I. The Beatitudes and the Moral Law
a. If the Ten Commandments form the foundation of the moral law, the Beatitudes are its walls and roof. With the Beatitudes, Jesus fleshes out the Great Commandment (love one another) with specific inner dispositions, actions, and rewards for those actions.
b. The Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 5:1-12 (Reversals, conventional wisdom on its head)
c. Beatitude=happiness: “The Beatitudes respond to the natural desire for happiness.” (CCC 1718)
d. Living the Christian moral law is about seeking ultimate happiness with every significant decision. The ultimate goal of living the Beatitudes is supreme happiness: “With beatitude, man enters into the glory of Christ and into the joy of the Trinitarian life.” (CCC 1721)
e. The Beatitudes depict a noble way of life, a way of great dignity
f. The saints exemplify the Beatitudes, and the promises of Christ can be clearly seen at work in those who followed him most closely. A saint is one who has been canonized and held up as a “rule” or example to the Body of Christ.
II. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
a. The Lord is talking about spiritual poverty, an attitude of complete inner dependence on God grounded in humility
b. Spiritual poverty is linked to material poverty-there have been wealthy saints, but they are few. (St. Olaf of Norway, St. Louis IX of France, who spent long hours in fasting, prayer, and penance.) (Show me a wealthy saint and I will show you how he is really poor inside) “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” (Luke 18:24-25)
c. Contrast four different approaches to poverty:
i. St. Benedict: Practical poverty that will help us become holy
ii. St. Francis: Romantic poverty that is itself an ideal
iii. St. Dominic: Missionary poverty so that nothing gets in the way of preaching the Gospel
iv. Servant of God Dorothy Day: Poverty of solidarity with the poor in order to identify with and better serve them
d. We become poor as Christ became poor, emptying himself of the richness of his Divinity to become an ordinary-seeming man. “Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:5-8)
III. “Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
a. Most writers interpret this as mourning over the fact and consequences of sin in our lives
b. We maintain an attitude of inner penitence, an awareness and sorrow for our sinfulness that comes between us and God
c. This is not to be depressed all the time, as the Good News about sin is that it can be cured through the Sacraments Christ instituted
d. Blessed Bartolo Longo, a lay Dominican, experienced a weakening of faith in his youth that led him into the occult and eventually into Satanism. He was at one point “ordained” a Satanic priest and went on to deride the Catholic faith publicly. He experienced a conversion back to the Catholic Church and spent the rest of his life praying and propagating the Rosary in penance for what he had done (died in 1925). He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980.
e. Awareness of sin is only the beginning of a relationship with Christ, the consummation of which is a life of freely-given, freely-received love
IV. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.”
a. The Aramaic word for “meek” is a synonym of the word used for “poor” in the first Beatitude
b. “Meekness” does not mean that one is a pushover; rather, it is a source of great power, because one knows before God exactly who one is and what one has to offer. It is connected to humility, which is lowliness or submissiveness. St. Maximilian Kolbe, martyr of Auschwitz:
i. He published a subversive Marian newspaper and sheltered refugees during World War II. As a result he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp. After one man escaped, ten prisoners were condemned to the starvation bunker. Maximilian volunteered to take the place of a man who had a wife and children.
ii. In the bunker, Maximilian remained cheerful and the spiritual pillar of the other men. The guards were actually afraid of him. After two weeks of starvation, Maximilian was the only man left alive. He had to be given a lethal injection in order to kill him. It was reported that Fr. Kolbe “with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his arm to the executioner….(in death) His face was calm and radiant.” (www.catholic-pages.com)
c. Meekness is in the way we approach people; we do not approach people in order to “fix” or “convert” them; rather, we seek something for others, we seek that they will come to know the Lord through our actions.
d. Blessed Mother Teresa: “Do the small things with great love.”
e. It is through meekness-humility-that we obtain the royal power of the King. It is also through meekness that we are greatly honored by God: “We consider it an honor and privilege to serve Christ in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor with our humble work, and we do it with deep gratitude and profound reverence in a spirit of fraternal sharing.” (Mother Teresa’s Rule for the Missionaries of Charity)
V. “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”
a. (Really all the Beatitudes are both dispositions and actions) The first three Beatitudes are more passive; they describe an inner disposition that we as Christians are to hold. The remaining five Beatitudes are active. They impel us to specific kinds of action.
b. “Righteousness” is justice before God; this Beatitude is enjoining us to seek rightness of heart and holiness
c. Servant of God Dorothy Day: writer, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and promoter of the needs of the poor. Remembered for her pacifism during World War II. During that war, she declared that the Catholic Worker Movement’s “manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount.” Dorothy Day had a very strong sense of justice when it came to the poor, refusing to let herself be treated as better than they. She is remembered for an incident when she let a homeless beggar sleep in her own bed; when a fellow Catholic Worker protested that the man might give her a disease, Dorothy replied “You have no faith.” Jailed many times for acts of conscience, she was last jailed at age 75 for picketing in support of farmworkers. “If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.”
