Think about the last office party you went to. Somebody got promoted, or somebody retired after thirty years, and there was a sheet cake with their name on it in blue icing. People stood around with paper plates and said congratulations. We all know who gets the party: the person who closed the big deal, the kid who signed with a college team, the couple who just bought the house. We congratulate people when something good has visibly happened to them.
November 1 fell on a Sunday this year, which means the feast of All Saints took the place of the regular readings in many churches. The Western church has kept All Saints Day on that date for more than a thousand years, and it comes with its own readings: Revelation 7:9-17, Psalm 34:1-10, 22, 1 John 3:1-3 and Matthew 5:1-12. The Gospel is the Beatitudes, the short sayings that open the Sermon on the Mount, each beginning "Blessed are." Read them as a list of congratulations, which is very close to what they are, and Jesus is throwing the party for all the wrong people.
The Beatitudes in Matthew 5
"When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him." Notice that he sits down. In that world a teacher sat to teach. This is the posture of someone about to say something he means you to remember.
And then the list. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." It keeps going: those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. Nine times in twelve verses the same word starts the line. The name "Beatitudes" comes from the Latin for that word, beati.
Word Study — Makarios
The Greek is makarios (mah-KAH-ree-oss). Most English Bibles say "blessed," which isn't wrong, but it has become a churchy word, the kind we paint on a decorative sign in the kitchen. In Jesus's day makarios was an everyday word for someone fortunate, someone things had gone well for. Go back far enough and the Greek poets call the gods makares, the blessed ones, because the gods lived beyond the reach of trouble, and the legendary Isles of the Blessed, where heroes went after death, carry the same word. Said to a person, it was close to "congratulations." How fortunate you are. Good for you.
Congratulations to the poor in spirit
Now listen to the list again with that word in it. Congratulations to the poor in spirit. Congratulations to the ones who mourn. Congratulations to the meek, the ones who get stepped over. Congratulations to the people hungry for a justice they haven't seen yet. Congratulations to the ones mocked for doing the right thing.
You see the problem. Nobody throws those people a party. Nobody orders a cake for the woman whose husband died in March, or for the man who keeps making peace in a family that keeps blowing up. In most rooms they're the people we feel a little sorry for.
Jesus congratulates them anyway, and every line comes with a reason attached. Theirs is the kingdom. They will be comforted. They will inherit the earth. They will be filled. He's congratulating them on something that hasn't arrived yet, the way you'd congratulate someone the day the offer letter comes, before the first paycheck. The good news is already true of them. It just isn't visible.
There's a Hebrew word underneath this one. When the ancient Greek translators of the Old Testament came to ashrei (ahsh-RAY), "happy," the word that opens Psalm 1, they used makarios. So the Beatitudes sound like the Psalms. This week's psalm has it too: "O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him." And a few verses earlier: "This poor soul cried, and was heard by the Lord, and was saved from every trouble." Taken together, the psalm and the Beatitudes say the same thing. The person God calls fortunate is often the one who needed rescuing.
All Saints and the great multitude in Revelation 7
So what does this have to do with saints? Earlier in Revelation 7, John hears a number: one hundred forty-four thousand sealed, twelve thousand from each tribe of Israel. It's precise and countable. Then verse 9: "After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands." John hears a count, and then he turns and sees a crowd too big to count.
An elder asks him who these people are, and John, very honestly, says, "Sir, you are the one that knows." The elder answers: "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal."
That's the crowd All Saints Day celebrates. When we hear "saints," a lot of us picture the famous ones, the names on churches and statues. They're in the crowd, but they're a small fraction of it. The rest is a multitude no one could count, most of them people no one alive remembers. They came out of hard things. They're the poor in spirit and the mourners and the meek of the Beatitudes, and in Revelation they finally get the party.
First John adds the last piece. "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are." Go back to Matthew 5: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." It's the same phrase. And John is honest about the rest: "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed." That's the Beatitudes in one sentence. The congratulations are real today. The proof comes later.
Who are we congratulating?
We're good at congratulating visible success, and there's nothing wrong with that. The promotion is worth a cake. The retirement after thirty years deserves a speech. But the Beatitudes hand us a second list, and it's worth asking whether we ever celebrate anyone on it.
Who in your life is poor in spirit, someone who knows they can't hold it together alone and has stopped pretending? Who is mourning right now, a year or two out, after everyone else has stopped asking how they're doing? Where is the peacemaker, the one in your family or your office who absorbs the conflict so it doesn't spread, or the person who stays merciful when it costs them? Those people almost never get the sheet cake. By Jesus's count, they're the fortunate ones.
All Saints asks one more thing, and it's quieter. The great multitude isn't an abstraction. It includes people you knew: a grandmother who prayed for you when you didn't know it, a teacher, a neighbor who was merciful in ways nobody saw. They're in the crowd no one could count, and they're in it because of exactly the things the Beatitudes congratulate.
So try two things this week. Congratulate one person for something on Jesus's list instead of ours. Tell the peacemaker in your family that you noticed what they do. Send a few lines to someone who is still grieving. Thank the coworker who was merciful to someone who didn't deserve it. And sometime this week, say out loud the names of a few people you've known who are part of that great multitude now, and thank God for them.
The full episode of Monday to Sunday is above.