Lord of the Sabbath (Luke 6:1-11)
1
It happened that one Sabbath he was walking through the cornfields, and
his disciples were picking ears of corn, rubbing them in their hands
and eating them.
2 Some of the Pharisees said, 'Why are you doing something that is forbidden on the Sabbath day?'
3 Jesus answered them, 'So you have not read what David did when he and his followers were hungry-
4 how he went into the house of God and took the loaves of the offering and ate them and gave them to his followers, loaves which the priests alone are allowed to eat?'
5 And he said to them, 'The Son of man is master of the Sabbath.'
6 Now on another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and began to teach, and a man was present, and his right hand was withered.
7 The scribes and the Pharisees were watching him to see if he would cure somebody on the Sabbath, hoping to find something to charge him with.
8 But he knew their thoughts; and he said to the man with the withered hand, 'Get up and stand out in the middle!' And he came forward and stood there.
9 Then Jesus said to them, 'I put it to you: is it permitted on the Sabbath to do good, or to do evil; to save life, or to destroy it?'
10 Looking around at them all, he then said to him, "Stretch out your hand." He did so and his hand was restored.
11 But they became enraged and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.
Jesus unmasks his opponents with a question: Is the Sabbath day for good or harm? The implied answer is obvious (for good) and designed to expose the malice of the Pharisees (6:7). For regardless of what Jesus does, they are already planning to harm him. In the end, it is the Pharisees who violate the Sabbath and walk straight into their own trap. Jesus looks to the Sabbath as the most suitable day to relieve the oppressed of their burdens. Allegorically (St. Bede, In Lucam): the crippled man signifies mankind corrupt and fallen from grace. His hand is withered in sin because it stretched forth to eat the forbidden fruit in paradise. Christ now comes with forgiveness to restore man to spiritual health.
The observance of the Sabbath was a central law, one of the Ten Commandments. This was a very ancient Law the value of which was stressed after the Exile. During the Exile, the people had to work seven days a week from morning until evening, without any conditions to meet and meditate on the Word of God, to pray together and to share faith, their problems and their hopes. Therefore, there was an urgent need to stop at least one day a week to get together and encourage one another during the very difficult situation of the exile. Otherwise they would have lost their faith. It was then that faith was reborn and the observance of Saturday was reestablished.
The Pharisees invoke the Bible to say it was a transgression of the Law of Saturday. Immediately Jesus responds recalling that David himself also did things which were prohibited. Jesus neither affirms nor disputes their interpretation of what counts as work. Instead, he brings the discussion to a different level, answering their question with a counterquestion. He refers to an incident recorded in 1 Sam 21:2-7, when David and his companions were fleeing for their lives from the murderous King Saul. En route, David stopped at the house of God (which at that time was the meeting tent, since the temple had not yet been built) to beg some bread for himself and his hungry men. Since there was no ordinary bread on hand, the priest, Ahimelech, responded by giving David some of the bread of offering, the holy bread that was kept on a special altar and that priests alone could eat (Exod 25:30; Lev 24:5-9). The fact that the holy bread was available suggests that that incident too took place on the sabbath (Lev 24:5-9).
Jesus knew the Bible and referred to it to show that the arguments of others had no foundation. In Matthew, the response of Jesus is more complete. He not only recalls the story of David, but also quotes the Legislation which permits the priests to work on Saturday and he quotes Prophet Hosea: “Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice”. Jesus ends with the following phrase: The Son of Man is Master of the Sabbath! The Lord of Saturday! Jesus, Son of Man, who lives in intimacy with God, discovers the sense of the Bible not from outside, from without, but from inside, that is, discovers the sense starting at the roots, beginning from his intimacy with the author of the Bible who is God himself.
comments by Edward Sri, professor of theology and Scripture:
It is astonishing the Jesus' self-identification as Lord of the sabbath. The Sabbath is a divine institution (Gen 2:3), and when God speaks of the Sabbath he refers to it as his own: “my Sabbath” (Exod 31:13; Lev 19:3, 30; Isa 56:4). Therefore in calling himself “Lord of the Sabbath” Jesus puts himself on par with God, the one who instituted the Sabbath. As such, he has authority over how the Sabbath law is to be observed.
After this confrontation, Jesus goes into their synagogue, where he encounters a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees ask Jesus, Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath? The Old Testament itself does not outlaw healing on the Sabbath, and healing is not one of the thirty-nine acts later specified by the rabbis as unlawful on the Sabbath. But later Jewish tradition viewed medical assistance on the Sabbath as permissible only in emergency cases; non-life-threatening conditions, such as having a withered hand, were to be treated after the Sabbath rest. This, it seems, is the opinion of the Pharisees. Their question takes on a hostile tone. They want to gain legal evidence against him, so that they might accuse him. They ask their question in order to provoke Jesus, hoping he will perform a healing, which many Jews would see as a violation of the Sabbath rest.
Jesus responds by noting that they themselves would rescue one of their sheep if it fell into a pit on the Sabbath. If a Jew would save livestock on the Sabbath, how much more should he rescue a man from physical sufferings on the Sabbath, for a person is much more valuable . . . than a sheep. Jesus concludes: So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath. Jesus thus keeps the Sabbath, while rejecting the Pharisaic view of what Sabbath observance requires.
On Sundays, Christians are to withdraw from the earthly tasks that preoccupy them throughout the week and enter into God’s Sabbath rest. At the same time, we must remember that “it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath” (12:12). In fact, Sunday is a day well-suited for charitable works. The Catechism recommends that on Sunday Christians pursue “good works and humble service of the sick, the infirm, and the elderly” (Catechism 2186). Thus Sunday is a particularly good day to volunteer at a soup kitchen, give alms to the poor, or visit the sick in hospitals and nursing homes. Moreover, the good that Christians should do on the Sabbath can also take place right in their own homes, “by devoting time and care to their families and relatives, often difficult to do on other days of the week” (Catechism 2186). Indeed, with every other day filled up with constant projects, tasks, and errands, observing the Sabbath rest forces us to set aside the busyness of life and focus on our most important relationships. By not treating Sunday as a day to catch up on yard work, shopping, and bills, we can enter more fully into the Sabbath and catch up with the family and friends God has placed in our lives, so that in leisure we can begin to “see the true face of the people with whom we live".
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
For Israel, observing the Sabbath with scrupulous care is the central expression of life in Covenant with God. Even the superficial reader of the Gospels realizes that the dispute over what does and does not belong to the Sabbath is at the heart of Jesus’ differences with the people of Israel of his time. The conventional interpretation is that Jesus broke open a narrow-minded, legalistic practice and replaced it with a more generous, more liberal view, and thereby opened the door for acting rationally in accord with the given situation. Jesus’ statement that “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mk 2:27) is cited as evidence, the idea being that it represents an anthropocentric view of reality, from which a “liberal” interpretation of the commandments supposedly follows naturally. It was, in fact, the Sabbath disputes that became the basis for the image of the liberal Jesus. His critique of the Judaism of his time, so it is said, was a freedom-loving and rational man’s critique of an ossified legalism—hypocritical to the core and guilty of dragging religion down to the level of a slavish system of utterly unreasonable obligations that hold man back from developing his work and his freedom. It goes without saying that this interpretation did not favor a particularly friendly image of Judaism. Of course, the modern critique—beginning with the Reformation—saw in Catholicism the return of this supposedly “Jewish” element.
