When I was a student studying feminist theology, as one strand of liberation theology, my professor used to challenge us to read against the grain of the text so as to find a different perspective. This was quite difficult until you got the hang of it.

When I read the reading from Matthew set for today, I was reminded of her challenge, and what came to mind was an early scene from the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian. In that scene, Brian, and the group of characters who are key to the movie, were at the back of a crowd listening to Jesus speak those familiar words we have just heard and now call the ‘Beatitudes’. The couplet that stands out is when Jesus says, “Blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called children of God”.

The group with Brian can’t hear very well and ask “What did he say?” and one of the women relays it to the group saying “He said ‘blessed be the cheesemakers. In’t that nice, they have a hell of a time.”

And there it was… a movement against the grain. A shift from the focus on Jesus, to the struggling cheese makers!

A reminder to read from the underside as it were.

A reminder to ask, “why would that need to be said?”

In this instance, it is a reminder that when there is a need to make peace there are victims of violence - people living in fear, and it is these fear-filled people that Jesus is honouring.

For us it is a reminder not only to listen to the words, but to ask ourselves who it is that the words are directing our attention to. In this story Jesus is directing attention away from himself toward those who suffer at the hands of religion or the political system.

The time in which Matthew was writing (70s CE) was not a time of peace and harmony. It was a time shaped by economic inequality, political violence and deep religious anxiety. The community was living under Roman occupation and struggling to understand their identity and Judaism was reorganizing itself. It was not a time of confidence and clarity, but one of loss and destruction and fear about the future.

Matthew is speaking to an audience of mainly Jewish-Christians, and some Gentiles grappling with the identity of Jesus, so he locates Jesus up a mountain, in a reassuring echo of Moses, for this mainly Jewish audience. From here Jesus speaks to a crowd of people who do not feel on top of the world: people who are poor, vulnerable, grieving, unsure where they belong. He says to them “blessed are you.” Or “you are to be honoured.”

It’s good for us to hear this again at the beginning of another year when our world and it’s people, are living with trauma through human mismanagement, greed and fear.

We are not being offered a ‘self-improvement’ plan in the verses of the Beatitudes, or a set of rules to live within so we can do better this year than last. Nor is it a checklist to measure our achievement by even if we sometimes use these beatitudes that way, patting ourselves on the back as it were for being on the ‘right side’, on the ‘best’ side. To do this we often align ourselves with Jesus and those who consider themselves to be ‘working on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden’. But those are not the people who, in this instance, in his time, Matthew is affirming.

In the situation Matthew is recounting, Jesus is naming where God is already at work.

“Blessed are the poor I spirit” Not those work on their behalf or who hold spiritual certainty, rather those who don’t have all the answers and are grappling to understand.

“Blessed are those who mourn” Not the grief counsellors and not because grief is good, but because grief means you have loved deeply, care enormously.

You get the idea ….

“Blessed are the meek” Not the passive or the powerless but those who refuse to dominate through the use of raw power.

“Blessed are you when people revile and persecute you” not because this is a good way to live but blessed because God is among you. God is present: that indomitable energy that urges us toward life and often to speak and act contrary to current norms, and stereotypes is at work here.  It is these people who are honoured, who are blessed.

In 2026, this is a reorientation of the values that we are bombarded with. It is a reminder that the logic of empire, the logic of consumer capitalism and territory acquisition, is not the logic of God’s reign. It is not the logic that shapes the vision of the kin-dom that we proclaim.

The Beatitudes remind us to resist the idea that faith is about being certain or being rewarded with ‘success’ for being sympathetic to the plight of those who society has disadvantaged.

It requires us to resist the idea that the measure of blessing in our greedy world comes with the idea of ‘success’ seen in piled high treasure,

It calls us to resist the seductive idea that declares God is on the side of the victors, the strong and the wealthy.

The Beatitudes remind us to reverse all that and to honour those who have loved and lost, those who work without equitable recompense, those who offer kindness and generosity where there is disrespect, violence and greed. They remind us to honour those who seek mercy rather than punishment, and to honour those who make peace rather than fight to win arguments.

Jesus, speaking from his ‘mountain’, reminds us that it is among these people, these people on the underside of history, that God is already at work. His words urge the people of those turbulent times to hold on, not to lose hope, to look for the lifegiving energy of God among themselves.

Reading against the grain of the text reminds us that to be blessed is to defy the logic of success and achievement in our world; it is to be honoured for continuing struggling hopefully for peace, for just engagement in social structures, and for kindness and generosity to become core characteristics of our relationship with each other.

If we play for a moment with the Micah story: if we locate the court God convenes to our own time in history, and if imagine we were put on trial and asked by God what God had done to us to provoke us to turn our backs on the covenant, that is to turn our backs on those who are our neighbours and all who share this world with us, including the earth herself, and to favour instead personal aggrandisement, accumulation of wealth, stripping of the earth’s capacity to heal herself,  how would we answer? How would we defend ourselves?

What could we say in our own defense when what is required is so simple

“…do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.”

We know religious excess and triumphal religiosity without justice won’t make things right.

We know more of the same is not the solution.

But rather

Fair treatment of the vulnerable

Loyalty, mercy and faithful relationship building and

Living responsibly and attentively to the earth and all its creatures

Is what is required.

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