February 16, 2025
Bless. We use that word a lot, don’t we? “What a blessing!” we might shout when something goes right. “They’re blessed!” we might say when we want to emphasize what a charmed life someone leads. Or how about, “Have a blessed day!”—we hear that more and more often these days as a substitute for the more formulaic Have a nice day. When I was growing up, we were a Gesundheit family for some reason, so it wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was more common to say “(God) bless you!” when someone sneezed.
Or—and here’s one I talked about a couple of years ago, much to your confusion: “Bless your heart!” Now if a little child does something cute or creates a piece of art, an adult (usually a woman) might say “Bless your heart!”—and mean it in a positive sense. But in the south, the phrase “Bless your heart” does not generally have a positive connotation when spoken to an adult. It might be spoken to a person who has just made a fool of themselves. Or, if a person is irredeemably hateful and says something so far beneath contempt that there’s no appropriate response, a southerner (once again, usually a woman) might look at them and say, after the perfect pause, “Well bless your heart.” This is probably the biggest insult in the southern lexicon. When I mentioned this before, you seemed surprised that “Bless your heart” often had a negative meaning—which is fine; this is not the South and you can speak your own dialect.
The origin of the word bless is the archaic English, blessen, which comes from an Old English word that sounded like bledsen. If the first syllable of that word sounds like the past tense of bleed, then there’s a reason for that. It was a religious term based on the word for blood. Specifically, it meant “to make sacred with blood sacrifice.” It sounds like quite a change in meaning from our word blessing, but I think we can all see how we might have gotten from Point A to Point C here—especially since we use the word blessing so often in a religious sense.
Today, for example, we’re going to bless a thousand peace cranes to send to our sisters and brothers in Sweden. This means we’re sending them with our love and prayers, not just for them, but for an end to the type of violence that we also experienced. We might also refer to the benediction at the end of one of our worship services as a blessing. That’s when the pastor sends the congregation out into the world with a prayer that God will be present with them—often to strengthen or to guide them.
And we use this meaning of blessing in ways that might be slightly less religious, but are still quite serious. A young person might need their parent’s blessing to do something important: Go to college, get married, enter a certain career, move away from home, almost anything that might have an impact on the parent/child relationship. This is far removed from that old English word for bless, but it still makes sense: A young adult wants to set off on the right foot by having their parents’ best wishes and support for who they are or what they’re doing. If the people who are most important to you desire your happiness, then that’s a big deal.
And that’s why blessing is such a huge deal in the Bible. Usually, in the Bible, blessing comes from God—it’s God love, God’s support, God’s sending strength and courage and all things good upon those that God views with kindness. And if blessing is from God, then the granting of it or the withholding of it becomes a theological matter… and a pretty important one, at that.
I think it’s natural to think that God blesses those who are good, who are obedient and righteous. And if that’s the case, then it’s natural to look at the healthy, wealthy, and wise as being blessèd because of their goodness. And it can’t be denied that the Bible encourages this belief. You can find it in several places, but I think one of the main ones would be in the Book of Deuteronomy—especially chapter 28. There Moses speaks God’s blessings on the obedient, including lots of children, healthy crops, and an increase in livestock. On the other hand, the reverse is true if the people are not obedient. Rather than blessings, houses, fields, children, livestock, and crops will all be accursed.
I’m sure this way of thinking wasn’t new in Moses’ day, and it has pretty much continued throughout history. It was especially powerful among our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors. And I think it’s safe to say that most of us think this way ourselves.
There’s a song I’m thinking of—it’s from The Sound of Music—that is about goodness being rewarded with blessing. It’s sung by Maria and Captain von Trapp. Maria starts it out:
Perhaps I had a wicked childhood;
perhaps I had a miserable youth
But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past,
there must have been a moment of truth
For here you are, standing there, loving me,
whether or not you should
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good [©1965 Richard Rodgers]
Maria—a novice nun—cannot fit her good fortune into her theology of blessing, and so she’s searching for the righteousness in her past that resulted in her present happiness.