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27f.). In Matthew and Luke, the first sentence is missing. They record Jesus as saying simply: “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Mt 12:8; Lk 6:5). Perhaps the explanation is that Matthew and Luke omit the first sentence for fear that it will be abused. Be that as it may, it is clear that according to Mark the two sentences belong together and interpret one another.
To say that the Sabbath is for man, and not man for the Sabbath, is not simply an expression of the sort of modern liberal position that we spontaneously read into these words. In the Son of Man, man is revealed as he truly ought to be. In terms of the Son of Man, in terms of the criterion that Jesus himself is, man is free and he knows how to use the Sabbath properly as the day of freedom deriving from God and destined for God. “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” The magnitude of Jesus’ claim—which is an authoritative interpretation of the Law because he himself is God’s primordial Word—becomes fully apparent here. And it also becomes apparent what sort of new freedom devolves upon man as a result—a freedom that has nothing to do with mere caprice. The important thing about this Sabbath saying is the overlapping of “man” and “Son of Man”; we see how this teaching, in itself quite ordinary, becomes an expression of the special dignity of Jesus.
At any rate, the question about Jesus—who he really was, and what he really wanted—as well as the whole question as to what Judaism and Christianity actually are: This is the point at issue. Was Jesus in reality a liberal rabbi—a forerunner of Christian liberalism? Is the Christ of faith, and therefore the whole faith of the Church, just one big mistake?
When we read the dispute over the healings on the Sabbath and the accounts of Jesus’ angry grief at the hard-heartedness of those who spoke for the dominant interpretation of the Sabbath, we see that these debates concern deeper questions about man and about the right way to honor God. This side of the conflict is therefore by no means simply “trivial.” The Sabbath is therefore not just a negative matter of not engaging in outward activities, but a positive matter of “resting,” which must also be expressed in a spatial dimension: “So to keep the Sabbath, one remains at home. It is not enough merely not to work. One also has to rest. And resting means, re-forming one day a week the circle of family and household, everyone at home and in place”(p. 80). The Sabbath is not just a matter of personal piety; it is the core of the social order. This day “makes eternal Israel what it is, the people that, like God in creating the world, rest from creation on the Seventh Day” (p. 74).
We are dealing not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precisely, a Christological one. The heart of the Sabbath disputes is the question about the Son of Man—the question about Jesus Christ himself. Jesus understands himself as the Torah—as the word of God in person. The tremendous prologue of John’s Gospel—“in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1)—says nothing different from what the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels says. The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel and the Jesus of the Synoptics is one and the same: the true “historical” Jesus.
What disturbs Rabbi Jacob Neusner about Jesus’ message concerning the Sabbath is not just the centrality of Jesus himself. He throws this centrality into clear relief, but it is not the ultimate bone of contention for him. Rather, he is concerned with the consequence of Jesus’ centrality for Israel’s daily life: The Sabbath loses its great social function. The Sabbath is one of the essential elements that hold Israel together. Centering upon Jesus breaks open this sacred structure and imperils an essential element that cements the unity of the People of God.
Jesus’ claim entails that the community of his disciples is the new Israel. How can this not unsettle someone who has the “eternal Israel” at heart? The issue of Jesus’ claim to be Temple and Torah in person also has implications for the question of Israel—the issue of the living community of the people in whom God’s word is actualized.
At this point, the question arises for the Christian: Was it a good idea to jeopardize the great social function of the Sabbath, to break up Israel’s sacred order for the sake of a community of disciples that is defined, as it were, solely in terms of the figure of Jesus? This question could and can be clarified only within the emerging community of disciples—the Church. We cannot enter into this discussion here. The Resurrection of Jesus “on the first day of the week” meant that for Christians this “first day”—the beginning of the creation—became the “Lord’s day.” The essential elements of the Old Testament Sabbath then naturally passed over to the Lord’s day in the context of table fellowship with Jesus.
The Church thus recuperated the social function of the Sabbath as well, always in relation to the “Son of Man.” An unmistakable signal of this was the fact that Constantine’s Christian-inspired reform of the legal system granted slaves certain freedoms on Sundays; the Lord’s day was thus introduced as a day of freedom and rest into a legal system now shaped on Christian principles. I find it extremely worrying that modern liturgists want to dismiss this social function of Sunday as a Constantinian aberration, despite the fact that it stands in continuity with the Torah of Israel. Of course, this brings up the whole question of the relationship between faith and social order, between faith and politics.
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you” (Ex 20:12)—this is the version of the fourth commandment that is given in the Book of Exodus. It speaks of the land and of the stable continuance of life in the land. In other words, it connects the land, as the place for the people to live, with the basic order of the family. But this is exactly the connection that Jesus calls into question. He is told that his mother and brothers are outside waiting to speak to him. His answer: “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” And he stretches out his hand over his disciples and says: “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mt 12:46–50).
Faced with this text, Rabbi Jacob Neusner asks: “Does Jesus not teach me to violate one of the two great commandments…. that concern the social order?” (p. 59). The accusation here is a twofold one. The first problem is the seeming individualism of Jesus’ message. While the Torah presents a very definite social order, giving the people a juridical and social framework for war and peace, for just politics and for daily life, there is nothing like that to be found in Jesus’ teaching. Discipleship of Jesus offers no politically concrete program for structuring society. The Sermon on the Mount cannot serve as a foundation for a state and a social order, as is frequently and correctly observed.
This restructuring of the social order finds its basis and its justification in Jesus’ claim that he, with his community of disciples, forms the origin and center of a new Israel. Once again we stand before the “I” of Jesus, who speaks on the same level as the Torah itself, on the same level as God. In Jesus’ case it is not the universally binding adherence to the Torah that forms the new family. Rather, it is adherence to Jesus himself, to his Torah. For the rabbis, everyone is tied by the same relationships to a permanent social order; everyone is subject to the Torah and so everyone is equal within the larger body of all Israel. Neusner thus concludes: “I now realize, only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking”
We come to the same conclusion as in our earlier analysis of the commandment to keep the Sabbath. The Christological (theological) argument and the social argument are inextricably entwined. If Jesus is God, then he is entitled and able to handle the Torah as he does. On that condition alone does he have the right to interpret the Mosaic order of divine commands in such a radically new way as only the Lawgiver—God himself—can claim to do.
