What is commanded by the fourth Beatitude? What is forbidden by the seventh Beatitude? We were never given answers to such questions in our childhood. In fact such questions were never asked. But we had to memorise answers on each of the Ten Commandments: not only to the questions ‘What is commanded’ and ‘What is forbidden’ by each of the Commandments, but ‘What else is commanded’ and ‘What else is forbidden’. That came to 40 answers. But there was silence on the Beatitudes – even though they are the essence of the Sermon on the Mount, as the Sermon on the Mount is the essence of the Gospel. This was surely an imbalance: the Old Testament choking out the New.
Many ancient writers saw the parallel and the contrast between Moses receiving the Law on Mount Sinai, and Jesus pronouncing the Beatitudes on the Mount of Olives. Chromatius, who flourished around the year 400, wrote, “When the law was first given on the mountain, the people were forbidden to draw close. But now, as the Lord was teaching on the mountain, no one is forbidden. Rather, all are invited that they may hear, because there is severity in the law and grace in the gospel.”
The very first word tells it all. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Another translation says “How happy are the poor in spirit.” But there are differences between ‘blessed’ and ‘happy’.
You can be blessed without knowing it. I saw this clearly as I watched a young couple almost competing with each other to hold their baby, while the baby slept through it all. And you can be blessed without appreciating it. “You’re blessed with good health,” someone says to you; but you don’t feel blessed at all, you feel just normal. It is only when you fall ill that you appreciate health.
“When you have a toothache,” said Thich Nhat Hanh, “you realise how wonderful it is not to have a toothache.”
Happiness, on the other hand, is just a passing state of feeling. The word ‘happiness’ is related to ‘happen’ and ‘perhaps’: it’s about randomness, it’s about hit and miss. Feelings, like the weather, come and go and are constantly changing. You can't stake a claim to happiness because it’s not firm ground and stakes take no hold there.
Jesus doesn’t tell you that you are happy. He tells you that you are blessed. He tells the poor in spirit that whether they know it or not, whether they appreciate it or not, they are blessed. Blessedness comes from beyond the changeable world of feelings and ideas. The mediaeval theologians spoke about ‘beatitudo’. It was not the subjective feeling of happiness but the objective state of being rightly aligned in one’s life.
As we go through our phases we are to know that there is a loving God who cares for us with the love of a father and a mother. It is especially when we are weak and without resources of our own that we come to know it. It is when we ourselves begin, even in the slightest degree, to embody some of God's own qualities, made visible in the face of Jesus – that we know it. The Beatitudes are the best portrait we have of Jesus himself, and he honours us by telling us they are our portrait too.
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