First Sunday of Lent, cycle A

Matthew 4:1-11

My earliest memories are pretty foggy. But I think I can still resurrect some images from about the time I was four. I know I wasn't in school, my mother was working as a nurse, my dad was working for my mother's father in another city, having just come back from being in the army. I spent the days with my grandparents – who doted on me. I knew I was special. And this was reinforced when my mother had a day off. She would take me shopping, and part of that was to go to the local Woolworth's where she would buy me an ice cream soda. Sometimes she'd buy some little toy. I was the center of the universe! I was special.

As time went on I would now and then get hints that in the eyes of the world I wasn't so special. Being fairly unathletic I would generally get picked last when they were choosing teams for baseball. I didn't belong to the in crowd in high school; I was kind of a nerd in those days and that probably hasn't changed. But there were many times when the world reminded me that I wasn't special. One of the biggest shocks of retiring from my job as a physician was the sudden loss of being special, because like it or not, doctors are considered special.

I think all of us feel special and we like that feeling. We gravitate towards situations where we can be special. And it starts when we are small children.

I think Jesus felt special. He had, after all, just before this passage today, undergone baptism by John, and he heard a voice from heaven saying “this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!” That's got to make you feel special. But today we hear of the three temptations in the desert. And what is the common theme running through these temptations? I think the devil is trying to tempt Jesus to believe he is not special, that he is not really the Beloved Son.

Jesus is hungry, as you would be after fasting for 40 days and nights. The devil tells him to turn stones into bread. “If you are the beloved one, why are you standing here hungry?” he seems to be saying. And Jesus does not give in to the temptation. He can be hungry, he can be starving, but he still knows he is the beloved of the Father. He doesn't need proof.

And the same is true when Satan offers him all the kingdoms of the world. He seems to be saying, “If you are so special, why do you have no power at all? Shouldn't special people have more than you have?” And Jesus, of course, redirects the conversation – Only God is deserving of worship; to worship someone or something else, like power, is futile and a waste of energy.

And when Satan suggests he throw himself off the tower to prove that he is special and that God will send his angels to bear him up, Jesus again refuses to yield to this argument. He does not need to put God to the test; he doesn't need any concrete proof that he is God's beloved.

I know a young woman who is dying of cancer. She and her family have stormed heaven for a miracle. It doesn't look like they will get the miracle they want. Certainly she must feel tempted that she is not special, that she is not Beloved of the Father. But that is the assurance we all receive at Baptism. We too step out of the water and our souls hear those words, “You too are my beloved, in whom I am well pleased!” We can wander far, we can live lives of sin, we can fail to live up to our potential, we can lie, cheat, steal and murder – and we can run away from the Father and live with pigs. But nothing can take away the fact that we are beloved, that the Father continues to love us, that it is as though we are his only one, his only child.

In Lent we remember that we are flawed, that we are sinful creatures. And we undertake penances to discipline ourselves, to turn our back on our sins and repent, and to demonstrate with more than words that we want to return to our Father, that we are sorry for drifting away from his love. And the Father delights in what tokens we offer him. And when we make these little efforts, he reaches down and loves us and helps us to draw closer to him.

My brothers and sisters, Lent is a time to remember that we are beloved, despite the fact that the world keeps telling us otherwise. The world steps on us, the world tells us that we are just one of some seven billion people, that we are subject to accident and disease and ultimately death, that our plans seldom turn out the way we want them to – Oh, yes, the world is always telling us that we are nobody, that we are alone, that we are victims of fate, that once we are gone we will scarcely be missed.

But that is the devil talking, who is constantly tempting us, who is telling us that we are nobody, that we are at the mercy of fate, that God isn't really interested in me, or what I do. The devil is telling us that God only loves the people who are perfect, the people who do harsh penances, the people who live lives as monks or nuns. The devil says that if we want God's love we need to do more, pray more, sacrifice more. The devil tells us that we might as well give up, we will never be Beloved.

