Try to imagine, if only for a moment, being separated from your young child. If your politics will not permit you to empathize with those on our borders, then picture a different scenario. There are other reasons why children are suddenly taken from their parents.
As a parent, this is not something that you saw coming. You have not had time to prepare yourself or your child for what is happening. You have no idea how long the separation will last. You do not know for sure if you will ever see each other again.
You have not been given any time to converse with your child, to say that is not what you intended, that there is nothing you can do to prevent it, that your child must not believe that you do this willingly or that you do not love your child.
What else could you do, save hold your young child as tightly as possible for as long as permitted, saying over and over, “I love you; it will be alright”?
Don’t the Beatitudes ever remain both comforting and confounding?
Having preached for 35 years, I would be loath to learn how many times I have identified some particular belief as the very core of the Christian faith. In my defense, the teachings of the faith do have a way of seamlessly conjoining themselves. For me, that accounts for some of the faith’s allure.
But don’t most of us suspect that however confounding and unlike the world in which we live, the Beatitudes perfectly express the mission and the person of Jesus—and, consequently, of the faith and the community that he gave to us?
Read them at any stage of your life, in any conceivable circumstance of your life. Don’t they ever remain both comforting and confounding? Comforting because they suffuse our lives with hope. Confounding because they do not correspond to the world in which we live. Don’t all of us, at one level of consciousness or another, find ourselves saying or, perhaps, praying, “I sure hope that they are true.”
In confronting calamity, the Prophet Jeremiah cried out,
Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings,
who seeks his strength in flesh,
whose heart turns away from the Lord (17:5).
Then he quickly countered,
Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose hope is the Lord (17:7).
The person and mission of Jesus as expressed in the Beatitudes perfectly correspond to the stark division that Jeremiah draws in human life: There is a world and person, neither of which we can directly see but from which flow every blessing that this life can offer. If we choose what faith can perceive over what our eyes do indeed see, we will be blessed. If we will not raise our eyes, then we cut ourselves off from the very source of life, which is the very meaning of being cursed.
St. Paul preached to the church in Corinth:
[I]f Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain;
you are still in your sins.
Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,
we are the most pitiable people of all (1 Cor 15:16-19).
The credibility of both the person and the mission of Jesus rise and fall with our belief in his resurrection from the dead. In his triumph over death, Christ reveals a world beyond our own and the love that long has ruled therein.
We cannot see God because we and our world are utterly enveloped in God’s love.
Some people reduce Jesus of Nazareth to a long line of wise, human teachers. Certainly his Golden Rule—doing unto others as you would have them do unto you—transcends any creed. Even a non-believer finds it a credible, albeit challenging, course of action.
But if Jesus did not come among us to reveal a person and a world that we do not know, could not know without his life, death and resurrection, then neither the totality of his life nor the Beatitudes make any sense at all. Reread them. If this world is all there is, then the Beatitudes are not only nonsense; they are wantonly wicked.
The core of our faith is that we are loved by someone whom we cannot see. We cannot see God because we and our world are utterly enveloped in God’s love. At present, we are like newborn infants who do not distinguish the goodness of the world from the face and the voice of the mother.
Belief in another world gives us the courage to resist and to renew this one.
The heart of our faith, the person and preaching of Jesus, tells us that this world of longing and suffering is not what the God who loves us intended. We have been separated from the love of a parent by forces beyond our control, and if our loving parent has permitted this to happen it is not for any lack of love. The hope of our faith is that our parent will find us, reclaim us and lift us again into arms of love.
The tortured event, a beloved child cruelly sundered from a loving parent, is how our faith understands the human condition. We read sacred Scripture to remind ourselves of the world from which we came and to which we travel. We celebrate sacraments so that Christ can reach into history from both past and future, giving us tangible signs of his graciousness. We cling to our brothers and our sisters in the faith because the world darkens and we need them to remind us of the loving family from which we come.
Read the Beatitudes. Memorize them. They do not describe the world in which we live. They tell us how to live in this world so as to prepare for one yet to come. Belief in another world gives us the courage to resist and to renew this one. And always remember: Jesus preached the Beatitudes. He lived them and died for them. And in rising from the dead, Christ confirmed them.
Readings: Jeremiah 17:5-8 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20 Luke 6:17, 20-26
