Christ the Cornerstone
In the Beatitudes, Christ challenges us to turn our lives inside out
The Gospel reading for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Mt 5:1-12a) contains the Eight Beatitudes. These have been described as Christianity’s fundamental ethical principles, and they certainly do proscribe for us a way of living that leads to goodness and a happy life. But the Beatitudes are much more than a set of moral guidelines.
The way of life presented to us by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount turns our whole understanding of ethics or righteousness inside out. Each of the eight Beatitudes is counterintuitive. From Christ’s perspective, the way to happiness is different from what we expect it to be. Indeed, as the Beatitudes show us, the values that we assume are correct, and that are supported by our culture, need to be turned inside out.
In his Life of Christ (Chapter 11, “Beatitudes”), The Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen writes, “The Sermon on the Mount cannot be separated from [Christ’s] crucifixion, any more than day from night. The day our Lord taught the Beatitudes, he signed his own death warrant.”
Everyone wants to be happy, Archbishop Sheen says, but according to Jesus, the only way to genuine happiness leads through the Cross.
The eight Beatitudes can be contrasted with what Archbishop Sheen calls “eight flimsy catchwords of the world: security, revenge, laughter, popularity, getting even, sex, armed might, and comfort” which the Lord turns upside down:
To those who say you cannot be happy unless you are rich, he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” To those who say don’t let them get away with it, he says, “Blessed are the patient.” To those who say laugh and the world laughs with you, he says, “Blessed are those who mourn.” To those who say if nature gave you sex instincts you ought to give them free expression, otherwise you will become frustrated, he says, “Blessed are the clean of heart.” To those who say be popular and well known, he says, “Blessed are you when men revile you and speak all manner of evil against you falsely because of me.” To those who say in times of peace prepare for war, he says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
All so-called moral values which make happiness depend on self-expression, license, having a good time, or “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die” are rejected by Jesus as dead ends. They do not lead to genuine happiness, but as Archbishop Sheen points out, they too often bring “mental disorders, unhappiness, false hopes, fears, and anxieties.”
To be “blessed” is to live a life of openness to God’s will (rather than our own) and to spend our lives in pursuit of the kind of self-sacrificing love that Jesus showed us through his words and example during his whole life, up to and including his death on the cross. Happiness is not self-generated (as if we had the power to “make ourselves happy”). It comes from the kind of self-emptying that Jesus demonstrated through his incarnation, through his life of humble service, and through his giving up his life as a ransom for our sins.
The second reading for the Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time (1 Cor 1:26-31)
reinforces the idea that God’s perspective about what is most important in life is often very different from our understanding of things. “God chose the foolish of the world,” Saint Paul tells us, “to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong.” God chose the poor and lowly. He sought out those who were despised by the world, and those who count for nothing, “to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.”
This is what Jesus did when he became a man and when he freely chose to hand himself over to the religious and political leaders of his day as the sacrificial lamb who takes away the sin of the world. This is what it means to turn the world’s values inside out and upside down—to be blessed by God for our fidelity to the way he has chosen for us rather than what we would choose for ourselves.
“Consider your own calling, brothers and sisters,” St. Paul admonishes us. “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” We are ordinary people chosen by God to live lives of extraordinary goodness, humility and kindness. We are called to be humble, patient, pure and wholly obedient to God’s will. Above all, we are challenged to be peacemakers who follow the only path that leads to authentic happiness: the Way of the Cross. †