But here the question arises: Was it right and proper to create a new community of disciples founded entirely on him? Was it good to set aside the social order of the “eternal Israel,” founded on and subsisting through Abraham and Jacob according to the flesh? To declare it to be an “Israel according to the flesh,” as Paul will put it? Is there any point that we can discover to all of this? When we read the Torah together with the entire Old Testament canon, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Wisdom Literature, we realize very clearly a point that is already substantially present in the Torah itself. That is, Israel does not exist simply for itself, in order to live according to the “eternal” dispositions of the Law—it exists to be a light to the nations. In the Psalms and the prophetic books we hear more and more clearly the promise that God’s salvation will come to all the nations. We hear more and more clearly that the God of Israel—being, as he is, the only God, the true God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the God of all peoples and all men, who holds their fate in his hands—does not wish to abandon the nations to themselves. We hear that all will come to know him, that Egypt and Babylon—the two secular powers opposed to Israel—will give Israel their hand and join together in worshiping the one God.
So what has your “Messiah” Jesus actually brought asked Neusner? He has not brought world peace, and he has not conquered the world’s misery. So he can hardly be the true Messiah, who, after all, is supposed to do just that. Yes, what has Jesus brought? We have already encountered this question and we know the answer. He has brought the God of Israel to the nations, so that all the nations now pray to him and recognize Israel’s Scriptures as his word, the word of the living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one great definitive promise to Israel and the world. This universality, this faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—extended now in Jesus’ new family to all nations over and above the bonds of descent according to the flesh—is the fruit of Jesus’ work. It is what proves him to be the Messiah. It signals a new interpretation of the messianic promise that is based on Moses and the Prophets, but also opens them up in a completely new way.
The vehicle of this universalization is the new family, whose only admission requirement is communion with Jesus, communion in God’s will. For Jesus’ “I” is by no means a self-willed ego revolving around itself alone. “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mk 3:34f.): Jesus’ “I” incarnates the Son’s communion of will with the Father. It is an “I” that hears and obeys. Communion with him is filial communion with the Father—it is a yes to the fourth commandment on a new level, the highest level.
Jesus’ intention is not to abolish either the family or the Sabbath-as-celebration-of-creation, but he has to create a new and broader context for both. It is true that his invitation to join him as a member of a new and universal family through sharing his obedience to the Father does at first break up the social order of Israel. But from her very inception, the Church that emerged, and continues to emerge, has attached fundamental importance to defending the family as the core of all social order, and to standing up for the fourth commandment in the whole breadth of its meaning. Likewise it soon became clear that the essential content of the Sabbath had to be reinterpreted in terms of the Lord’s day. The fight for Sunday is another of the Church’s major concerns in the present day.
All in all, it would be good for the Christian world to look respectfully at this obedience of Israel, and thus to appreciate better the great commandments of the Decalogue, which Christians have to transfer into the context of God’s universal family and which Jesus, as the “new Moses,” has given to us. In him we see the fulfillment of the promise made to Moses: “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren” (Deut 18:15).
Jesus does nothing new or unprecedented when he contrasts the practical, casuistic norms developed in the Torah with the pure will of God, which he presents as the “greater righteousness” (Mt 5:20) expected of God’s children. He takes up the intrinsic dynamism of the Torah itself, as further developed by the Prophets, and—in his capacity as the Chosen Prophet who sees God face-to-face (Deut 18:15)—he gives it its radical form.
In the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus stands before us neither as a rebel nor as a liberal, but as the prophetic interpreter of the Torah. He does not abolish it, but he fulfills it, and he does so precisely by assigning reason its sphere of responsibility for acting within history. Consequently, Christianity constantly has to reshape and reformulate social structures and “Christian social teaching.” There will always be new developments to correct what has gone before. In the inner structure of the Torah, in its further development under the critique of the Prophets, and in Jesus’ message, which takes up both elements, Christianity finds the wide scope for necessary historical evolution as well as the solid ground that guarantees the dignity of man by rooting it in the dignity of God.
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
The Pharisees’ zeal for sabbath observance was motivated by the belief that disobedience would lead to disaster for the whole nation. Indeed, as punishment for disobedience (Deut 28:15, 36-37, 63-64), Israel had gone into exile and Jerusalem had been destroyed: “If you do not obey me and keep holy the sabbath day ... I will set fire to its gates . . . and it will consume the palaces of Jerusalem” (Jer 17:27). In Jesus’ time, the effects of exile still continued, since Israel’s tribes were scattered and the land was controlled by a Gentile oppressor. In order to hasten Israel’s restoration, therefore, obedience was necessary, especially with regard to observances like the sabbath that safeguarded Israel’s identity. However, these Pharisees failed to see that in Jesus the time of restoration was at hand.
comments by Jimmy Akin (Catholic author):
Jesus exercised his sovereign power to abrogate the sabbath law in at least some way. This is why he states, "For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath" (Mt 12:8). Both "Son of Man" and "Lord" are references to Christ's sovereign power.
The sabbath command is the only one of the Ten Commandments which can be altered in any way, because only it is a part of the ceremonial law.
The other commandments of the Decalogue are precepts of the natural law, obligatory at all times and unalterable. Hence, after the abrogation of the Law of Moses, all the Commandments contained in the two tables are observed by Christians, not indeed because their observance is commanded by Moses, but because they are in conformity with nature which dictates obedience to them.
This Commandment about the observance of the sabbath, on the other hand, considered as to the time appointed for its fulfillment, is not fixed and unalterable, but susceptible of change and belongs not to the moral, but the ceremonial law. Neither is it a principle of the natural law; we are not instructed by nature to give external worship to God on that day, rather than on any other. And in fact the sabbath was kept holy only from the time of the liberation of the people of Israel from the bondage of Pharaoh.
The observance of the sabbath was to be abrogated at the same time as the other Hebrew rites and ceremonies, that is, at the death of Christ. . . . Hence St. Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, when reproving the observers of the Mosaic rites, says: "You observe days and months and times and years; I am afraid of you lest perhaps I have labored in vain amongst you" (Gal 4:10). And he writes to the same effect to the Colossians (Col 2:16).
For Christians the ceremonial observance of Sunday replaces that of the sabbath. Properly speaking, we're not celebrating the sabbath on Sunday. We're celebrating something else, but it's something that the sabbath points toward. As the Catechism says, the Jewish sabbath announces man's eternal rest in God and prefigures some aspects of Christ. Sunday thus fulfills what the sabbath pointed toward.
