All Saints Day

Jesus speaks the blessing in the present tense

Commentary on Matthew 5:1-12

O. Wesley Allen, Jr.

Early in its history, the church began setting aside individual days to honor individual saints and martyrs. In the fourth century, different regions of the church also began commemorating all the saints and martyrs on a single occasion.¹ In 735, Pope Gregory III set November 1 as the date for this festival in the diocese of Rome, and a century later, Gregory IV extended the celebration to the whole Western church. Similarly, various regions of the church observed different prayer days for their own deceased members until, in the 10th century, monasteries began offering special prayers and psalms for all the dead on November 2, which came to be known as All Souls Day.

During the Reformation, Protestants rejected the veneration of and prayers to saints, redefining “saints,” for the most part, as all believers made holy in Christ (based on Paul’s address of hagioi in his letters). Thus, most Protestant denominations have since combined the two observances into All Saints Day on November 1, when congregations remember and celebrate their dead—especially those who died in the previous year.

The beatitudes have been associated with All Saints Day since the medieval period because interpreters saw them as naming both the virtues and the rewards of the holy. The blessings open Matthew’s ethical discourse, the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5–7). The ethic Matthew portrays Jesus presenting in the discourse is practical, idealistic, and eschatological all at the same time.

Following the narrative introduction to the discourse in verses 1–2, the beatitudes (verses 3–12) serve as Jesus’s opening address to the audience. But these are no throwaway lines. They are filled with rich, evocative ambiguity and draw on the language of First Testament texts such as Isaiah 61:1–11 and Psalms 37:11; 24:3–4; and 107:9. They share paraenetic language like that in 1 Peter 1:8, 22; 2:10; 3:4, 11, 14; 4:13, 14. Perhaps most importantly, however, the blessings are thoroughly apocalyptic in ways that sound foreign to our contemporary ears.

Indeed, so strange are they that we tend to domesticate them by treating them as imperatives for how to live a blessed, spiritual, even “saintly” life. Note, however, that with the exception of the final verse calling the hearers to rejoice, none of the verbs in the Beatitudes are imperatives. They are not “if… then…” statements (such as “If they become poor in spirit, then theirs is the reign of heaven”). They are all declarative statements.

As the climax of the section in verses 10–11 shows, Matthew writes to an audience oppressed and persecuted for its faith, and the indicative mood serves a prophetic, pastoral function with an eschatological slant. This certainly fits the traditional theme of honoring martyrs for the faith on All Saints Day (as does the blessing on those who mourn in verse 4).

One might be tempted to preach an eight-point sermon, giving time to each of the beatitudes, but of course this is impossible. Two other homiletical strategies are perhaps more useful. First, one can offer an overview of the beatitudes and then zoom in on one of them. Given the liturgical context of All Saints’ Day, the most obvious focus would be verse 4 or verses 10–12. But given particular congregational contexts and the individuals being honored, one of the other beatitudes may be more important.

Second, one can focus on the paradoxical, eschatological nature of the blessings overall. This approach will also serve well to set up the gospel lections from Matthew’s eschatological discourse appointed for the final three weeks of the liturgical year.

Different pastors, different congregations, and different individuals within those congregations will have varying understandings of the eschatological outlook Matthew offers. It is probably safe to say that people are generally confused about what the reign of heaven means, often collapsing it into the way they understand eternal life “in heaven.” Matthew, however, juxtaposes the advent of the reign of heaven brought about by the Christ event with the reign of Caesar. In this sense, the beatitudes put flesh on the prayer later in the Sermon on the Mount that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. These blessings offer a view of God’s desire for the well-being of all, especially those who suffer, in the here and now.

But Matthew’s community knew what we know. While we have already experienced God’s salvific and providential care in so many ways, God’s will is not yet fully manifested throughout creation. We see this already/not yet character of Matthew’s apocalyptic worldview especially in the two sides of each beatitude. Jesus speaks the blessing in the present tense: “Blessed are _________…” Yet the rationale for why Jesus’s addressees are presently blessed appears in the future tense: “…for they will _________.”

Matthew heightens the paradox of this already/not yet eschatological state of Christian existence by presenting Jesus as using the present tense in the rationale for two of the beatitudes, when the promise is that “theirs is the reign of heaven” in verses 3 and 10. The two instances serve as an inclusio around the future-tense blessings. Theirs is (already) the reign of God, and they will (yet) be comforted, inherit the earth, be filled, receive mercy, see God, and be called children of God.

Preaching this second approach on All Saints Day invites sermonic imagery portraying those who have died in Christ (both historically and in the past year) as having experienced—and those of us alive now as still experiencing—the Christian life as a blessing amid the ongoing difficult and troubling realities of human existence.