This new year so far as brought us cold and snowy winter storms, and distressing news of violent abuses of power. It seems fitting that the practice in Epiphany often includes the opportunity to hear and to receive Jesus’ Beatitudes.

Jesus’ Beatitudes have attitude.They are acts of defiance. We can receive the warmth of these blessings, we can also feel their heat. (Matthew 5:1-11 ; Luke 6:20-26)

These blessings are not merely naïve hopes or nice sentiments. They are acts of defiance against the values and sensibilities that so often dominate societies and religions.

These blessing have the power to turn lives around and free us from our enthrallment to the false powers of sin and to reorient ourselves according to the truth of God’s Love. These blessing have the power to transform hearts that have been hardened and embittered and to open us to receiving and sharing mercy of God’s Love.

Jesus’ blessings reveal a different order of value from the values our social world so often extolls.

Jesus’ blessings undermine the values that so often dominate societies and religions. Jesus’ blessings undermine the world-views that see blessings in those who succeed, those who win and keep on winning, those who have might and power and status and wealth, those who raise their will to the level of law, who assert their will-to-power with impunity.

Jesus does not bless the wealthy in their wealth; he does not bless the powerful in their power, he does not bless the dominant in their domination, he does not bless the proud in their pride, he does not bless those who enjoy safety, those who enjoy esteem. Jesus does not bless those happily unconcerned with the suffering of others. In fact, in the version of Jesus’ Beatitudes in Gospel of Luke, Jesus curses those who count themselves blessed for these reasons (Luke 6:20-26).

Rather, Jesus’ blessing rests on our willingness to weep for the suffering in this world; Jesus’ blessing rests on our willingness to be humble and pure of heart, to show mercy rather than punitive judgment, to be willing to labor long and hard and often seemingly fruitlessly for peace – peace in all our relations, with our family, with our friends, with the stranger, with the enemy. Jesus’ blessing rests on those who, in the words of Dr. King, are “creatively maladjusted” to the inhumanity and injustice of one’s wider society, those who desire justice and righteousness and right relations so deeply it is like a hunger and a thirst. Jesus’ blessing rests on those who are persecuted and rendered powerless for pursuing the good Way of Jesus’ Way. Jesus’ blessing rests on those whose humble prayers before God allows their hearts to be cleansed of cynicism and deceit.

Jesus blesses these ways of being and recognizes them as being the ways to nothing less than the kingdom of heaven, nothing less than a full inheritance of the world, nothing less than the ways to see God and to be transformed by God into who God has created us to be, Children of God.

Jesus’ blessings show a God’s eye view of ourselves and that world, which shows how human pride is ultimately pathetic, how the monuments we make to ourselves are just built on sand. We can let this humble us. We can let this encourage us.

Jesus’ blessings express to us that there is a better way, a truer way, a way that is indeed rooted in the everlasting. We are blessed when we allow ourselves to be humbled by this and pressed into its service; we are blessed when we feel the hunger for this; we are blessed when we grieve our world’s distance from this, when we grieve for the suffering under abuses of power, the violation of people’s rights for dignity and safety and due process ; we are blessed when we let this this hunger to lead us to pure-hearted pursuit of God and God’s good way of peace; we are blessed when let this hunger lead us to love mercy, to act justly, and to walk humbly with our God.

Jesus’ blessings are as important now as they always have been.

Many in our society and even in our Christian religion propagate the belief that “might makes right.” There’s talk of the so-called “iron law of history,” that if you’re strong enough to take what you want from others, that’s all the justification you need to go ahead and do it. There is no higher law to check the will-to-power of those who wield power; impunity is justified.

This is profoundly un-Christian. It is also profoundly deluded.

Even evolutionary biologists have long corrected the willful misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution as somehow justifying our most violent, aggressive, and selfish tendencies. Our survival as a society, and as a species, requires us to cooperate, to build trust and forge alliances, to engage in mutual aid, to care for our wider ecological home, as well as to be able to defend ourselves and to get what we and our communities need for food and shelter and safety, for belonging and meaning and purpose. Our capacity for empathy is not an aberration, but a sign of God’s pull on us to evolve.

History is littered with the ashes of empires that refused this and were destroyed by their own brutality and greed and short-sightedness.

The Way of Jesus contains wisdom for survival. It is not at all naïve. It is about the most important kind of survival – soul survival, above all else, survival of the heart, survival of our true selves and our true community in the Spirit. It is about finding life and vitality in difficult times through one’s relationship with God, through our integrity to the good Way the Jesus teaches, through communities centered on mercy and faith and humility.

If you are grieving the violence of abuses of power in our time, if you are hungering and thirsting for a better way than the merciless way on display, may Jesus’ blessings hold you and strengthen you and encourage you.

This good Way is the way to life and to life eternal.

So, let us seek it and pursue it, this good Way of Jesus, in defiance if necessary, knowing that through we are be blessed.

For this I give thanks to God.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, January 25, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.