He Gave the Beatitudes Without 'You'

In the eight Beatitudes of Matthew 5:3–10, Jesus never addresses the listeners directly. Each statement uses third-person description: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit,' 'Blessed are they that mourn,' 'Blessed are the meek.' The beneficiaries are named in the third person throughout — 'they,' 'theirs,' 'they shall.' The shift is sudden and unmistakable when the ninth Beatitude arrives in Matthew 5:11: 'Blessed are ye when men shall revile you.' Here, mid-sequence, Jesus pivots from third person to second person, from 'the meek' to 'ye.' This is the only Beatitude addressed directly to the listener. Luke's parallel version (Luke 6:20–22) reverses this: all four of his Beatitudes are in the second person — 'Blessed are ye poor,' 'Blessed are ye that hunger' — making the Matthean third-person sequence a structurally distinctive feature of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount. The effect in Matthew is that the first eight Beatitudes function almost like observations about a third party, a description of a type of person, before the final statement collapses the distance and speaks directly to the one being addressed. The grammar performs the point: the listeners are implicated only at the moment of persecution.