Christians have celebrated the Lord's day since the first century. In fact, in the very first chapter of Revelation, we read that John experienced the inaugural vision of the book on "the Lord's day." He writes:
"I John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet"
Commissioning of the Twelve Apostles (Luke 6:12-16)
12 In those days he departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God.
13 When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named apostles:
14 Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew,
15 Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot
16 and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
Jesus undertakes a prayer vigil to prepare for his selection of the twelve apostles in the morning (6:13). The apostles will preach the gospel and lead the early Church. They are emissaries invested with Christ's royal and priestly authority (9:1-6; Mt 28:16-20) (CCC 765, 1577). Like the 12 patriarchs of Israel (Gen 35:22-26), Jesus chooses 12 men to be the father figures of the renewed kingdom of Israel, the Church (22:28-30; Gal 6:16; Rev 21:14). From Luke's perspective, they are an important group who because of their association with Jesus from the time of his baptism to his ascension (Acts 1:21-22) provide the continuity between the historical Jesus and the church of Luke's day and who as the original eyewitnesses guarantee the fidelity of the church's beliefs and practices to the teachings of Jesus.
Simon who was called a Zealot: The Zealots were the instigators of the First Revolt of Palestinian Jews against Rome in A.D. 66-70. Because the existence of the Zealots as a distinct group during the lifetime of Jesus is the subject of debate, the meaning of the identification of Simon as a Zealot is unclear.
Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17–49)
17 He then came down with them and
stopped at a piece of level ground where there was a large gathering of
his disciples, with a great crowd of people from all parts of Judaea and
Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon
18 who had come to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. People tormented by unclean spirits were also cured,
19 and everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him because power came out of him that cured them all.
20 Then fixing his eyes on his disciples he said: How blessed are you who are poor: the kingdom of God is yours.
21 Blessed are you who are hungry now: you shall have your fill. Blessed are you who are weeping now: you shall laugh.
22 'Blessed are you when people hate you, drive you out, abuse you, denounce your name as criminal, on account of the Son of man.
23 Rejoice when that day comes and dance for joy, look!-your reward will be great in heaven. This was the way their ancestors treated the prophets.
24 But alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now.
25 Alas for you who have plenty to eat now: you shall go hungry. Alas for you who are laughing now: you shall mourn and weep.
26 'Alas for you when everyone speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets.
27 'But I say this to you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
28 Bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.
29 To anyone who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek as well; to anyone who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic.
30 Give to everyone who asks you, and do not ask for your property back from someone who takes it.
31 Treat others as you would like people to treat you.
32 If you love those who love you, what credit can you expect? Even sinners love those who love them.
33 And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit can you expect? For even sinners do that much.
34 And if you lend to those from whom you hope to get money back, what credit can you expect? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount.
35 Instead, love your enemies and do good to them, and lend without any hope of return. You will have a great reward, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
36 'Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate.
37 Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven.
38 Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap; because the standard you use will be the standard used for you.'
39 He also told them a parable, 'Can one blind person guide another? Surely both will fall into a pit?
40 Disciple is not superior to teacher; but fully trained disciple will be like teacher.
41 Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the great log in your own?
42 How can you say to your brother, "Brother, let me take out that splinter in your eye," when you cannot see the great log in your own? Hypocrite! Take the log out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take out the splinter in your brother's eyes.
43 'There is no sound tree that produces rotten fruit, nor again a rotten tree that produces sound fruit.
44 Every tree can be told by its own fruit: people do not pick figs from thorns, nor gather grapes from brambles.
45 Good people draw what is good from the store of goodness in their hearts; bad people draw what is bad from the store of badness. For the words of the mouth flow out of what fills the heart.
46 'Why do you call me, "Lord, Lord" and not do what I say?
47 'Everyone who comes to me and listens to my words and acts on them -- I will show you what such a person is like.
48 Such a person is like the man who, when he built a house, dug, and dug deep, and laid the foundations on rock; when the river was in flood it bore down on that house but could not shake it, it was so well built.
49 But someone who listens and does nothing is like the man who built a house on soil, with no foundations; as soon as the river bore down on it, it collapsed; and what a ruin that house became!
Together, the Beatitudes present a new set of ideals that focus on love and humility rather than force and exaction; they echo the highest ideals of his teachings on spirituality and compassion.
27 love your enemies and do good to them, and lend without any hope of return: Early church thinkers saw this as one of Jesus' most important teachings, but the history of the early church shows that very few church fathers actually lived up to the literal ideal it espouses. By the Middle Ages, the verse had become seen as problematic in regard to war, and so it was re-interpreted so as to only apply to relations between individuals rather than those between nations, countries, faiths, or ideologies. Several later thinkers rejected this view as a blatant attempt to re-write things that one disagreed with rather than accept that it contradicts ones own stance at face value,and Leo Tolstoy specifically read this verse as a rejection of militant nationalism.
29 To anyone who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek as well; to anyone who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic.
The idea of "offering one's cheek" to a smiter is also seen in Lamentations 3:30, where the context indicates a form of penitence or submission to oppressors, with the hope of being spared. In everyday speech, the phrase "turn the other cheek" is often used to mean something like "turn away from aggression and ignore it rather than retaliate." Morality lessons that teach turning the other cheek as a good or Christian value would typically emphasize nonviolence and non-confrontation.
Several Church Fathers interpreted Jesus' teachings as advocating nonviolence. For example:
Whatever Christians would not wish others to do to them, they do not to others. And they comfort their oppressors and make them their friends; they do good to their enemies…. Through love towards their oppressors, they persuade them to become Christians.
—The Apology of Aristides 15
Luke 6 Vers 47-49: The usual interpretation goes back to John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), who wrote in his Homily 24 on Matthew:
By "rain" here, and "floods," and "winds," He is expressing metaphorically the calamities and afflictions that befall men; such as false accusations, plots, bereavements, deaths, loss of friends, vexations from strangers, all the ills in our life that any one could mention. "But to none of these," says He, "does such a soul give way; and the cause is, it is founded on the rock." He calls the steadfastness of His doctrine a rock; because in truth His commands are stronger than any rock, setting one above all the waves of human affairs. For he who keeps these things strictly, will not have the advantage of men only when they are vexing him, but even of the very devils plotting against him. And that it is not vain boasting so to speak, Job is our witness, who received all the assaults of the devil, and stood unmoveable; and the apostles too are our witnesses, for that when the waves of the whole world were beating against them, when both nations and princes, both their own people and strangers, both the evil spirits, and the devil, and every engine was set in motion, they stood firmer than a rock, and dispersed it all.
This Sermon on the Plain was a sermon given by Jesus of Nazareth according to the Gospel of Luke 6:17-49; it may be compared to the longer Sermon on the Mount. Some of Jesus' most famous teachings come from the Sermon on the Mount, which contains the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer. It is one of five collections of teachings in Matthew.
The beatitudes in Matthew (5:3-12) are:
* Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
* Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
* Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
* Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
* Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
* Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
* Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
* Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
* Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
The beatitudes as given in the Gospel of Luke (6:20-26) are:
* Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.
* Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.
* Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.
* Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.
The beatitudes present only in Matthew are:
* The meek. The text says that they will "inherit the earth".
* The merciful. The text says that they will "obtain mercy".
* The pure of heart. The text says that they will "see God".
