Fr Mark Schultz
Dear Friend,
In our Office Gospel this morning, we find ourselves at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount with Jesus preaching the beatitudes, an understanding of what a life lived according to the pattern of the Kingdom of Love that is coming into the world might genuinely look like. The whole of this sermon is a brilliantly structured manifesto of the life of that Kingdom, at the heart of which is the Lord’s Prayer that recapitulates in the form of prayer the Kingdom’s pattern, what it means for a human being to have, alive in them, shaping them, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Some of you may have heard me preach on the beatitudes before, and I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that they’re not a series of statements Jesus makes about how things’ll get better for people experiencing hardship, nor are they about how God might reward in another life those who manage to be nice to other people in this one. The beatitudes really are description of what a holy life—a life transparent to Christ, a life that is a window onto the Reign of Love—looks like in a broken world in which that Reign is rejected.
Take that first one: poor in spirit. The Greek word for “poor” here means “poor” because it describes an attitude of cowering, the attitude of the sort of person who fearfully crouches somewhere, their head down, their hands lifted up: begging. The word means poor, because it describes the posture of a beggar. And we, Jesus is suggesting, must understand ourselves as beggars before God, completely relying on what God in God’s grace might give us. This is, in fact, the reality of our lives, and if we were to live this reality, truly live it, we would understand ourselves as blessed…because the God on whom we completely rely is in fact the God who, beholding our emptiness, longs to fill us with an infinite fullness.
Look at those words, “hunger and thirst”: they’re primal. And this primal sort of desire ought to be our relationship to righteousness.
Look at the word “meek”: it doesn’t mean nice. It means “one who controls themselves for the sake of kindness.” And the word for persecution here: it’s not just to suffer any sort of wrong. It describes what happens when someone is hounded, and hunted, forced to flee for one’s life from whatever they thought was home or happiness or comfort. Because, in part and by grace, there is no home or happiness or comfort in this world’s darkness for them anymore. And this is the shape of a holy life, this is who the saints are: those folks in human history, in our communities even now, who live lives transparent to a world of joy and bliss and love and wonder that is, even now, coming to be, shining into our present darkness, illuminating it with the splendor of God’s love…a splendor which the Gospel tells us this present darkness cannot comprehend. A splendor made poor, hungry, persecuted and reviled in Jesus Christ.
Why should this be the case? Because the splendor God has desires for is not what we chose: we chose and, of ourselves, cannot help but keep choosing sin and death over God and Life. We turned our ourselves and our lives inside out, upside down, and backwards. The only way henceforth that the Divine can speak to us and still be true to itself is if it speaks to us in a way we would not, of ourselves, choose: a way that looks, to us in our fallen-ness, upside down, inside out and backwards, a way broken, wounded, obscure. In the way, in other words, of beatitude. In the Way that is Jesus, nail-pierced, thorn-crowned, dying…yet rising again with life, forgiveness, healing, grace and love in his wings.
Dear Friend, let us seek to walk the Way this day! Let us receive the grace of the One who has chosen us and become the Way we could not choose so that grace, alive in us and through us, could empower us to choose the goodness we, in and of ourselves, can only dimly comprehend. Let us receive the grace we need to become living windows onto the life of God, because we have chosen, by grace, the life of Christ to blaze alive in us!
Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+