But we are, and we need to remind ourselves and each other of this every day.. Husbands should remind their wives that they are beloved, and vice versa; and parents should tell their children, and employers should tell their employees. What a world we would live in if we were constantly reminding each other that we are beloved, and that we are pleasing to God – without doing anything; just be being.

Ash Wednesday, 2017

Just recently we visited my oldest daughter who lives outside of Washington DC. I was greeted excitedly by her youngest daughter, age almost six, who followed me around telling me about whatever was on her mind. I sat down and she disappeared for a few minutes, then brought me a piece of candy which she had apparently unwrapped for my convenience, leaving chocolate marks on her hands. And do you know, I was deeply touched. It wasn't that she gave me her last piece of chocolate – it turned out she had more. It wasn't that I needed the chocolate. It was simply that I recognized she had done this out of love.

Therese of Liseaux, the Little Flower, is a doctor of the Church, primarily because she brought to the attention of the Church that little acts done with great love are precious to the Father. The Father needs nothing we can give him. But, being a Father, it seems likely that he takes delight in the little things we do out of love for Him.

We are about to embark on another Lent. You are here getting marked with ashes as a reminder that our time on earth is limited. We are reminded that everything we can do, everything anyone can do, is in the long run, so much ash. The great men and women of the past are just distorted memories now. And the ashes remind us that this is our fate as well – in this world.

And it's traditional for Catholics to select a penance for lent. I don't think Penance is the best word. What we are really trying to do is put something in our lives, or take something out of our lives, so that when Easter rolls around we are closer to God. And if you are like me, you might have selected something and a week into lent you may have fallen and gotten up again a few times, and maybe eventually you gave up. Or maybe you persisted to the end, hardly being able to wait for Easter, when you can go back to your old self; eating that candy, drinking that cocktail, watching that television program. On Easter Sunday it will be as though you never underwent a penance.

But remember that little acts done with great love are precious to the Father. This year instead of a dramatic penance, I invite you to select something little, something that you can do in a few minutes, something that doesn't require much on your part. And when you do this, talk to the Father; tell him you love him, and you are offering this little token of your love, just like my granddaughter offered me her sticky piece of chocolate. And do this every day during lent – the little action and the words of love and affection.

So what might that look like? One person was used to having two cups of tea in the morning. He gave up the first, drinking hot water instead and offering this little token to the Father. Then he would have his second cup of tea as usual. Or you might set the alarm for five minutes earlier than usual, and when it goes off, give those extra five minutes you could have been sleeping to the Father, and speak to Him with love. Or if you are in the habit of reading the newspaper starting with the sports page, start with the comics instead and offer that to the Father, with your love. Little things, done with prayers of love, might just bring you closer to the Father than most of the things you've done in the past.

Now I would suggest that you do something like this every day. But you should also do something once or twice a week. We have stations of the cross every Friday evening followed by a communion service. That will take a little more than half an hour out of your week. We have a course on the Book of Revelation – I always enjoy learning new things and believe me, most Christians know very little about the Book of Revelation. We have bible study in the afternoon and again in the evening; check the bulletin. And between two thirty and three fifteen every Tuesday we have adoration before the Blessed Sacrament (that's spiritual radiation therapy, by the way) along with the recitation of the Rosary, the chaplet of Divine Mercy, and formal repose of the Blessed Sacrament. Under 45 minutes! And remember that you are making a commitment for just a short duration – a commitment to a little act done with great love every day, and a commitment of time to do something to bring yourself closer to God once a week.

God isn't asking you to be a martyr or wear a hair shirt or completely upend your life. As you undertake your Lenten practices, remember why you are doing them – They are to show your Father that you love him and that you are aware that He loves you in return. This is the way to use Lent, This is the way to undergo transformation. Today as you receive the ashes, remind yourself that maybe this is the last Lent you will have. And ask the Father and our Blessed Mother to help you make a good Lent.

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 6:24-34

A few years back, there was a cartoon which showed a man curled up on the floor while his wife sat in a chair looking horrified. There was a bomb on the floor and the fuse was lit. Shards of glass from the broken window were all around. The man was saying, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't worry enough about this happening!” Do you know anyone like that?

