November 1, 2020
Solemnity of All Saints, November1, 2020 – Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; 1 John 3:1-34; Matthew 5:1-12A
All of us who received a religious education, whether in a parochial school or in a religious education class, up until probably the early 1970s, were required to memorize the eight Beatitudes, and give them back orally or in a written form on an exam. Imagine my surprise then, as a little boy, the first time I was at Mass and the priest proclaimed the gospel I just read. I said to myself, “Ooh, Jesus had to memorize them too.”
That’s because we were not aware. we were not made aware, that what we memorized was part of gospel passage. That, in fact, altogether there were nine Beatitudes, the last one aimed directly at Jesus’ audience rather than at a presumed group of people. The “this,” and the “that.” You, “you were persecuted in my name.”
In order to understand what we need to know about these Beatitudes, first of all we have to realize that when we were taught them they were treated as individual maxims, separate from one another. And that each one of them was analyzed for us as though a particular virtue, which was meaningful enough as it stood. But the way the gospels were formed tells us a very different story about the Beatitudes.
I want to just give you a very brief scripture lesson here. The Beatitudes are found in slightly different form in two of the four gospels. Matthew and Luke. When Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels, they had Mark’s gospel as an outline. But they also had information that was circulating probably in a written form, that they both could use, and they also had information that was the treasured memory of only in their community. And so they filled in the outline of Mark’s gospel from two other sources - a source they had in common, and the sources that were individually theirs. And the story of the Beatitudes was one of these things they held in common, but the version we find in St. Luke’s gospel is very different from what we just heard. Instead of saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says, “Blessed are you poor in spirit.” Instead of, “Blessed are those who mourn,” “Blessed are you who are mourning now.” And where Matthew has Jesus go up on a mountain, Luke has Jesus come down to a level stretch.
Imagine this. Imagine that Jesus is confronted by a large crowd of people, as he frequently was. He comes down from where he was to be with them, walk among them, and see them eye to eye, face to face. As he walks through the crowd, he sees someone who is obviously starving. He says to the person, “Blessed are you who are hungry, one day you will be filled, you will be satisfied.” To another one who is crippled up and marked with all of the drudgery of life, “Blessed are you who mourn, one day you will laugh.” And as he looks through the crowd, he sees people who are well fed and well dressed, and he becomes angry. He says, “Woe to you who now are filled, one day you will be hungry. Woe to you who think you have everything you want now and you are laughing, some day you’re going to cry.” A very different experience. That’s probably how it first happened.
So why does Matthew have such a different version. Well, because Matthew’s audience is different. They are Jewish followers of Jesus, almost 30 years after the crucifixion. And most people of Jewish descent have made up their minds for or against Jesus. It’s split households in communities in two, bitter disagreements with one another. He wants to console them. And so he paints a picture of Jesus going up on a mountain because the great Jewish hero, Moses, had gone up onto a mountain. When Moses got up to top of the mountain, God gave him Law, The Ten Commandments. When Jesus arrives at the top of the mountain, he himself gives law. He himself is the law giver. He calls his closest followers to himself. He doesn’t teach them ten things they may not ever do, “Thou shalt not.” He gives them a pattern for living. Whereas our teachers tried to separate the Beatitudes and explain them one at a time, for Jesus and his followers, all eight of them are exactly the same, one from another. It’s a very Hebrew type of writing. It’s called doublets. You take an idea and express it once. The next line or several lines down you express it again in a slightly different form, more intense, or maybe you give its negative in order to contrast it, but you say the same thing over and over again. So what we have here is a pattern of the righteous person. And a pattern of the expected reward for righteousness.
So what then do we make of Matthew’s Beatitudes. We live in a time when there is an aggressive materialism devouring our society. We live in a time when people approach one another, both as individuals and as groups, with a chip on our shoulder, ready to be angry. We approach one another without empathy, without compassion, unable to perceive the great grief that hangs over our world, especially in this time where we have lost almost a quarter of a million people to one disease. We live in a time when people are craving, hungry for righteousness and justice, but often without the willingness to also suffer persecution in the pursuit of that righteousness and justice. The world needs what Jesus proposes in the Beatitudes. What unites Matthew’s story and Luke’s story is Jesus. He is the Beatitudes come to life. He, himself, is the living expression, in his life, his teaching and his behavior, of what he calls us to be.
In the second reading, John says something interesting. He says, “The world does not recognize us, because it did not recognize Him. And yet we are called to be God’s children. We are God’s children now.” The world finds it difficult to recognize the values that are gathered together in this way of living, but the world hungers for them, despite the fact that it does not recognize them. If we try to follow the rule of life that Jesus provides for us - the eight Beatitudes- then now, right now, we’ll be called children of God. If we try to follow the pattern of life that Jesus provides for us, then taking a line from St. Luke’s Jesus, “Blessed are you. Blessed are we.”