* The peacemakers. The text says that they will be called "the sons of God"
Many Christians believe that the Sermon on the Mount is a form of commentary on the Ten Commandments. It portrays Christ as the true interpreter of the Mosaic Law. To most believers in Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount contains the central tenets of Christian discipleship, and is considered as such by many religious and moral thinkers—such as Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—, and it has been one of the main sources of Christian pacifism.
45 Good people draw what is good from the store of goodness in their hearts; bad people draw what is bad from the store of badness. For the words of the mouth flow out of what fills the heart.
Similar speech we can read in Matthew 16:17-20:
17 Do you not realize that everything that enters the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled into the latrine?
18 But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile.
19 For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy.
20 These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.
comments by Rev. Joseph Hung Tran (Order of the Carmelites - ocarm.org)::
In today’s Gospel we have the second part of the “Discourse of the Plain”. In the first part (Lk 6, 20-26), Jesus addresses himself to the disciples (Lk 6, 20). In the second part (Lk 6, 27-49), he addresses himself “to you who listen to me”, that is, the great crowds of poor and sick people, who had come form all parts (Lk 6, 17-19).
• Luke 6, 27-30: Love the enemies! The words that Jesus addresses to these people are demanding and difficult: to love the enemies, not to curse them, to present the other cheek to anyone who slaps you on one cheek, and do not protest or complain when somebody takes what is ours. Taken literally, these phrases seem to favour the rich who rob. But not even Jesus observes them literally. When the soldier struck him on the face, he did not offer the other cheek but rather reacted firmly: “If there is some offence in what I said, point it out, but if not why do you strike me?” (Jn 18, 22-23). Then, how are these words to be understood? The following verses help us to understand what Jesus wants to teach us.
• Luke 6, 31-36: The Golden Rule! to imitate God. Two phrases of Jesus help us to understand what he wants to teach. The first phrase is the so called Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would like people to treat you!” (Lk 6, 31). The second phrase is: “Be merciful as your Father in Heaven is merciful!” (Lk 6, 36). These two phrases indicate that Jesus does not want simply to change the situation, because nothing would change. He wants to change the system. The novelty which he wants to construct comes from the new experience of God the Father, full of tenderness who accepts all! The words of threat against the rich cannot be the occasion of revenge on the part of the poor! Jesus demands the contrary attitude: “Love your enemies!” Love cannot depend on what I receive from others. True love should want the good of others, independently of what he or she does for me. Love should be creative, because that is how God’s love is for us: “Be merciful, as your Heavenly Father is merciful!” Matthew says the same thing with other words: “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect” (Mt 5, 48). Never will anyone be able to say: Today I have been perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect! I have been merciful as the Father in Heaven is merciful”. We will always be below the measure which Jesus has placed before us. In Luke’s Gospel, the Golden Rule says: “Treat others as you would like people to treat you!” (Lk 6, 31). Matthew, in his Gospel, gives a different formulation: “Treat others as you would like others to treat you” And he adds: “That is the Law and the Prophets” (Mt 7, 12). Practically, all religions in the whole world have the same Golden Rule with a diverse formulation. This is a sign that a universal intuition or desire is expressed which comes from the bottom of the human heart.
• Luke 6, 37-38: “Do not judge and you will not be judged; do not condemn and you will not be condemned; forgive and you will be forgiven; give and there will be gifts for you; a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap; because the standard you use will be the standard used for you”. These are four advices: two in a negative form, do not judge and do not condemn; and two in positive form: to forgive and to give an abundant measure. When it says: “there will be gifts for you”, Jesus refers to the treatment which God wants to have with us. But when our way of treating others is mean, God cannot use with us the abundant and overflowing measure that he would want to use. Celebrate the visit of God. The Discourse of the Plains or the Sermon on the Mountain, from the beginning, leads the listeners to make a choice, to opt, in favour of the poor. In the Old Testament, several times, God placed people before this same choice, blessing or curse. People were given the freedom to choose: “Today I call heaven and earth to witness against you: I am offering you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live” (Dt 30,19).It is not God who condemns, but the people themselves according to the choice that they make between life and death, good or evil.
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
As a whole, the Beatitudes reverse the world’s understanding of true happiness, showing that it is found not in riches, gratification, entertainment, and fame, but in God. Learning this lesson on discipleship requires faith, since the promises and rewards may not be experienced until the heavenly kingdom. It also requires charity, as those with economic means are exhorted to tend to the needs of the poor, the hungry, and the weeping.
Beatitudes and Christian life: The Second Vatican Council called for a renewal of moral theology, saying that instruction on Christian living should draw more on the Scriptures.6 One fruit of this renewal is the retrieval of the teaching that the Beatitudes reveal God’s plan for our eternal beatitude, happiness in the life to come (Catechism 1716-29). A person learns to live the Beatitudes by practicing, with the aid of God’s grace, the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity; see 1 Cor 13:13) and the moral virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance; see Wis 8:7), and by being empowered by the Holy Spirit’s gifts (see Isa 11:1-2), so that the fruits of the Spirit, such as love, joy, and peace (see Gal 5:22), become manifest in one’s life.
49 But someone who listens and does nothing is like the man who built a house on soil, with no foundations; as soon as the river bore down on it, it collapsed; and what a ruin that house became!
Building our lives on rock. Do I listen to Jesus’ words—the Word of God in Scripture—and act accordingly (see 6:47; 8:21; 11:28)? Pope Benedict XVI writes that “those who build their lives on his word build in a truly sound and lasting way ... Many things in which we trust for building our lives . . . prove ephemeral. Possessions, pleasure, and power show themselves sooner or later to be incapable of fulfilling the deepest yearnings of the human heart. In building our lives we need solid foundations.” God’s word gives us this firm foundation: “Your word, lord, stands forever; / it is firm as the heavens” (Ps 119:89).
comments by Francis Martin, president of Father Francis Martin Ministries (FFMM), "commentary on the Gospel of John":
6:35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.
Similarly we have in John 13:34-35:
“34. A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Jesus’ command, “Love one another as I love you” (John 13:34), is foundational to the entire Christian life (Catechism 1827). It is so simple and yet so difficult. When we look upon the cross in faith, we see the love of God revealed, a love that is totally self-giving for others’ good. It is the same love that Jesus tells us we must practice. One reason why it is so difficult to love as Jesus does is that we are sinners, bound up in prideful selfishness. To love as God does, we must be constantly dying to our own sinfulness and selfishness and living for God. And we live for God by obeying the Father’s will and loving one another.
