Mass readings for the 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Zephaniah 2.3; 3.12-13 Psalm 146.6-10 1 Corinthians 1.26-31 Matthew 5.1-12
The Beatitudes are among the most celebrated of scriptural passages; I would say it ranks high in all of literature both sacred and profane. Even among the irreligious, aside from the final confessional virtue of being persecuted for being a follower of Jesus, the majority of these virtues that Christ speaks of are endorsed by most people.
And I hope that’s what we take away from this. Jesus is not praising those who are righteous, who are meek, but actually commending to us living life through these virtues. But, let’s think about his recommending to us lives of spiritual poverty, of mourning. Why would he want to do that?
How can he recommend to us the state of being “poor in spirit”? Who wants to be in a state of mourning? Why be meek in a dangerous world?
Equally though, we have to ask ourselves about those heroic virtues: the striving after righteousness like a hungry and thirsty man emerging from a desert wilderness; the person who undertakes to be a peacemaker in a world of conflict. Are we living out any of these? Or do we look at them as something someone else will do, and receive God’s blessing for it; But us? Well, we’ll try to do the others, the ones we think we’re better suited to. After all, these Beatitudes, understood as the hallmarks of the Christian life, are a rather daunting list. Do we have to do them all?
In our culture there has emerged this idea of “the bucket list” – things to aspire to do in a lifetime that we think will enhance our lives, and be good use of the limited time we have; you know, have those adventures and experiences while we can so as to not have regrets when our end comes. Well, for you and I as Christians, the Beatitudes really are the “bucket list” we are to be carrying around with us, checking these off, and not just once, but repeatedly. And as I have come into middle-age, my “bucket list”, the kind celebrated in our culture, is growing ever shorter, and not because I’ve been crossing off items as done; but because increasingly I see them as trivial, mundane, in some cases rather selfish. I still want to ride a horse in the Rockies and to go rafting through the Grand Canyon; I’d like go the Holy Land one day, but getting that done to the neglect of these Beatific virtues, that would be a tragic misuse of my time and energy.
So, let’s consider a couple of these beatitudes: one that would seem to be about embracing misery, and the other one that seems impossibly heroic.
Poverty of spirit is often misunderstood. For one, it’s often taken as Jesus giving an out to us all who quite like having a bit of money in the bank and nice things in our home – that is, if you can’t manage material poverty, if you just can’t sell it all and give it to the poor, well here you go: just feel badly about yourself. Good old Catholic guilt, which I think is pretty similar to Jewish guilt, and any number of forms of Protestant self-loathing. No, poverty of spirit isn’t self-hatred, it isn’t depression or anxiety,
To be poor in spirit is a manner of being the world that starts with acknowledging that at the spiritual level, we are bankrupt. We have nothing. Yes, we have a soul, and that is the spiritual aspect of our existence; but it’s empty and needs to be filled up, and only God can do that, because God is spirit, and His spirit gives to us those things that are divine and essential to human life: truth, justice, love.
To receive a benediction, and to sign yourself with the cross, that is an acknowledgment of this. More profoundly, to come forward in humility and receive the eucharist is a full-bodied expression of this need. It’s like that famous scene from Oliver Twist where young Oliver, a starving inmate of a workhouse makes his way to the front of the dining hall his empty bowl in his hands and says, “Please Sir, I want some more” but instead of facing the cruel master who rapped Oliver on the head with a ladle, we have our heavenly Father who gladly feeds us, and does so through Christ’s very substance.
I’ve encountered those who tell me in all sincerity they believe in God; that they pray, but they struggle to see the necessity of receiving the Blessed Sacrament with any regularity—why do I need to come to Mass? Forgetting that we are body and soul, that we are material and intellectual, they don’t grasp that we are to learn and be trained not just mentally but physically. This motion of hands upheld or the mouth meekly opened to receive not take as ours, this teaches us more profoundly over time far more than any number of sermons heard, theological essays we might read.
And we see this humility in the community, and by that we are reminded of the fundamental equality we all share, none morally or spiritually superior to another. We’re all in this together in a shared need of God. That works on us, forms us, makes us better parents, better children, better neighbours, and a better friend to strangers.
Now, how about this call to heroic virtue – to be a champion of truth and justice. Now, I will say this, some of what we’ve been seeing in what has been called “social justice” has proven rather off-putting. The self-righteousness of some activists, the judgmentalism they exercise, the lack of sympathy they have for anyone who might disagree with their assessment of things or in their policy prescriptions derived from to their ideology, well, it makes it all very unattractive.
The righteous life, we must remember, is simply the one aligned with God’s will. It’s a life that puts at its centre a concern for truth, justice and love, but in humility recognizes how difficult that is to achieve.
Truth, for one thing, is hard to know in a world awash in so-called information.
So, the righteous must be humble in light of this because to act based on a misunderstanding, to act without an appreciation of the actual truth of a situation, is to risk injustice even as you do it out of a sincere sense of love.
Also, love cannot substitute for justice. The simple reason for that comes in the fact that we lead people into ever greater evil by excusing them from justice; and obviously, we do an injustice to their victims.
And this awareness of feebleness in assessing the truth of things, of then knowing what the just and loving thing to do, ought to chasten us and keep us civil toward each other; but also vigilant about how our society is shaped by our institutions and governed within our politics.
We shouldn’t start in our consideration of the issues of the day with outrage or indignance, an emotional reaction; nor should we be addressing the complexities of public policies until we have rooted our perspective in the moral principles of our faith: these are to govern our lives. The concerns that are to animate our discussions are nonetheless many: care for the poor; stewardship of creation; respect for human life from conception to natural death; inherent dignity of all human persons and respect for their autonomy; defense of the weak; freedom of conscience; and so on.
We are to make doing the right thing the central concern of individuals and our society so as to temper our politics, tamp down on the ideologically-driven idiocy, and make us all more generous toward each other in our disagreements.
We’ve had that before, and throughout history we’ve lost it, needing to get hungry for it again. And that is a hunger for God who is righteousness itself; that is the instinct to seek refuge in Him where, as the Prophet Zephaniah says, there is no wrong-doing, where there are no lies uttered, where there is no deceit.
Brothers and Sisters, we seek to be wise, not by human standards – human wisdom at heart is cynicism; our wisdom is Jesus Christ, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, who comes to us in our spiritual poverty and fills us with his spirit of hope and love such that when we boast, we boast in the Lord.
Amen.