When I was teaching confirmation class,
this passage we just heard from Matthew, the beatitudes, was in our textbook.
But, rather confusingly, it was in the section on Christian morality, on a
right hand page, right next to the Ten Commandments on the left. I, at least,
was confused by this, because the beatitudes aren’t primarily about what we’re
meant to do at all. We have beautiful Christian teaching about what we are to
do and not do; the Ten Commandments, inherited from our Jewish roots, work great
as a to-do list (along with a not-to-do-list). I could tell the kids, make sure
you honor father and mother this week, careful of that coveting. But the
beatitudes? How could I tell them, go out and be poor this week, or go mourn?
No, the beatitudes aren’t a to-do list;
they’re not primarily a moral text. Or if they’re any kind of to-do list, they’re
God’s sharing of His own to-do list with us, proclaimed by His Son. And when God
resolves to do something, His will is effective. These are promises on which we
can rely, unconditional assurances of salvation to people who are in seemingly hopeless
situations.
“Blessed are they who mourn, for they will
be comforted.” This one’s typical. The promise – for they will be comforted –
is passive voice, it’s what we call a theological passive, a Jewish
commonplace where rather than saying “God will do X” you just say “X
will be done,” out of a concern to avoid over-using the name of God. “They will
be comforted” – God will comfort them.
God will comfort you if you are mourning. If you are lost in that
horrible confusing sea of emotions called grief, there is divine comfort in
store for you; the hand that set the stars in the sky and cupped the oceans
will tenderly wipe every tear from every eye. Note too the tense: it’s future.
Yes, there is real comfort to be had here and now. God’s comfort here and now
is mainly incarnated throw other humans, through the Church and through others
of good will, though I hope we do in some real ways sometimes feel the reality
of God’s comfort directly. But all of this is but a foretaste of the feast of
comfort that is to come, a candle pointing to a fiery furnace of God’s love.
And all that is enough that those who mourn, and who realize what that means,
can truly be called happy. “Blessed” is what we’re used to hearing in English
translations, but the full weight of the Latin beatus behind ‘beatitude’
reflects better the Greek μακαριος which is something much
earthier, a happiness in the fullest sense of the word, not a fleeting elation,
but something that survives in the gut and sustains us.
If you are mourning, God will comfort you.
First and foremost, God’s promise. But every one of God’s promises does,
secondarily, challenge us a little. I talked to my eighth graders in my
confirmation class about how you could avoiding mourning people. Very perceptively,
they talked about repressing grief, and they noticed the very real encouragement
in this text not to do that. But, there’s another way of avoiding grief that
they couldn’t think of, and were shocked to hear when I told them: don’t love
anyone. If you don’t truly love anyone, you’ll never grieve their death. And
there are people that choose that path, or at least try to. And to these
people, there is a challenge here: live a risky life of love. Dare to love, not
because it’s easy, or because it’s less painful, but because God can be trusted
to comfort. I don’t know how we get from eighth graders that can’t imagine that
as a possibility, to people who are walled off, frightened, unloving. But we
do. And God has good news for them, and challenge.
How about, “Happy those who are insulted
and persecuted”? Again, hardly an action item on our to-do list. But the
kingdom of heaven is promised to those who dare to risk this, who dare to stand
up for what they believe in, to be unpopular, even if that’s going to lead to
insult, even if that’s going to lead to persecution. The beatitudes are
assurance, promise, but promises that subtly dare us to be riskily loving, to
participate in God’s mission, to comfort the mourning, to welcome and aid the
persecuted.
Today in this parish, we celebrate St.
Francis de Sales, the saint in whose patronage the Oblates, who founded this
parish, Fr. Robert’s order, were founded. One of his great convictions was that
everyone was called to holiness, not just monks, nuns, sisters, friars and
priests, something that only sounds like a commonplace to us because he was
ahead of his time. He worked to really develop spiritual practices that could
lead to holiness that were compatible with having a job, raising a family, that
didn’t see those things as distractions from the life of holiness, but
opportunities for love. This vision of the beatitudes offers us promise and
challenge as we try to live that life of holiness. A promise we can rely on,
not so much a safety net, but a loving pair of arms to catch us, and a
challenge: to soar in holiness, knowing we’ll probably fall, often, knowing we’ll
be caught.
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