It is fitting that our study of this beatitude follows our exploration last Sunday of the one that comes immediately before, “blessed are the pure in heart.” As we saw last Sunday, that beatitude was concerned with the inner reality of a person. It follows logically that Jesus would then go on in the next beatitude to speak of what flows from such a transformed inner reality, saying “blessed are the peacemakers.”

James, the half-brother of Jesus, described this dynamic between being pure in heart and a peacemaker in its inverse when he posed the question, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?” (James 4:1) Then he answers his own question, “Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?”

We’ll unpack what Jesus meant by calling his followers “peacemakers,” and also what he meant when he said that such people would “be called sons of God.”