The Bible itself realizes the problem with this way of thinking. In Psalm 73, the writer says that God is truly good to the pure-hearted, but they talk about how jealous they are of those who are obviously evil, but appear to be blessed. The happiness of the wicked rich confuses people. “Did I keep my heart pure for nothing?” the psalm-writer asks.
But the dilemma was resolved not in actually solving the problem, but in the writer’s confession of the sin of jealousy. God will sort it all out in the end, but until then, being near God is blessing enough. And so the psalmist has made the Lord, not their wish-granter, but their shelter.
But if there are parts in the Bible that cause confusion as to who does and who doesn’t get blessed, Jesus is consistent and clear on the issue. God’s blessing isn’t really a reward for righteousness. And when disaster happens, it’s not a curse for evil deeds. Let’s look a little deeper into Luke’s gospel—in chapter 13. There, some people talk to Jesus about some people who’d been killed by King Herod. “Were they worse than other people?” they asked.
“No,” Jesus says, they weren’t. And before you ask: Those people who died when that tower fell? They weren’t any worse than anybody else, either. Everybody needs to come clean to God.”
He’s prepared us well for his theology of blessing, though. He’s even pronounced his own blessings—twice now: Once in the Sermon on the Mount, and then in this morning’s reading, which came from the Sermon on the Plain. He begins both of these sermons with a set of blessings—sayings that we call the Beatitudes. They’re quite similar—these blessings in Matthew and Luke—but there are some differences. And the first difference is in the first Beatitude. “Blessèd are you who are poor,” he says in Luke. Which is why we prefer the Beatitudes in Matthew, where he says, “Blessèd are the poor in spirit.” Though we may not particularly want to be poor in spirit, it’s at least preferable to abject poverty.
But Blessèd are you if you’re poor, says Jesus in the Sermon on the Plain, for God’s kingdom is yours. Blessèd are you if you have to go hungry, for you will be filled. Blessèd are you if you weep, for in the future you’ll be able to laugh again. And blessèd are you if you’re hated for your faith, because God will reward you in heaven.
We are disturbed by the Beatitudes—especially Luke’s version of them. Reading them is like playing opposites. Poverty is not blessèd. If we tell somebody that their life seems to be blessed, we never mean by that that they can’t make their mortgage payment or afford medical care. Going hungry is not blessèd. Not having enough food sounds more like a curse to me. Weeping is not blessèd; weeping is sad. And being hated for your faith isn’t blessèd; it’s torture. I want to be respected and in the majority; I want to be free.
But what if we take Jesus seriously. This means letting go of the idea that the good things and bad things that happen to us in life are not based on how good or bad we are, how righteous or evil. If this is the case, then the judgment we pass (probably without knowing what we’re doing) on the less fortunate is completely wrong. The poor and the persecuted are at least as worthy as the rich and famous. And yet we never think of them as blessèd. But Jesus did. And that’s the most important thing.
In one of our uses of blessing, we want the blessing of our loved ones. We long for their approval because we want to be part of their lives; we want them to be part of ours. To have our family members’ or friends’ blessing is to know that we will be present with and for each other, come what may.
And so when Jesus pronounces his blessing on the impoverished and the poor and the sad and the hated, he’s making sure they know that, no matter what others say or think, he’s with them. And this reminds me of that psalm I talked about earlier—Psalm 73. It’s well worth reading and meditating on. Because it asks the question, “Why do good things happen to bad people?” And it comes up with a very good answer to that question.
The answer is that there’s no solution. But there is an answer, and God is the answer. The person praying the prayer doesn’t need to seek happiness in riches and the high esteem of their neighbors. All they need is God’s presence in their lives. “But as for me,” the psalm writer prays, “how good it is to be near God.”
So pronouncing blessing upon the least among us isn’t saying that suffering is good. It’s saying that God is with those who suffer. And when we give our blessing to them, we’re keeping the connection between us and them as well. So, instead of resenting the fact that Jesus blessed the poor and the hungry, the sad and the excluded, let’s add our own blessing to those who need it most. We now know that God is with them.
Because we, too, have blessings to share. And there is no better place to put them than on the heads of those first blessed by the One who made them sacred by his blood.
—©2025 Sam Greening
