Matthew 5:9
What does Matthew 5:9 mean?
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
The short answer
Matthew 5:9 is the seventh of the Beatitudes, the blessings Jesus pronounces at the start of the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God." Notice the word Jesus chooses. The blessing is not for the peaceful — people with calm temperaments or quiet lives — but for peace-makers, people who actively create peace where it does not yet exist. And the reward is a name: they will be called God's children, because in making peace they show the family likeness of the God who makes peace with us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer draws out how demanding this is. Disciples, he writes, first receive their peace from Jesus himself — and then are called to create it for others. In his description, that looks like renouncing violence, preferring to suffer rather than to cause suffering, holding on to fellowship where others walk away from it, and refusing to be provoked by hatred or injustice. This is how, echoing Romans 12:21, evil is overcome with good. Peacemaking, on this reading, is not the absence of conflict but the willingness to absorb its cost.
Carl Daw adds an honest complication. He observes that this beatitude is much more comfortable to remember than Matthew 10:34, where the same Jesus says he came not to bring peace but a sword. Daw doesn't try to smooth the two sayings into one; he holds them together as part of the paradox of who Christ is. That tension keeps Matthew 5:9 from going soft. The peace Jesus blesses is not sentimental conflict-avoidance or keeping everyone comfortable. It is truthful, costly, and sometimes divisive work — peace made the way Jesus made it, through a cross rather than around one.
What scholars say
Bonhoeffer answers the question this beatitude raises — what does it actually take to move from having peace to making it — while Daw candidly notes how much easier Matthew 5:9 is to remember than Jesus' words about bringing a sword, holding both together as part of the paradox of Christ.
“Jesus’ followers are called to peace. As Jesus called them, they found their peace. Jesus is their peace. Now they are not only to have peace, but also to create it. This means they renounce violence and revolution. These have never helped the cause of Christ. The kingdom of Christ is a kingdom of peace, and members of the church of Christ greet each other with the passing of the peace and the kiss of peace. The disciples of Jesus keep the peace because they would rather suffer themselves than cause others suffering. They preserve fellowship where others break it; they renounce self-assertion and are not provoked by hate and injustice. Thus they overcome evil with good (Rom. 12:21).”
“As mentioned in the hymnal note, the author titled this text “Christus Paradox” because it calls attention to the many ways that various attributes and images of Christ seem at least to be in tension and sometimes actually to contradict each other. She does not try to reconcile or mitigate opposed understandings, but she does not shrink from identifying them with a candor found in few hymns. Consider, for example, line 1.3: “You, peace-maker and sword-bringer.” The seventh beatitude (Matthew 5:9) is considerably more comfortable to remember than Matthew 10:34 (and its near parallel in Luke 12:51). Yet both are bound together in the mystery of the Incarnation.”
What it means for you
For most of us, the nearest mission field for this verse is a strained relationship — a family rift, a workplace grudge, a friendship gone cold. Matthew 5:9 asks: am I merely avoiding that conflict, or am I making peace within it? Following Bonhoeffer's picture, that might mean absorbing an insult instead of returning it, staying in a hard conversation others have abandoned, or answering hostility with a concrete act of good.
It also frees you from a false goal. Peacemaking is not keeping everyone happy; sometimes telling the truth disturbs a comfortable silence. The aim is real reconciliation, pursued at your own expense — the kind of peace that marks you as a child of the God who made peace with you first.
Matthew 5 in context
Matthew 5 opens the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' longest recorded teaching. It begins with the Beatitudes (5:3–12), a series of surprising blessings on the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, and the merciful — people the world rarely calls blessed. The peacemaker beatitude sits seventh in this list, just before a blessing on the persecuted, a telling sequence: making peace can provoke opposition. The rest of the chapter presses the same demanding vision, calling disciples salt and light and culminating in the command to love enemies (5:43–48) — peacemaking spelled out in practice.