Someone did a study once. 40% of what people worry about never happens; 35% involve things that can't be changed. 15% of the worries actually turned out better than expected. And 8% had to do with small, insignificant things which the person recognized as not worthy of worrying about, but did so anyway. But still I worry.

So Jesus tells us not to worry? I don't think so. We human beings are designed to worry. If it weren't for our ancestors living in caves worrying about food and shelter and how to keep away the wild animals, we wouldn't be here. If it weren't for our ancestors who struggled every day to get enough to eat – if they hadn't worried, we wouldn't be here. We have inherited a strong tendency to worry. But Jesus couldn't be more clear.

So what if I stopped worrying? If I didn't worry about food, God would see to it that the Big Y would deliver a package every day, right? If I didn't worry about shelter, God would send a check to the town of Longmeadow to pay my property taxes, right? Isn't that what Jesus is saying?

And when you think about it, the birds of the air who never worry seldom live through a year or two before they become someone's dinner or freeze to death because they forgot to fly south. And yes, the flowers are beautiful, but only for a little while and then they dry up and turn brown and what good are they?

So what is Jesus getting at?

When I was very young I had every intention of becoming a cowboy. My parents got me a cap pistol and a pair of cowboy boots and I was all set. However, that didn't work out. When I was in high school, I wanted to learn all I could about mathematics, and thought I would become a professor. But that didn't work out. In college I decided to become a missionary, and wanted to have a medical degree, so I majored in biology. But after I had the medical degree a few years later, I also had a family and my impulse was long gone. And here I am in the tail end of my life and I look back and see that everything I planned to do never happened. And everything I worried about never happened. And yet, somehow, God led me down a path which I probably wouldn't have taken if I had made all the decisions. And I'm really very happy with the way things turned out, even though I had very little to do with it, except go along with the flow.

And I can see how during the course of my life the rough edges of my personality have been ground off, (God isn't quite done with that, my wife tells me) and the selfishness and self-centeredness have been partly removed; and my ability to empathize with other people has increased somewhat. God has been at work in my life.

And I think, what if I had learned not to worry a long time ago? What if I learned not to worry right now? How much more could God do if I didn't constantly stand in his way because of worry? Because worry presumes that I can actually influence my future. But all I have to do to disabuse myself of that notion is look back on my life. And how many times did I start down the wrong path because I worried about the future?

Jesus is, after all, not saying we shouldn't be prudent. There's nothing wrong with saving for retirement or your kid's education. But tomorrow you could have a heart attack. Or some terrorist could decide to blow himself up a few feet away from you. Or you could begin that long slide into Alzheimer's disease that you can't do anything about. Everything is contingent.

What Jesus wants us to remember is that for us Christians, God has our back. Do you remember how Jesus told his apostles that he had to go to Jerusalem and be tried and crucified? Jesus knew, as a human being, that if he went to Jerusalem, it was extremely likely that he would be killed. He didn't have to go. If he had worried, he would be headed in the other direction. And on the cross, he cried out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” But in the end, he said, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” Jesus as a human being did not know what would happen beyond death. If he knew that he would rise again in glory, his suffering would be a sham. But Jesus knew what you and I know – God has our back. He proved it when he raised up his Son.

Many translations of this passage tell us that we cannot serve God and money. But the original word was “Mammon” which was a Greek word that reflected the Aramaic word Jesus used. We aren't sure what that word means; it is the only place in the bible that we find it. Some of the semetic peoples who were not Jewish had a word like that. It seemed to mean something like “The Wealth that I can trust”. And that is why Jesus contrasts God with Mammon. Where do we put our trust. We can't have it both ways. And only by trusting in God, which means fighting to get rid of all those chronic worries which kind of imply that I am in control, can we let God into our lives so that he can transform them.

Whenever you worry, remember, God has your back. Then stop worrying and invite God to take over. I'm still working at it, but that's the point; don't give up.

