It is with this that we come to the Gospel. The Beatitudes are the magna carta for the shaping or the forming of the people that Jesus wants for His Kingdom. But a blue-print is never without its context and this is important for our appreciation of the Beatitudes. At the start of Jesus’ public ministry, the people were inspired by His preaching and impressed by His actions until He began to challenge their orthodoxies—whether their beliefs, convictions or ideas. In general, people are not contextless or tabulæ rasæ, meaning that they are not blank slates but they have notions of who they are and how things are supposed to be. The problem begins when worldviews are fossilised or codified and nobody likes to be told that what they have held on to dearly is wrong. It unsettles them. They react.
In the face of opposition, proclaiming any alternative worldview can be challenging. The radically bold pronouncement of the Beatitudes unsettled the audience then as they do us today. Even more so today. For example, the Declaration of Independence of the United States which lays down the principle that every individual has the right to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness feels tame in contrast to our aspirations. Note that the Declaration sprang from a background in which the quest for “personal” fulfilment or happiness was set within a religious framework, that is, a nation under God. Today, the objective standards are personal and individualistic and they are framed as the rights to good health, great wealth, personal prestige. These are usually grouped under the umbrella of a “good life”. Never mind the fact that a “good life” is more of a moral imperative than a description of an easy and comfortable life. Life is good and a good life are two different realities.
In fact, the programme outlined by Jesus to be numbered as His people has, in many extreme cases, led to the deprivation of life. To be fair, to be blessed or happy in the way that Jesus enumerated in the Beatitudes, is not a condemnation of our natural aspiration. Why? Creation is God’s endowment for man to enjoy. God did not give grudgingly. However, everything has a place in God’s creation. What has happened is the inversion of our perspective. From blessings as gifts, we have come to view material wealth, prosperity and health, as our entitlement. We deserve them and God owes them to us.
This sense of entitlement makes the Beatitudes hard to embrace. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are you who are abused, persecuted and have all kinds of calumny spoken against you. Are you kidding? Every statement runs counter to our native appetite. It may not be that accurate to speak of this inclination as natural but more precise to view our faculty of passion from a perspective that it has been damaged by sin.
The priority of life is not so much to be successful as it is to live a good life, that is, a moral life of excellence and virtue. The goal in life is not to live forever. It is to live in a manner that dares to lay down one’s life for a greater value or better still for a person who is worth dying for. It sounds alien but it is not because a father or mother will give his or her life for his or her child. It is part of our constitution or make-up. The grace is to convert that dying from “egoistic” to “altruistic”, from selfish to self-effacing. It is within this magnanimous framework that the Beatitudes make sense.
We are living in troubled times. When a society becomes decadent, it will begin to close in on itself. Luxury, or the good life, instead of it being a consolation along the pilgrimage of life, will soon become a value in itself. We are fatter and lazier. Lost in the clutches of hedonism, we cannot see beyond the here and now. As a result, whatever aspirations we may have, they have to be fulfilled. Otherwise, life becomes meaningless.
The good thing is that society is not entirely lost. It still retains a semblance of right and wrong even though its sense of morality is misguided. It appears that our desire for the good is influenced by a therapeutic moralistic deism. Within such a belief, the primary mark of society is to feel good. Goodness is measured by feeling more than any other values.
The aim of life is to be and not to feel good because we have been created for an eternity that cannot be satisfied temporally. In other words, eternity cannot find its fulfilment in the temporal. The knowledge that we have the possibility of everlasting life is both a consolation as well as a compensation for sorrow. It makes the unrequited yearnings of the heart bearable. Take a movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon starring both Chow Yun Fatt and Michelle Yeoh. Whatever “sexual attraction” they had for each other was never fulfilled. When our notion of life is restricted to the temporal, these two characters would basically be lost souls because of their “unfulfilment” but if our vision is more eternal, whatever cannot be resolved in this lifetime, there is an eternity for the final resolution. For example, “adultery” can be excused by claiming that “you have married wrong person”. Consider a man who has a wrong wife, already three children but who chose to uphold the vows of his marriage. Stupid in the eyes of the world for not giving in to the excuse to cheat on the wife. But in the eyes of God, a man of integrity.
The spirituality of the Beatitudes is based on this principle and that means that the troubles we encounter in this world, even though they can be overwhelming, they do not indicate a permanency. No matter how tested we are by circumstances, they do not define who we are.
This realisation makes the Beatitudes a bit more comprehensible even though it is not entirely palatable. The question we need to ask ourselves is what sort of philosophy of life should we hold on to? The answer can be helped if we consider this scenario and that is this: when we have gained everything, what is next. The richest or the most successful person in the world will have arrived at the pinnacle and there they must ask the question of what the next is. Is there anything more?
In summary, the Beatitudes prepare us for eternity. They help us to see a realm beyond this world. There the values are different from this world of incompleteness and inadequacy. Whatever we experience here will never satisfy us completely. Whatever we achieve here will never fulfil us fully. Sadly, the response is more hoarding and accumulating, be it wealth or even health. The drive or passion we have was never intended “solely” for this life. The fatal mistake is to consider what we find in this world to be the final satisfaction or fulfilment. Whereas, in eternity, what the world prizes will no longer be what attracts us. Instead, we shall live the Beatitudes with a kind of peace and integrity that the world cannot give. In conclusion, the Beatitudes only make sense when we realise that whatever we are on earth or have in this world is only a stepping stone to the next. The Beatitudes are less commandments and more invitation from the Heart of Christ to seek the values of the eternal Kingdom through a life of excellence, well-lived in this passing world as a preparation for the next. We hold on despite our losses here because of the promised gain of heaven. Blessed are you for trusting that God will never be outdone.