d. Blessed Mother Teresa: “Jesus made Himself the Bread of Life to satisfy our hunger for God and for His love.” In seeking holiness, we seek a person, some One who is real and concrete-a relationship, not an idea, ideology, or “belief system.”
e. We obtain what we seek through the Sacraments of the Church, especially the Eucharist, and through the Sacraments the love of God gradually grows within us over the course of a lifetime, until it is consummated in the Beatific Vision of Heaven.
f. It is critical to be wholehearted in seeking God; the Lord is angry with the lukewarm: “To the angel of the church in Laodicea, write this: ‘”The Amen, the faithful and true witness, the source of God’s creation, says this: ‘I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, “I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,” and yet do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.’”‘” (Revelation 3:14-17)
VI. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”
a. Mercy is something we do, not just something we feel.
b. St. Faustina, a Polish nun who died shortly before World War II, and the “apostle of Divine Mercy.” Jesus granted her many visions, and commanded her to write what she was told in her Diary. One of the things that Jesus told her was that the greater the sinner, the greater the right he has to God’s mercy. “My daughter, if I demand through you that people revere My mercy, you should be the first to distinguish yourself by the confidence in My mercy. I demand from you deeds of Mercy, which are to arise out of love for Me. You are to show mercy to your neighbors always and everywhere. You must not shrink from this or try to excuse or absolve yourself from it. I am giving you three ways of exercising mercy toward your neighbor: the first-by deed, the second-by word, the third-by prayer. In these three degrees is contained the fullness of mercy, and it is an unquestionable proof of love for Me.” (Diary, 742).
c. These works of deed, word, and prayer form the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy:
i. Corporal
1. To feed the hungry;
2. To give drink to the thirsty;
3. To clothe the naked;
4. To give shelter to the homeless;
5. To visit the sick;
6. To ransom the captive;
7. To bury the dead.
ii. Spiritual
1. To instruct the ignorant;
2. To counsel the doubtful;
3. To admonish sinners;
4. To bear wrongs patiently;
5. To forgive offenses willingly;
6. To comfort the afflicted;
7. To pray for the living and the dead.
iii. Volunteer: homeless shelters, food banks. Connection between what Jesus told St. Faustina and our work as volunteers
d. The merciful will receive mercy; the spiritual writers also point out that the opposite is true, the unmerciful cannot expect mercy from God. Are we living in a merciful nation?
VII. “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.”
a. To have a “clean heart” is to have a simple and sincere good intention, the “sound eye” of Matthew 7:22-23: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness.”
b. Having a “clean heart” also means being undeflected, having a consistent, pure, and holy intention to do God’s will at all times. Recall Mother Teresa at President Clinton’s prayer breakfast in 1994: when asked to say a few words, she got up in front of a score of dignitaries, including the President of the United States, and spoke out against abortion. “But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.” As she said at another time, “In Calcutta, we send word to the clinics, the police stations, and the hospitals: Please do not destroy the child. I will take the child. So our house is always full of children. There is a joke in Calcutta about Mother Teresa-that she is always talking about natural family planning and abortion, but every day she has more and more children.”
c. Mother Teresa also talked of the need to “cleave” to Christ, to stick to him like glue no matter the situation. This is cleanness or purity of heart.
VIII. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
a. These are the people who not only live in peace with others but also do their best to promote peace and friendship among mankind and between God and man. It is on account of this God-like work, “an imitating of God’s love of man,” (St. Gregory of Nyssa), that people shall be called sons of God, “children of your heavenly Father.” (Matthew 5:45)
b. St. Catherine of Siena, a lay Dominican woman of the 14th Century. She worked to end wars between Italian cities and encouraged Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome from Avignon. After his death, she worked to heal the Great Schism between Urban VI (in Rome) and Clement VII (in Avignon). Theologians, princes, and popes came to her for advice; at her death, she was 33 years old.
c. Seeking peace isn’t just about ending wars between nations: it’s something we can do every moment of our waking lives in our relationships with others. “The quickest and surest way is the ‘tongue’-use it for the good of others, if you think well of others. From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. If your heart is full of love, you will speak of love.” (Mother Teresa)
IX. “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.”
a. Those who live the way of Christ will be persecuted, but they will be blessed for it. The suffering that persecution brings is itself a blessing, because through it we are able to draw closer to Christ and become more fully conformed to him.
b. Persecution has been a hallmark of Christianity from its beginning.
c. St. Peter Chanel, who in the 1830’s was sent to the New Hebrides in the South Pacific as a missionary. He was initially welcomed by the king, but when the missionaries learned the local language and the king understood what they were really promoting, he turn against them and had St. Peter clubbed to death. God bestowed the grace of martyrdom on the island, and within 5 months of his death all of the island was converted.
d. And so, with the reward of the “kingdom of heaven,” we are returned to the first Beatitude, and have come full-circle.