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:38-48

There is a story about Desmond Tutu, the Episcopal archbishop of South Africa, back during the days of apartheid. He was walking on a narrow sidewalk when a white man came walking toward him. The man told him to get out of the way, and Tutu stepped down into the street. As the man passed, he said, “I don't step aside for gorillas.” Tutu replied, “Well, I do.”. Now the only thing about this story that I don't know is how loud Tutu said this. Since he's still alive I suspect it was in a fairly quiet voice. Jesus gives us two more interpretations of the commandments that Jews followed. Now you may not recognize these commandments, because they aren't technically part of the ten commandments. However, remember that the Jews had six hundred thirteen commandments to follow. Each of these commandments had a lot of footnotes. So the commandment “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was the foundation of a whole legal system. If someone deprived a person of something unjustly, the judges would try to find an equivalent that the offender had to repay. We see some of this elaborated in other parts of the Old Testament – if you killed a person's cow and didn't have one of your own, they would find something of equal value that you had to give that person. But Jesus gives us an entirely different twist on this commandment. If someone takes something from you, let them have it. If someone slaps you on the left cheek, turn and offer the right one as well. If you are forced to do something, do twice as much as you were supposed to do. Is this any way to run a justice system?

I look at this commandment as impossible for most of us to follow. But if we look more deeply, I think we can see the point Jesus is making. The logical extension of the law “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is violence. It is of course a good basis for living in a community, but if we take this law personally and use it as a way to behave in interpersonal relationships, we end up filled with anger, the desire for revenge, and wishing evil on other people. If someone takes our cloak, and we react by demanding that it be returned or doing violence to get it back, we give that cloak a lot more value than it has. And of course, to the extent that these emotions consume us, we lose our freedom, we invite those urges which lead us to sin. And of course the other person sees everything from his or her vantage point, and for him or her, you are the enemy; and the circle widens.

This desire for “getting even” is especially dangerous in marriages, because it makes adversaries of the two who have pledged to become one. And yet it seems to be a common topic of disagreement in a marriage – You did this so I am going to do that.

The other law Jesus refers to is “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” Again, the rabbis spent a lot of time discussing who was neighbor and who was enemy; and as a rule for a small nation surrounded by aggressive neighbors, it made a lot of sense for the citizens of that country to follow this rule. Trust your kinsman, be very suspicious of the foreigner. We see this sentiment being played out even today in our debate over immigration.

But again, Jesus is warning us that we shouldn't be applying this as a personal rule. He tells us to imitate our heavenly Father, who gives his gifts to the just and unjust alike. For Jesus, it is again an issue of our essential freedom; if we hate, we aren't free – it takes a lot of energy to carry a grudge around.

So these commandments of Jesus seem to be impossible at first glance. He seems to be telling us that we should be doormats and let people walk all over us. His teachings go against our natural human tendencies.

But maybe that's the point. Our natural human tendencies get us into trouble; they are rooted in original sin. In telling us to reject those natural tendencies, Jesus is actually pointing out the way to joy. A person is joyful if nothing can affect his interior peace; certainly if we are not disturbed by allowing our enemy to hurt us physically or take something from us – our labor, our clothing – we have achieved inner peace. Surely if there is no one left to hate, we have peace. And the more peaceful we are interiorly, the more freedom we have; and when we have peace and freedom, it is easier to form and strengthen our relationship with God. So we are not trying to become doormats; we are becoming free.

What should we do today? If you are like me, there are probably a few people you've met during your life that when you think about them, you react with a little internal anger, because the memory of that person is associated with a bad experience. Is there a way to look at the situation objectively and detach it from the emotions it brings up? Jesus thinks there is.

And equally, how far could someone push you before you would push back? Jesus is not asking us to forgo justice, but to live in a way that no one can disturb our interior peace. Saint John Bosco saw as his mission the care and education of street kids. In his instructions to the members of his order, he talked about the need for discipline, but he emphasized that all discipline needed to be done with love, because of you let yourself get emotionally upset, you were harming your spiritual life even though you might be helping the boy. To me that's kind of what Jesus is talking about.

