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Homily for Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 30 January 2011
Today’s Gospel is so familiar to us- the Beatitudes, we hear them so often, we know them so well- but I would like to share with you this morning some ideas on this passage from St Matthew’s Gospel that will I hope show this text in a new light. I have been looking at what the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries of Christian history had to say and I want to try and explain to you how they regarded these well known verses, because they saw them in quite a different way from how we usually think of them.
First of all, it is important for us to remember that Matthew was writing his gospel for Jewish Christians. For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses, the new deliverer of the people, the new law-giver. That is why at the start of this passage today Matthew says “Jesus went up the hill”- this is after all the beginning of that compendium of Jesus’s teaching that we call “the Sermon on the Mount”. Well, of course Jesus has to be on a hill, on a mountain, to teach the crowds, because after all, that is where Moses was – on Mt Sinai- when he received the tablets of the Law, the Ten Commandments, and here, spread out over chapters 5, 6 and 7 Matthew has Jesus giving his followers his commandments, his new law, his new way of living as the chosen people, the new Israel. Now the Old Testament has the teachings of Moses, the Law by which the Jews endeavoured to live, spread out over five books, doesn’t it, the Pentateuch that starts with Genesis. And you recall that Genesis itself starts with a sort of prologue, chapters 1-11, the creation, Adam and Eve and all that jazz, which sets the scene for everything that it to come.
Now I come to today’s Gospel! In the eyes of the patristic writers this was the prologue that Matthew has put at the start of his own version of the Pentateuch- we have Jesus delivering the new law, the new teaching, to the new chosen people, the Church, and so, as in Genesis, here at the very start is a prologue, and we shall see that Matthew is referring here to the whole creation saga. The first creation has gone terribly wrong and somehow must be unravelled, put right with a new emphasis, with new values. Now things will be different: we see this at once, we start with “How happy are the poor in spirit”. That means, how blessed are those who are not full of pride, who are not led astray by pride. Because after all that is the sin of Adam and Eve- pride, they want to be like gods, they want to ignore God’s plan for them and just please themselves. That is what all sin is about isn’t it, every sin we ever commit is just that- in my pride I decide for myself what is good or evil, what is good for me. So right at the start of this prologue we see that in this new creation, this new way of being human, that Jesus is bringing in, there must be no pride, no putting of myself in God’s rightful place. Then we see what will follow from that essential step. “Happy the gentle”- St Augustine says this means those who do not let their passions rule them (he says “it is a most worthy thing to govern impulse by reflection”) – we are not animals, just a mass of instincts “red in tooth and claw”, we are creatures endowed with reason, with the means of thought and self-control, and when we exercise these gifts, we achieve a measure of stability in our lives, our fulfilment, our “heritage”. “Happy those who mourn”- this refers to us mourning not for our departed as we usually think, but mourning for our sins- the inevitable result of our reflecting on and attempting to restrain our selfish desires. St Hilary says it comes in third place because it is the Three-in-One, the Trinity, who forgives sins, the sins we mourn for. And then we see in the next two beatitudes that once we are right with God in our own lives, we immediately want to be right with our fellow human beings, and want them to be right with God too. And so next comes “Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right”- we want a world where there is justice- but notice how this is joined to mercy, “Happy the merciful”. The old commentators said “justice and mercy are so joined together, that the one must ever be tempered by the other: for justice without mercy is cruelty, and mercy without justice is weakness”. Of this part of the Beatitudes St Remi, the great 6th century bishop of Reims, says that the merciful man is someone with “an unhappy heart because he regards others’ afflictions as his own” and St Jerome in the 4th century says being merciful to others is all about bearing with their sins- bearing their burdens, both their material and their spiritual needs. And so to the sixth Beatitude. Why is this number 6? Well, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury, St Anselm, says: because on the sixth day God created man, and here in sixth position we have the new man, what the new human being who belongs to Christ will be like- “Happy the pure in heart”. In the garden of Eden when it all went wrong, Adam and Eve lose their innocence don’t they, they hide from God (as if!), they cannot face him anymore because they are so conscious of their sin- they can’t look him in the eye, as we say. But now, the new human beings, the new creation of Christians, we can look God in the face if we have no sin on our conscience, if we are following Our Lord in all his teachings and all their implications- Jesus by his death on the cross has taken on all that burden of sin and freed us from its consequences forever, so that easy straightforward relationship with God that our first parents enjoyed can be restored to us- “they shall see God”. St John Chrysostom, preaching in Constantinople in the 4th century, says “as a man tears himself away from evil and does good, in this measure will he see God, either a little or more, at times or at all times, according to the human possibility”. And so there will be peace –the long reign of discord which has been the human condition since the Fall will have its end, we each of us can do, must do, must want to do, our part in ending it, being “peacemakers”, bringers of peace to those with whom we have to do, at home and at work. Because after all, we are the baptised, members of Christ, and intimately related to him in the sacraments, we are indeed “sons of God”. Of course, there are many people in our world who don’t want what we have to offer, who don’t want the peace we want for them: they like their own way of looking at things, they would rather continue in their own selfishness, however destructive and self-destructive it may be, and they often resent us and our message- we must expect this, that is why this prologue to Our Lord’s new teachings ends with a sober note: “Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right”.
And so we see in the Beatitudes, when we look at them through the eyes of our distant ancestors in the Faith, a vision of what we as Christians should be, what the Church should be- nothing less than a new creation! The old ways that have trapped and disfigured humanity can be undone- there is another way. What does St Paul say? “I will show you a still more excellent way”. Dear Jesus, we belong to you, we are your family the Church; make us “poor in spirit”, help us to put you in your rightful place in our lives; help us to have a heart that sorrows not just for our own troubles but for the troubles of others; make of us your new creation, the “pure in heart” who “shall see God” now and in eternity. Amen.