We need God’s help to love others in this way. To produce the fruits of love, we must remain on the vine and be pruned by the Father. Put differently, if we are to love others as God does, we need to remain and grow in communion with Jesus, through such things as prayer, the sacraments, and works of penance. Through these spiritual practices, we open ourselves to God’s action in us whereby we increasingly die to our own sinfulness and become conformed to the Fathers will. Thus we will come to joyfully experience the Father’ love and be able to love others as he calls us to do.
comments by Edward Sri, professor of theology and Scripture, "the gospel of Matthew":
Jesus’ beatitudes represent a reversal of values, turning the world’s standards for happiness upside down. Many of the people whom the world would consider to be among the most miserable—the poor, the mourning, the meek, the persecuted— Jesus proclaims to be in an advantageous situation, for God looks now with favor on them and assures them of consolation in the future. Jesus thus challenges his followers to see life from God’s viewpoint, not the world’s. When his followers live by God’s standards, they are truly in a fortunate state in life, no matter what their circumstances may be, for they bring a glimmer of the joy and hope of the heavenly kingdom into the afflictions of the present world.
Ultimately the beatitudes are nothing less than a portrait of Christ’s own life.
Matthew depicts Jesus as meek (Matthew 11:29; 12:15-21; 21:5), merciful (Matthew 9:27-31; 15:22; 17:14-18; 18:33; 20:29-34) and persecuted (Matthew 27:27-31, 39-44). As an indirect portrait of Jesus, the beatitudes “display the mystery of Christ himself, and they call us into communion with him.”
In the first beatitude, the poor refers not just to those in economic hardship. During the Old Testament period the term also began to describe the oppressed people of God who were in particular need of God’s help (Ps 37:14-17; Isa 10:2; 26:6; 61:1-2). Jesus’ reference to the poor in spirit puts the emphasis not on material poverty but on one’s inner attitude. It refers to people who take their powerlessness to heart, who recognize that God is the only one who can help them, and who trust that God will act on their behalf. Jesus indicates that despite their poverty they share in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3).
How are those who mourn to be considered happy? In this beatitude, Jesus does not commend mourning as such but praises those who grieve over wickedness, whether it be afflicting others or causing them suffering directly (Tob 13:14; Isa 61:2; Ezek 9:4). From a worldly standpoint, these mourners appear to be quite unhappy. But Jesus says they are truly in a good situation because, although they may not be able to change the circumstances around them, they can resist evil internally by mourning. Moreover, they can have confidence that God will vindicate the faithful and that they will be comforted. This comfort belongs also to those who repent and mourn for their own sins (Ps 51) and to those who, like Daniel and Ezra (Dan 9:1-19; Ezra 9:5-15), mourn for the sins of God’s people.
The third beatitude quotes Ps 37:11, where the meek are the lowly who patiently wait on the Lord amid their afflictions and refrain from responding in anger or with force against those who wrong them. They rely on God not their own strength to set things right. They will inherit the land. In Ps 37, this is a reference to the promised land. Jesus uses the image not geographically but spiritually as referring to the kingdom. God will vindicate the meek and give them the honorable position they did not aggressively seek for themselves. Biblical examples of meekness include Moses, when criticized by his sister and brother (Num 12:1-15); David, when King Saul was trying to kill him (1 Sam 24:1-20); and above all Jesus, at his arrest and throughout his passion (26:49-27:50). Jesus’ instructions regarding anger and retaliation illustrate what it means to be meek (5:21-26, 38-41).
The word righteousness can refer to ethical conduct, that is, to obedience to God, or to God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises. The image of hunger and thirst depicts someone seeking something with his or her whole heart. The person who hungers and thirsts for righteousness longs for God’s saving action and seeks to do God’s will “with the intensity of someone starving for food or dying of thirst.” This beatitude refers to those “who are not content with things as they are and refuse to stifle the restlessness of heart that points man toward something greater." Jesus teaches that they will receive their hearts’ desire: they will be satisfied.
The Old Testament repeatedly describes God as merciful, and Israel is called to imitate God’s mercy. Mercy involves an inward identification with those in need and an outward action of kindness and generosity toward them. In this beatitude Jesus emphasizes the reciprocal nature of mercy a theme Matthew develops throughout his Gospel. God will show his mercy to us to the extent that we are merciful to others (Matthew 6:12, 14-15; 18:21-35; 25:31-40).
In Hebrew, the heart is the center of a person’s inner life the emotions, the intellect, and most especially the will. The clean of heart are those who love God with undivided allegiance, with all their hearts (Deut 6:4). They pursue his will single-heartedly, without mixed motives. This beatitude echoes Ps 24:3-5, where entrance into the temple required not only external purity but also the internal disposition of a clean heart. Jesus commends those disciples whose external acts of faith reflect the inward attitude of a pure heart. They will see God not just metaphorically in the sense of Old Testament worship in the temple but face-to-face in heaven (1 Cor 13:12; l John 3:2; Rev 22:4).
The Hebrew understanding of peace includes more than the absence of hostility. It denotes well-being and rightly ordered personal relationships and society. The peacemakers are those who strive to bring about harmony with God and with others in society. They seek to unite those who are estranged from one another and to be reconciled with their own enemies. Since the peacemakers share in the Father’s mission of reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19), they shall be called children of God—a title that points to the intimate relationship Christ’s disciples will have with God, who, Jesus repeatedly tells them, is “your heavenly Father” (Matthew 5:16, 45, 48; 6:1, passim).
The eighth beatitude refers to those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. In their obedience to God’s law, they are persecuted by the world. This statement recalls the Old Testament theme of the persecuted just man (Ps 22; Wis 5) and the many heroes from the Israelite tradition, such as the prophets, who were killed for their faithfulness to God (5:12; 2 Chron 36:16; Neh 9:26), and especially the martyrs who died for the sake of the Torah in the time of the Maccabees (2 Macc 6-7). Christ’s faithful followers should expect similar trials. Early Christians who were suffering persecution saw—as Christians today see—in this beatitude a foreshadowing of their own situation, as well as a message of hope, since Jesus promises that theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Finally, the statements in verses 11-12 make clearer two important aspects of the beatitudes. First, it becomes evident that the beatitudes are not merely general principles for living life well but particular instructions for Christ’s committed followers. The persecuted are no longer a general “they” (5:10) but a personal “you” (Matthew 5:11), referring specifically to the disciples (Matthew 5:1): Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you.
These verses make explicit the christological basis of the beatitudes. Whereas Jesus initially spoke of people being persecuted for righteousness’ sake (v. 10), he now refers to his disciples being persecuted because of me. Obedience to God’s law is now associated with obedience to Christ himself. Other Jewish prophets and rabbis may have encouraged people to endure persecution for the sake of the Torah and out of obedience to God. Jesus, however, speaks of his disciples being persecuted because of him. Here, Jesus asserts an authority no prophet or rabbi in Israel claimed to possess, a claim that would be blasphemous if he were not the Son of God. He teaches loyalty not just to God’s law or even to his own teachings but also to himself. This underscores how the beatitudes are not merely ethical principles. They are statements about the unique authority of Jesus and what it means to orient our lives around him. Indeed, living the beatitudes is imitating Christ’s life, and that means sharing in his sufferings and persecution.