So this gospel should make us review all those “triggers” that cause us to react without thinking – even internally. Because we can get rid of them and we should, if we want to be joyful, if we want to create a space for God in our hearts.

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:17-37

I don't really like this gospel. I was ok with the ten commandments. It isn't terribly hard to not steal, not covet, not murder, and I honor my parents, I guess. I don't take God's name in vain whatever that means. There are moments when unbecoming language may escape my lips, but I don't bring God into it. And if honoring the Sabbath means going to Church and trying to make the day a little different from the others, I usually do that. The ten commandments aren't that hard. But here Jesus is reinterpreting them. And not just that, he's telling us, it seems, that unless we embrace this much higher standard, we will not enter the kingdom of heaven' we will not be released until we have paid the last penny; our bodies might end up in Gahanna (which is Jesus' way of saying we'll be tossed onto the garbage heap outside the city – I don't think he was thinking of hell).

And by Jesus' standards, I have no hope. It seems that there are always smoldering resentments in my heart. I don't want them there, I try to suppress them when they pop up – but you can't live 74 years without having experienced a few people that you would rather not have ever met. I gather even monks and nuns have this problem. And adultery? It's hard to turn on the television or read the newspaper, or look at billboards, for that matter, without seeing something that exploits our sexuality. Does that qualify as looking at a woman with lust?

Is it possible to let my yes be yes and my no be no? Because I doubt a day goes by when I avoid saying something that's on the tip of my tongue, something that may in fact be very true or even helpful, but I'm afraid to say it. And Jesus continues to reinterpret the commandments, making the keeping of them very difficult if not impossible.

In a way, Jesus is doing what the Pharisees of his time were doing. They described it as “building a fence” around the commandments. It went like this. If the commandment said, “remember to keep holy the Lord's day”, one of the implications is that you couldn't work at your usual occupation. Why? Because labor, which was most of the time physical, took your mind off of God and the obligation to pray. But then, what does labor mean? Eventually, it meant you couldn't prepare a meal, you couldn't walk more than 100 paces from your home, you couldn't light a fire in your house. In other words, by complying with these seemingly trivial rules, you got as far away as you could from breaking the commandment. The Pharisees, the ancestors of modern Jewish rabbis, were making these rules to guarantee that they did not even come near breaking a commandment. But I think Jesus had something different in mind. Jesus is building fences around the commandments, but behind everything he is warning us of consequences – not entering the kingdom of heaven; not being released until we've paid the last penny; being thrown on the garbage heap which is Gehenna. He is basically describing a way to live, where we are always striving to be better. This striving for spiritual perfection, which is really a matter of cooperating with God's grace, with God's desire to transform each of us into sons and daughters who resemble Jesus, the First Born, is the mark of someone who is seeking the kingdom of heaven. To not do so is to be left behind, to have wasted one's opportunities.

Jesus is making the point that we have to look inward – do we harbor those attitudes and psychological dispositions that could lead us to breaking a commandment? Because if we do, we need to get rid of them. When we are chronically angry, yes, that could lead us to kill someone; but just being angry keeps us from being fully human. We are slaves to that passion. Likewise, if we allow ourselves to feel sexual attraction towards someone other than our spouse, it may seem harmless, but it isn't. It enslaves us. There are people addicted to pornography who started out by looking at other human beings with lust in their hearts. And Jesus tells us not to swear. We don't do this much anymore, but in his time, the act of swearing on something like the city you lived in or your mother's grave or some other valued thing was common, and was a way of emphasizing that you were speaking the truth. Jesus is saying, if you have to do that, that means that the rest of the time you can't be trusted to speak the truth. And if you do lie easily, sooner or later you will begin to lie just because you can; truth won't really matter and if that is the case, anything goes.

As is always the case, Jesus is giving us advice that has to do with our achieving happiness here and now. When we get rid of those things that bind us, those habits of the heart which put limits on us, then we are happy, and that is where the kingdom of heaven begins. When we hang onto those attitudes which hold us down, our possibilities are limited; we are less than fully human.

