Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

In today’s Gospel passage, we see the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In the first sentences, Jesus sits and his disciples come to him and he begins to teach them. In our culture we are used to people standing behind a podium when they address us, so we find it striking that Jesus sits in order to teach the people. However, in Jesus’ day, speaking from a seated position was a sign of the authority of the person doing the speaking. So by sitting, Jesus is proclaiming his authority to teach. And we, who know Jesus to be God Incarnate, understand where this authority comes from. It is the same authority of the God who gave the Law to Moses on top of Mt. Sinai. So here we can see Jesus as the new Moses, giving us his teachings in person.

Just as Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, Jesus begins by giving us the Eight Beatitudes. If you count them, you come up with nine, but if you look closely, you will see that the eighth and ninth are a repetition of the same beatitude on the blessing of being persecuted. The Ten Commandments, with a couple of exceptions (Honor your father and mother, and keep the Sabbath holy) tell us what not to do. The Beatitudes with only a couple of exceptions, tell us what to do, and that we will be blessed if we are this kind of person. Thus, we are told to be poor in spirit, to be meek, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to be merciful, to be clean of heart, and to be peacemakers. For these six, we can choose to be this type of person, to practice these qualities in our lives. We may struggle with one or another of them, but with God’s grace, we will learn to do it.

The remaining two are a little different. We associate mourning with the experience of loss, especially the loss through the death of a loved one. But other forms of loss also cause us to mourn, and we are assured in this Beatitude that God will be with us to comfort us in our mourning. But I think there is also another way to mourn—when we recognize that so many people in our world do not know Christ. If we truly believe that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn 14: 6), then we recognize that any human life that does not know Christ will be lacking in something essential, and that should be a cause for mourning for us, and a cause for doing something about it.

Finally, we might also feel that the eighth beatitude about being persecuted might not apply to us, since we are not being overtly persecuted in today’s world. However, we do experience much opposition to our Christian values in today’s world, and this should put us at odds with many aspects of our culture. And this opposition is not only from the external world. Some of it comes from within ourselves. That is why we need to begin each Mass with the penitential rite, because we are sinners in need of repentance, and why we should celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation often. Thus, we can, each of us, make all eight of the beatitudes part of our life and part of who we are.

Reflection by Fr. Aquinas Keusenkothen, OSB