Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

As we continue through these early weeks of Ordinary Time, we continue to hear of the beginnings of the Lord’s Public Life, His ministry and Teaching.

And so, two weeks ago, we heard Saint John the Baptist pointing Him out to the crowds… last week, we heard the Calling of the first Disciples… and  now, beginning this week, and moving toward the beginning of Lent on February 22nd, we will be hearing excerpts from the Sermon on the Mount, Our Lord’s “inaugural address” in which the Lord, right from the start, lays out His vision of discipleship for all to hear.

This most famous of Sermons begins with the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes serve as a prologue to the coming Sermon, and forms the bedrock for the Lord’s Teaching. Here, the Lord recalls the Promises made to the chosen people, from the time of Abraham onwards, but now He gives them a new character: The promise of possession of land is transformed into a promise of receiving blessing which brings about a sense of belonging to the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Blessing promised in the Beatitudes have a paradoxical nature which helps us to sustain hope in times of tribulation, anxiety, or adversity. They proclaim the blessings and rewards already secured by the love of God, but not always recognized in the lives of His beloved people.

The wording of blessing as we hear it belongs to traditional Biblical language: the Book of Psalms opens in the same way, with Psalm One beginning, “Blessed is the man…” (KJV)

Recognition of blessing, while even in the midst of adversity, leads to a supra-human level of happiness: (You will remember that Saint Luke, in his version has the Lord using the word “happy”) This happiness, however, is not meant to convey what we know as joy or gladness; it’s something more like serenity: an interior peace brought about by Grace that comes from time spent with God.

Saint Augustine described it this way: “We all want to be happy. No one in the whole human race would deny that he wants to be happy, even if he’s not sure what ‘to be happy’ really means.”

This happiness — or rather this Blessing — of which the Lord speaks is not meant to be therapeutic, to cheer us up. Our Lord gives the Beatitudes an eschatological meaning — that is — a meaning which leads us to hope for eternal salvation. Therefore, if we were to live in the way He describes, we will find the door of heaven open to us. This is because God is not indifferent to us; He is active in our lives, and wishes to console us in life’s difficulties, and in the struggles we sometimes experience when we strive to live a life of Faith.

In this, the Beatitudes express the dual desire that God has written on the human heart:
- to attain real serenity here on earth — and —
- to be happy with Him forever in heaven as we memorized in our childhood Catechism.

Saint Matthew records nine Beatitudes; the first eight deal with the attitudes of the Christian toward the world. But the Ninth one differs from the rest: It begins, “Blessed are you,” rather than “Blessed are they.” By changing this one simple word, the Lord wants us to sit up and take notice: He’s teaching us that you who suffer for the faith, for the Church, or for your relationship with Christ will find particular blessing. This Beatitude alone promises both joy and the reward of heaven.

Let’s now take a look at the other eight Beatitudes, not individually, but as a whole so that we can gain some insight into what this Teaching means for us today.

The first thing we notice is how Saint Matthew sets the whole passage up:
- first of all the setting…
- secondly, the wording

In the setting, Matthew presents Jesus as the New Moses, the new Law-giver. He writes, “When Jesus saw the crowds, He went up the mountain.” Although written in Greek, this phrase demonstrates the Hebrew predilection for overstatement, for emphasis. The “mountain” of which Matthew speaks is actually a small rise above the village of Capernaum… that is to say: less like Okemo, and more like the path up to our cemetery.

The overstatement is important, though, because it awakens within the listener the memory that Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the Law - that is - the Ten Commandments. Here, Jesus reveals the “New Law” in His Sermon on the Mount.

Then St. Matthew goes on to say, “After [Jesus] had sat down, His disciples came to Him.” This sitting-down is an important gesture: in ancient days a Professor would give a lecture while walking with his students. When he would come upon a particularly important notion, he would sit down.

Hence we have in our colleges and universities today an endowed “Chair” for Humanities, Science, Literature, and more. The head of the Department is called a “Chair-person.” The word for “chair” in Latin is “cathedra,” from whence we get the word “Cathedral” because this particular Church building contains the Bishop’s throne, or chair. It’s only rarely, in our day, that a Bishop would preach from his chair, but it’s still done. So, this simple sentence reveals to us that the Lord spoke with authority, and wanted this authority to be recognized by His followers, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.

It must be noted, however, that when we say that Jesus replaces Moses as the new Lawgiver, we are not saying that the Beatitudes replace the Commandments. Instead, we’re saying that the Beatitudes complement the Commandments, giving them new meaning. They show that God is not a distant Lawgiver, but stays close to us in times of adversity.

It is His Grace that gives us understanding of the redemptive quality of human suffering so that we can now come to know the Blessing therein. However, the awareness of Blessing, as with most forms of wisdom, is generally recognized, not in the present moment, but, more likely, in hindsight.

As I mentioned earlier, the Beatitudes have a paradoxical nature. They are the opposite of the “gospel of prosperity” as preached by so many televangelists. When the Lord says, “Blessed are the Poor in Spirit,” there is no promise of future prosperity, but an assurance of closeness with God, both now and in the Kingdom of heaven.

This is because Poverty of Spirit is not like economic poverty; it is composed of an awareness of one’s need for God. The need and the awareness of it form the threshold of the Kingdom while we remain here on earth.

This hope for heaven is what brings blessing out of adversity and makes us, whom Saint Paul identifies as  the foolish and the weak… the lowly and the despised… into what the Prophet Zephaniah described as the Faithful Remnant.

And so, since we generally find blessing only in retrospect, the more frequently we look toward God’s blessings, the more likely we will begin to live a life of Beatitude. And we should keep in mind, that if we look for blessings, it’s very likely that we will find them.