A Jewish friend was asked what would happen if he ate pork or used the wrong set of dishes for his supper or drove to the synagogue on Saturday rather than walked. His answer was, “Why would I do any of those things when God asked me not to?” I think that is a good attitude to have towards these commandments that Jesus interprets for us.

So today lets resolve to go into our own hearts and look for those attitudes which could lead us to breaking the commandments; and let us take Jesus' words seriously – even the little seeds of sin can hold us down – but with God's help and our own efforts we can uproot them and enter the kingdom of heaven.

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:13-16

High school was a mixed blessing for me. I wasn't Irish, I lived on the wrong side of town, and being an introvert, I had trouble making friends. In my graduating class there were about 45 kids. Most of these I had known since first grade. By the time high school rolled around, everybody had settled into their appropriate social sphere. There were the class leaders of course. And the jocks and cheerleaders. There were a few class clowns and a couple of loners. And there were me and my very few friends, who you would probably call Nerds today. We couldn't understand why everybody wasn't interested in comic books and learning to play chess. We couldn't see the point of school dances, and when we went, we would keep the walls from falling down. And we would feel a little envious when someone threw a birthday party and we didn't get invited. But that's life.

There was one guy in our class, though. He stood out because everyone liked him. He could sit at any table in the lunchroom and be welcomed – and he did. He was the guy who invited the awkward guy to join him and his friends at the table. He was the one who would dance with the girls who no one else would dance with. And he did not seem to belong to a clique, although he could have.

He was different. He was the salt of the earth.

Today Jesus tells us that we ARE the salt of the earth, we ARE the light of the world. Most of the time we think this means that we are supposed to give good example, we are supposed to live exemplary lives so that all those pagans out there will be shamed into converting. But I think Jesus is telling us more than this.

In Jesus' time, there were two sources of salt – you could evaporate sea water, and you would be left with a mixture of salt crystals and sand and whatever else had been around in the water. Nowdays such salt can be further refined, but not then. So you had a kind of brown flaky mixture that had odd flavors and wasn't of great quality and smelled like rotten fish. The other kind of salt came from mines. Here you could find pure salt crystals. Even today, there are botiques that sell different kinds of salt that come from different mines. We have a large package of pink salt I bought in a moment of weakness that came from tibet. This mined salt was salt of the earth. This was the pure stuff, the stuff they used to flavor food, to preserve meat, to use in medicines; this was the salt that was used as payment for roman soldiers. This was the salt that enhanced human life.

And I think Jesus is saying much the same thing about you and I being the light of the world. Light kept to itself doesn't do any good. Light on a lampstand is useful to everyone in the room, not just the one who owns the light. And it is when light is available that truth is revealed and lies shown for what they are.

What do salt and light have in common? In themselves, they don't amount to anything. No one goes out and orders salt for supper. No one who posesses a flashlight sits and stares at the light. Salt is what makes everything else taste a little better; it brings out flavor. And light brings clarity to our sense of sight. As I get older, I find I need more light to read.

And that's the situation with us Christians. We are people of the incarnation. We are the Body of Christ, not the soul of Christ. We are the ones for whom God made this beautiful world; we are the ones for whom God created relationships. God really loves everything he made. He called it good and very good.

One of the things we incarnational Christians are supposed to do, I think, is highlight the goodness in the world, the goodness in each other, and we don't do enough of that. We keep falling back into the idea that religion is about me and God, and

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:1-12

You've just heard the eight beatitudes – again. If you've never heard them before, you would have to be living under a rock. Even people who don't know them at least know that there are beatitudes. One question is how to read them. Some people say that Matthew took a few of Jesus' sayings and put them all in this gospel. Others say that Jesus actually preached a sermon starting out with these statements. The second big problem is that Jesus gave the beatitudes in Aramaic; Matthew's gospel is in Greek, and even when you try to translate Greek into English, you often don't quite hit the mark. If you go to different translations of the bible, you find different words. Sometimes the beatitudes begin with the word “Blessed” as you've just heard them. Other times the word is “Happy”. I've also heard the variation, “How blest are those...” with an exclamation mark. And translators can't make up their minds wether Jesus is saying “Blessed are they” or “Blessed are you”. And the third problem with the beatitudes – what do we do with them? Are they descriptions of how we should live? Are they commandments? Are they just comments Jesus is making? Martin Luther said that they are meant to show us that we can never meet the standards that they set, and so all we can do is throw ourselves on God's mercy.