Jesus summons his disciples to be what God’s people were always meant to be: salt of the earth and light of the world. Salt was used to flavor and preserve food. Through living the beatitudes, Jesus’ disciples become salt of the earth, preserving goodness in the world. The disciple who does not embody the beatitudes is like salt that loses its taste: he becomes no longer good for anything. Similarly, the disciples are to be light of the world. In the Jewish tradition Israel was to be a light to the nations (Isa 60:1-3; Bar 4:2). Jesus calls his disciples to fulfill this role by living the beatitudes in such a way that the world may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
The Beatitudes are not infrequently presented as the New Testament’s counterpart to the Ten Commandments, as an example of the Christian ethics that is supposedly superior to the commands of the Old Testament. This approach totally misconstrues these words of Jesus. Jesus always presupposed the validity of the Ten Commandments as a matter of course (see, for example, Mk 10:19; Lk 16:17). In the Sermon on the Mount, he recapitulates and gives added depth to the commandments of the second tablet, but he does not abolish them (cf. Mt 5:21–48). To do so would in any case diametrically contradict the fundamental principle underpinning his discussion of the Ten Commandments: “Think not that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Mt 5:17–18).
But what are the Beatitudes? First of all, they are situated within a long tradition of Old Testament teachings, such as we find in Psalm 1 and in the parallel text at Jeremiah 17:7–8: Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord. These are words of promise. At the same time, though, they are criteria for the discernment of spirits and so they prove to be directions for finding the right path. The setting in which Luke frames the Sermon on the Mount clarifies to whom the Beatitudes of Jesus are addressed: “He lifted up his eyes on his disciples.” The individual Beatitudes are the fruit of this looking upon the disciples; they describe what might be called the actual condition of Jesus’ disciples: They are poor, hungry, weeping men; they are hated and persecuted (cf. Lk 6:20).
These statements are meant to list practical, but also theological, attributes of the disciples of Jesus—of those who have set out to follow Jesus and have become his family. The Beatitudes, spoken with the community of Jesus’ disciples in view, are paradoxes—the standards of the world are turned upside down as soon as things are seen in the right perspective, which is to say, in terms of God’s values, so different from those of the world. It is precisely those who are poor in worldly terms, those thought of as lost souls, who are the truly fortunate ones, the blessed, who have every reason to rejoice and exult in the midst of their sufferings. The Beatitudes are promises resplendent with the new image of the world and of man inaugurated by Jesus, his “transformation of values.” They are eschatological promises. This must not, however, be taken to mean that the joy they proclaim is postponed until some infinitely remote future or applies exclusively to the next world.
The paradoxes that Jesus presents in the Beatitudes express the believer’s true situation in the world in similar terms to those repeatedly used by Paul to describe his experience of living and suffering as an Apostle: “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Cor 6:8–10). “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8–9). What the Beatitudes in Luke’s Gospel present as a consolation and a promise, Paul presents as the lived experience of the apostle. He considers that he has been made “last of all,” a man under a death sentence, a spectacle to the world, homeless, calumniated, despised (cf. 1 Cor 4:9–13). And yet he experiences a boundless joy. As the one who has been handed over, who has given himself away in order to bring Christ to men, he experiences the interconnectedness of Cross and Resurrection: We are handed over to death “so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor 4:11). In his messengers Christ himself still suffers, still hangs on the Cross.
The Beatitudes express the meaning of discipleship. They become more concrete and real the more completely the disciple dedicates himself to service in the way that is illustrated for us in the life of Saint Paul. What the Beatitudes mean cannot be expressed in purely theoretical terms; it is proclaimed in the life and suffering, and in the mysterious joy, of the disciple who gives himself over completely to following the Lord. This leads to the second point: the Christological character of the Beatitudes. The disciple is bound to the mystery of Christ. His life is immersed in communion with Christ: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). The Beatitudes are the transposition of Cross and Resurrection into discipleship. But they apply to the disciple because they were first paradigmatically lived by Christ himself.
Let us now take a somewhat closer look at each individual link in the chain of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. First of all, we have the much debated saying about the “poor in spirit.”. At the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judea, 90 percent of Judeans would have been counted among the poor; Persian tax policy resulted in another situation of dramatic poverty after the Exile. It was no longer possible to maintain the older vision according to which the righteous prosper and poverty is a consequence of a bad life. Now Israel recognizes that its poverty is exactly what brings it close to God; it recognizes that the poor, in their humility, are the ones closest to God’s heart, whereas the opposite is true of the arrogant pride of the rich, who rely only on themselves.
The piety of the poor that grew out of this realization finds expression in many of the Psalms; the poor recognize themselves as the true Israel. In the piety of these Psalms, in their expression of deep devotion to God’s goodness, in the human goodness and humility that grew from it as men waited vigilantly for God’s saving love—here developed that generosity of heart that was to open the door for Christ. Silently evolving here was the attitude before God that Paul explored in his theology of justification: These are people who do not flaunt their achievements before God. They do not stride into God’s presence as if they were partners able to engage with him on an equal footing; they do not lay claim to a reward for what they have done. These are people who know that their poverty also has an interior dimension; they are lovers who simply want to let God bestow his gifts upon them and thereby to live in inner harmony with God’s nature and word. Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, Zachariah and Elizabeth, the shepherds of Bethlehem, and the Twelve whom the Lord called to intimate discipleship are all part of this current, which contrasts with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but also, despite a great deal of spiritual affinity.
There is no opposition between Matthew, who speaks of the poor in spirit, and Luke, in whose Gospel the Lord addresses the “poor” without further qualification. Some have claimed that Matthew took the concept of poverty that Luke originally understood in a totally material and real way, spiritualized it, and so robbed it of its radicalism. Yet anyone who reads the Gospel of Luke knows perfectly well that it is he who introduces us to the “poor in spirit”—the sociological group, one might say, among whom Jesus’ earthly journey, and that of his message, could begin. Conversely, it is clear that Matthew remains completely in the tradition of piety reflected in the Psalms and so in the vision of the true Israel expressed in them.
The poverty of which this tradition speaks is never a purely material phenomenon. Purely material poverty does not bring salvation, though of course those who are disadvantaged in this world may count on God’s goodness in a particular way. But the heart of those who have nothing can be hardened, poisoned, evil—interiorly full of greed for material things, forgetful of God, covetous of external possessions.
On the other hand, the poverty spoken of here is not a purely spiritual attitude, either. Admittedly, not everyone is called to the radicalism with which so many true Christians—from Anthony, father of monasticism, to Francis of Assisi, down to the exemplary poor of our era—have lived and continue to live their poverty as a model for us. But, in order to be the community of Jesus’ poor, the Church has constant need of the great ascetics. She needs the communities that follow them, living out poverty and simplicity so as to display to us the truth of the Beatitudes. She needs them to wake everyone up to the fact that possession is all about service, to contrast the culture of affluence with the culture of inner freedom, and thereby to create the conditions for social justice as well.
