4th Sunday of Year
January 30, 2005
Mt 5:1-12

In old-fashioned liberal Protestantism the eight beatitudes were regarded as the "magna carta" of the Kingdom announced by Jesus. In modern historical-critical investigation they have been seriously reduced in stature, mutilated to the four beatitudes of Luke and tossed around as a blueprint for social justice

Patristic exegesis, starting with Origen and continuing with Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Pope St Leo and all the way to St. Bernard of Clairvaux regarded the beatitudes as the outline for a spiritual program of gradual progress beginning with humility ("poor in spirit") and ending with contemplation ("they shall see God"). Such an outlook is fully justified, since in Matthew's gospel the beatitudes represent the opening words of Jesus' first discourse, a text that reveals both the way God approaches us and the way we should approach him.

The attitude of being "poor in spirit" means hardly anything else than authentic humility, recognition of the human being's true situation when facing God. Since the pursuit of knowledge and freedom are written into our nature, we are unable to extricate ourselves from the deep-seated instinct of worrying about the self: building up the self by using knowledge and power to appropriate to ourselves all other creatures. But this leads to the unrelenting exercise of self-assertion through denying the truth about our deficient self, though exploiting other personal beings and marginalizing God's dominion over the realm of our life. The man who is "poor in spirit" is someone who has learned about his sins against the self, the neighbor and the Creator and sees the bankruptcy of this instinctive human enterprise of domination, exploitation and self-exaltation.

Blessed are the poor because, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they are incapable of reaching God by their own efforts and attempts, they see that only a merciful God can rescue them from their misery. Thus, they stop their attempts to place themselves at the top of their universe. Hearing the first beatitude is the evidence that in Jesus they have found a merciful God who can restore the order of their world and give a chance for genuine reconciliation with the self, the neighbor and the Creator who alone can exalt the fallen creature.

The next three beatitudes initiate no radically new thought, but extend the basic insight of spiritual poverty to one's moral life: the one who weeps, who is meek, who hungers for justice and the merciful -- these all refer to the person who has converted from self-seeking, self-sufficiency and self-exaltation to penance, kindness, the passionate search for a life pleasing to God, and sharing life's burden with those he recognizes to be in the same need of divine mercy as he is. Each dimension brings its consolation and happiness, because God matches every effort on our part with his grace that provides efficacy for our efforts. And as the soul is purified -- blessed are the pure of heart -- man begins to see, as if through a lifting fog, the true face of God and taste for the first time the beatitudes as "happiness."

The beatitudes must not be taken out of the context of the gospel as a whole. The poor are happy only because God chose to become poor and began to share with us a condition from which only He can lead us out. Meekness comes first from God who suspended the immediate harshness of punishment in response to our sins. Hunger and thirst for justice's sake are satisfied only because he grants the grace of a renewed life. Human mercy is fruitful because in his sovereign will he has decided to respond to it by divine mercy. We see his face only because he wanted to reveal himself to little ones. Our poverty enriches because he decided to become poor so that in his poverty we might be enriched.

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