Matthew 5:9 — Sermon Prep & Expository Preaching Guide

Makarioi hoi eirēnopoioi — "Blessed are the peacemakers"

The word makarioi (blessed) is a nominative plural adjective functioning as a declaration, not a command. This grammatical distinction is theologically decisive. Jesus is not issuing an imperative — "Go and be peacemakers so that you might become blessed." He is making a pronouncement about a present reality: those who bear this character already stand in the condition of blessedness that belongs to the kingdom of heaven. The Beatitudes, in this reading, are less a moral program than a portrait — a description of what the life of grace looks like from the inside.

The Greek word makarios originally described the serene happiness of the gods, or the tranquility of the dead beyond mortal care. But the Septuagint appropriated the term to translate the Hebrew ashrei (אַשְׁרֵי), a congratulatory exclamation used throughout the Psalms and Wisdom literature to describe the person who walks in covenant faithfulness with God. By the first century, makarios had been thoroughly colored by this usage. When Jesus says makarioi, his hearers would have heard an echo of the Psalter, a declaration that these people are the ones whom God approves and upholds.

Eirēnopoioi — The Active Makers of Peace

The central term of this beatitude is eirēnopoios (εἰρηνοποιός), a compound of eirēnē (peace) and poieo (to make or do). It is a hapax legomenon — appearing nowhere else in the entire New Testament. The word's rarity signals its intentionality. Matthew is not reaching for a common religious term; he is capturing something precise. The word does not describe someone who loves peace in a passive, conflict-averse sense, nor someone who simply maintains the status quo. It describes an agent — one who actively creates, constructs, and brings about peace where it did not previously exist.

The only secular Greek parallel of note appears in Plutarch's Life of Lysander, where the term describes someone who successfully negotiated an end to war. In both the secular and scriptural uses, the eirēnopoios is a figure of agency and initiative, not of mere temperament.

The Reformed exegetical tradition has been especially attentive to the logical structure of the Beatitudes as a whole. The peacemaker does not produce peace through sheer force of character or human goodwill. Rather, peacemaking flows from the prior work of God: "God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation" (2 Corinthians 5:19). Peacemaking, in this reading, is participatory — the believer enters into and extends the reconciling work that God himself has already accomplished in Christ. This is why the Reformed tradition insists that the Beatitudes are not entrance requirements but descriptions of the fruit of grace.

"They Will Be Called Children of God"

The passive voice of the promise — "they will be called" — is almost certainly a divine passive, a grammatical convention in Jewish Greek for avoiding the direct use of God's name. The statement means: God himself will call them his children, will own them as his own. This is not merely an honorific title but an ontological claim. To be called a child of God is to be recognized as bearing the family character. The peacemakers are those in whom the likeness of the reconciling Father is visibly displayed.

The future tense carries both a present and an eschatological dimension. There is a sense in which this recognition begins now — in the community of faith, in the lives of those around them, in the witness of the church. But the full weight of the promise is eschatological: at the final judgment, when all things are revealed, God will acknowledge these as his own. The homiletical implication is significant: the work of peacemaking often goes unrecognized, even misunderstood, in the present age. The blessing is not the world's applause but the Father's declaration.

Pre-Nicene Interpreters

Tertullian (c. 200 CE) brought Matthew 5:9 to bear on the problem of division within the church. Writing in a context of mounting internal conflict, he argued that the church's credibility as a witness to the world depends first on the quality of peace within its own community. The apostle Paul, in Tertullian's reading, modeled this peacemaking when he worked to heal the factions at Corinth. Internal reconciliation, for Tertullian, is not a preliminary nicety but a precondition of external mission.

Origen of Alexandria (c. 230 CE) developed a distinctively inward reading of the beatitude. True peacemaking, he argued, begins in the soul of the peacemaker: only the person who has achieved some integration of reason and passion, spirit and flesh, is genuinely able to reconcile others. Origen consistently presented Christ as the archetype of the peacemaker, and the disciples as channels through whom that peace flows outward into fractured human relationships.

The Nicene and Post-Nicene Tradition

John Chrysostom, in his fifteenth homily on Matthew, widened the circle considerably. The peacemaker is not merely one who manages personal conflicts, but one who actively intervenes in the quarrels of others — bringing together those who have no existing claim on each other. Chrysostom read Matthew 5:8 and 5:9 as a deliberate sequence: purity of heart leads naturally to the work of peacemaking, as those who see God clearly become instruments of his reconciling purpose.

Augustine of Hippo connected the peacemakers' promised inheritance to the eschatological horizon of Psalm 37:37: "There is a future for the person of peace." For Augustine, the reward of peacemaking is not to be sought in present outcomes — conflicts resolved, relationships mended, communities healed — but in the life that endures beyond death. This reading aligns closely with the Reformed emphasis on the beatitude as eschatological promise rather than earthly reward. Leo the Great (fifth century) drew a sharp contrast between worldly friendship and the genuine peace Jesus describes, insisting that true peace cannot be built on self-interest or political alliance, but only on the foundation of divine love actively shared.

Reformation and Modern Reception

The Reformed tradition, particularly in Calvin's commentary on Matthew, emphasized that the peacemaker participates in the very nature of God — since God is himself the source and model of reconciliation. This participation is not achievement but gift, shaped by the Spirit who produces the fruit of peace in the believer's character. In contemporary preaching, the beatitude has been applied to marriage and family reconciliation, racial and social healing, and international conflict — always with the insistence that Christian peacemaking is grounded in the prior peace that God has made with humanity through Christ, and is therefore qualitatively different from mere conflict management.