If you remember how this gospel starts, even there we have a lack of clarity. Is he speaking to the crowd who follows him? Or did he leave the crowd and go up on the mountain with his disciples? Is this a message for everyone, or just the inner circle?

One author gives an interpretation I like. Imagine that Jesus is speaking to his disciples, and pointing at the crowd below. If you look at the first four beatitudes, they describe people who are suffering, who are at the margins. Being poor in spirit are those who for whatever reason have no joy; they are the worriers, the people who have no one in their lives. She is the woman who sees no hope, who thinks suicidal thoughts, who dreads waking up tomorrow. Being someone who mourns is confronting loss. He is the man who has been told that he has to carry around an oxygen tank the rest of his life; she is the one who has lost a child and the void is always there. And the meek – he is the doormat, the person everyone kind of ignores. She is the teenager who is always getting teased, who is the object of bullying. And the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness – the man who can't get a decent job because English is his second language and he hasn't gotten it down too well. Or perhaps she is the one who has been cheated out of her livelihood by her children, and because they are her children she has chosen to suffer rather than seek justice.

The first four beatitudes promise that God will reverse these things, if not in this world, than the next.

And then we get to the second set. Here the beatitudes don't describe something that a person is caught up in; instead, they describe traits that can be acquired. You can be merciful; you can be clean of heart, you can be a peacemaker, you can go out and try to make things right. And Jesus is saying that if you do these things, you are God's way of addressing the issues present in the first four. IF you are merciful, you will be there dealing with the bully; if you are clean of heart, you will have made yourself sensitive to the presence of God in other people, and that in turn will show you what you can do. And if you are a peacemaker, you will be a bridge between enemies, you will be the one who heals divisions. And you will notice that hungering and thirsting for righteousness is not the same as being persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Jesus is saying that the person who seeks to make things right will inevitably draw fire – because someone has a vested interest in keeping the injustice going. But such a person will achieve his goal – seeing the kingdom of heaven come about.

So Jesus says, look around you – God loves all these people who carry such burdens and you should love them too, because God will see that things come out right in the end. And if you make yourself merciful, if you seek righteousness, if you beome clean of heart, if you make peace, you will be part of that reward, and you yourself will have what you are looking for.

And finally, Jesus changes the last “blessed”. He's been saying “Blessed are they” and now he says, “Blessed are you” – he's speaking to his disciples now, to you and I – when as a consequence of your efforts on my behalf, you suffer – because as the martyrs of the early years of Christianity knew so much better than we do – you will not go unrewarded. To bring about the kingdom, identify people described by the first four beatitudes, and teach people to develop the characteristics in the second four.

One other point. Matthew has Jesus go up a mountain to deliver the beatitudes, just like Moses went up a mountain to receive the ten commandments. The commandments were meant to be a floor. They mostly say “Thou shalt not”. In other words, if you want to live together in some sort of peace, here are the minimal requirements. Jesus, on the other hand, says, “Here are goals to shoot for: A follower of Jesus is never satisfied with the bare minimum. He or she is always striving to be better. Saint Alphonsus Ligouri, the founder of the Redemptorists and a doctor of the church, died at the age of 90. Even in the last few days of his life, he was still reaching for those goals, he was still trying to live the beatitudes.

And so should we. Because the message of Jesus is that what is wrong will be made right, sooner or later. But those of us who are members of Jesus' body have the opportunity right here and now to begin this process. And he holds out an awesome promise that should make us rejoice.

Do a beatitude today. Find someone who needs you and be merciful, clean of heart, seek righteousness, make peace, and begin to right the injustice of the world. And you will notice your heart rejoicing because you are doing what Jesus calls you to do.