FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, YEAR A

February 1, 2026

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Matthew 5:1-12

 

In my childhood in the late 1960s, the comic strip Peanuts popularized the slogan, “Happiness is.” Happiness is a warm blanket. Happiness is a fresh pile of autumn leaves. Happiness is a home run. 

 

The “Happiness is” craze spread to advertisements, T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers. The point was that you could fill in the blank in an almost infinite variety of ways. Happiness is a new car. Happiness is a perfect golf game. Happiness is a vacation in the Bahamas. And so forth.

 

Throughout history, observers of the human condition have remarked on our natural desire to be happy. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

 

All this begs the question of where authentic and lasting happiness is to be found. The Peanuts philosophy implied that we’re free to define our own individual subjective meanings of happiness. But the Church’s traditional understanding is that the true sources of human happiness are objective and given—more to be discovered or revealed than invented or constructed. 

 

And the classical Christian definition of happiness is nowhere summed up more succinctly than in the collection of sayings from Saint Matthew’s Gospel, that we’ve just heard in today’s Gospel, known as the Beatitudes. The word beatitude means blessing or happiness. An equally accurate, although not quite as elegant, translation of the word “Blessed” in today’s Gospel would be “happy”—as in “Happy are the poor in spirit … Happy are those who mourn … Happy are the meek,” and so forth. The Beatitudes give our Lord’s answer to the question of where true and lasting happiness is to be found.

 

Throughout the centuries, the Church has used easily memorized lists that summarize its teaching on the Christian life. The Ten Commandments give a basic set of dos and don’ts. The Seven Deadly Sins presents a list of destructive patterns of behavior that separate us from God and from one another. The Seven Gifts of the Spirit (Isaiah 11:2-3) and the Nine Fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) describe God’s workings in the human soul. But the Church has always given the Beatitudes pride of place as the clearest possible statement of our life’s goal in the blessedness and happiness of God’s Kingdom.

The Gospel readings for today and for next Sunday are taken from the Sermon on the Mount. “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.”  Here, Matthew is portraying Jesus as a new Moses. Just as Moses led the children of Israel through the Red Sea into the wilderness, and then ascended Mount Sinai to deliver God’s Law to the people, so Jesus, having been baptized in the River Jordan (his own Red Sea), and having fasted forty days in the wilderness, now goes up another mountain to deliver his instruction, his teaching, his law.

 

A key point is that the people to whom Jesus is speaking are the very ones whom he’s describing in the beatitudes. His listeners are blessed because they’ve become—or are becoming, or will become—poor in spirit, meek, merciful, and so forth. The ninth beatitude makes this point clear when the Lord shifts from the third person to the second, declaring, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” Blessed are you.

 

So, Jesus begins his most famous sermon by pronouncing a series of blessings upon his disciples. Each blessing has two parts: a present condition, and a future reward: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. In each case, the present condition describes a quality of those who follow Christ, and the future reward describes some aspect of the happiness that awaits us in God’s Kingdom.

 

The people whom our Lord pronounces blessed are the very opposite of those whom the world counts as blessed. We tend not to think of the poor in spirit or those who mourn as being particularly happy. The world’s wisdom is that nice guys finish last. But our Lord subverts this world’s values. The time is coming when present-day fortunes shall be reversed. The meek shall inherit the earth. The kingdom of heaven belongs to those suffering persecution and exile on this earth—and no humanly constructed walls or deportation orders will keep them out!

 

We don’t have time to look at each beatitude in detail. Entire books have been written on the Beatitudes; each one of them could easily be the subject of an entire sermon.

 

The key point, not to be overlooked, is that Jesus himself is the perfect fulfillment of everything he says here. He perfectly exemplifies what it is to be poor in spirit, to mourn, to be meek, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to make peace, and to be persecuted, reviled, and spoken against for righteousness’ sake. First and foremost, then, the Beatitudes are a portrait of Christ.

 

Secondarily and derivatively, they’re a portrait of those who follow Christ. Only in Christ, only by becoming Christlike, can we make the Beatitudes our own and enter into their happiness. 

 

Some commentators point out that the wording is not, “If you want the kingdom of heaven, then be poor in spirit; if you want to be comforted, then mourn.” It doesn’t quite work that way. The point is that the more we follow Christ, the more he'll make us like him, gradually giving us these characteristics, so that we become heirs of the accompanying promises. They’re not so much a how-to manual as a promise of the divine reward held in store for those whom the world counts least blessed in this life.

 

What we can’t achieve on our own, our Lord can and will achieve in us. In our baptism, we’ve been made members of his Body, the Church, and every week we receive his very life in the blessed Sacrament of his Body and Blood. 

 

Provided that we persevere in making use of the means of grace that Our Lord has appointed for us in his Church, then we can rely on him to make us into the very people that he describes in the beatitudes: a people on the way to true and lasting happiness, heirs of a reward great in heaven.