when we come to the table of our Lord Jesus Christ this morning, may we be reminded that order matters. It doesn’t particularly matter who gets to the table first or even if you eat the bread and then drink the cup, or do it the other way around.
But we do have to start with that gentleness, meekness, self-restraint that allows this feast to be a joyful mystery, that acknowledges that everyone has a seat at this table, that realizes none of us has it all figured out. And then, only then, can our hunger and thirst be satisfied. Only then can we taste and see that the Lord is good and that only God knows what is truly right. Only then can we be nourished with righteousness, empowered to see our own misjudgments, and equipped to participate in the reign of God’s righteousness on earth.
To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.
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