The Sermon on the Mount is not a social program per se, to be sure. But it is only when the great inspiration it gives us vitally influences our thought and our action, only when faith generates the strength of renunciation and responsibility for our neighbor and for the whole of society—only then can social justice grow, too. And the Church as a whole must never forget that she has to remain recognizably the community of God’s poor.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In both Matthew and Luke the promise assigned to them is as follows: “Theirs [yours] is the Kingdom of God [the Kingdom of heaven]” (Mt 5:3; Lk 6:20). “Kingdom of God” is the basic category of Jesus’ message; here it becomes part of the Beatitudes. This context is important for a correct understanding of this much disputed term. We have already seen this in our examination of the meaning of the expression “Kingdom of God,” and we will need to recall it frequently in the course of our further reflections.
But it may be a good idea—before we continue our meditation on the text—to turn for a moment to the figure whom the history of faith offers us as the most intensely lived illustration of this Beatitude: Francis of Assisi. The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out. Interpretation of Scripture can never be a purely academic affair, and it cannot be relegated to the purely historical. Scripture is full of potential for the future, a potential that can only be opened up when someone “lives through” and “suffers through” the sacred text. Francis of Assisi was gripped in an utterly radical way by the promise of the first Beatitude, to the point that he even gave away his garments and let himself be clothed anew by the bishop, the representative of God’s fatherly goodness, through which the lilies of the field were clad in robes finer than Solomon’s (cf. Mt 6:28–29). For Francis, this extreme humility was above all freedom for service, freedom for mission, ultimate trust in God, who cares not only for the flowers of the field but specifically for his human children. It was a corrective to the Church of his day, which, through the feudal system, had lost the freedom and dynamism of missionary outreach. It was the deepest possible openness to Christ, to whom Francis was perfectly configured by the wounds of the stigmata, so perfectly that from then on he truly no longer lived as himself, but as one reborn, totally from and in Christ. By looking at Francis of Assisi we see clearly what the words “Kingdom of God” mean. Francis stood totally within the Church, and at the same time it is in figures such as he that the Church grows toward the goal that lies in the future, and yet is already present: The Kingdom of God is drawing near….
In the text of Matthew’s Gospel, this third Beatitude is associated with the promise of the land: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land.” What does this statement mean? Hope for the land is part of the original content of the promise to Abraham. During Israel’s years of wandering in the desert, the promised land is always envisaged as the goal of the journey. In exile Israel waits for the return to the land. We must not overlook, however, that the promise of the land is clearly about something far greater than the mere idea of possessing a piece of ground or a national territory in the sense that every people is entitled to do.
The main issue in the foreground of the struggle for liberation prior to Israel’s exodus from Egypt is the right to freedom of worship, the people’s right to their own liturgy. As time went by, it became increasingly clear that the promise of the land meant this: The land was given as a space for obedience, a realm of openness to God, that was to be freed from the abominations of idolatry. The concept of obedience to God, and so of the right ordering of the earth, is an essential component of the concept of freedom and the concept of the land. From this perspective, the exile, the withdrawal of the land, could also be understood: The land had itself become a zone of idolatry and disobedience, and the possession of the land had therefore become a contradiction.
There is a sense in which the interplay between “meekness” and the promise of the land can also be seen as a perfectly ordinary piece of historical wisdom: Conquerors come and go, but the ones who remain are the simple, the humble, who cultivate the land and continue sowing and harvesting in the midst of sorrows and joys. The humble, the simple, outlast the violent, even from a purely historical point of view.
The gradual universalization of the concept of the land on the basis of a theology of hope also reflects the universal horizon that we found in the promise of Zechariah: The land of the king of peace is not a nation-state—it stretches from “sea to sea” (Zech 9:10). Peace aims at the overcoming of boundaries and at the renewal of the earth through the peace that comes from God. The earth ultimately belongs to the meek, to the peaceful, the Lord tells us. It is meant to become the “land of the king of peace.” The third Beatitude invites us to orient our lives toward this goal and harmonizes closely with the first: It goes some way toward explaining what “Kingdom of God” means, even though the claim behind this term extends beyond the promise of the land.
With the foregoing remarks, we have already anticipated the seventh Beatitude: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Mt 5:9). The faithful in Israel would be reminded of Solomon, whose Hebrew name is rooted in the word for “peace” (shalom). The Lord had promised David: “I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days…. He shall be my son, and I will be his father” (1 Chron 22:9f.). This brings to the fore a connection between divine Sonship and the kingship of peace: Jesus is the Son, and he is truly Son. He is therefore the true “Solomon”—the bringer of peace. Establishing peace is part of the very essence of Sonship. The seventh Beatitude thus invites us to be and do what the Son does, so that we ourselves may become “sons of God.”. This applies first of all in the context of each person’s life. It begins with the fundamental decision that Paul passionately begs us to make in the name of God: “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20). Enmity with God is the source of all that poisons man; overcoming this enmity is the basic condition for peace in the world. Only the man who is reconciled with God can also be reconciled and in harmony with himself, and only the man who is reconciled with God and with himself can establish peace around him and throughout the world. But the political context that emerges from Luke’s infancy narrative as well as here in Matthew’s Beatitudes indicates the full scope of these words. That there be peace on earth (cf. Lk 2:14) is the will of God and, for that reason, it is a task given to man as well. The Christian knows that lasting peace is connected with men abiding in God’s eudokia, his “good pleasure.” The struggle to abide in peace with God is an indispensable part of the struggle for “peace on earth”; the former is the source of the criteria and the energy for the latter. When men lose sight of God, peace disintegrates and violence proliferates to a formerly unimaginable degree of cruelty. This we see only too clearly today.
Let us go back to the second Beatitude: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Mt 5:4). Is it good to mourn and to declare mourning blessed? There are two kinds of mourning. The first is the kind that has lost hope, that has become mistrustful of love and of truth, and that therefore eats away and destroys man from within. But there is also the mourning occasioned by the shattering encounter with truth, which leads man to undergo conversion and to resist evil. This mourning heals, because it teaches man to hope and to love again. Judas is an example of the first kind of mourning: Struck with horror at his own fall, he no longer dares to hope and hangs himself in despair. Peter is an example of the second kind: Struck by the Lord’s gaze, he bursts into healing tears that plow up the soil of his soul. He begins anew and is himself renewed.
Tradition has yielded another image of mourning that brings salvation: Mary standing under the Cross with her sister, the wife of Clopas, with Mary Magdalene, and with John (Jn 19:25). We encounter here the small band of people who remain true in a world full of cruelty and cynicism or else with fearful conformity. They cannot avert the disaster, but by “suffering with” the one condemned (by their com-passion in the etymological sense) they place themselves on his side, and by their “loving with” they are on the side of God, who is love.
At the foot of Jesus’ Cross we understand better than anywhere else what it means to say “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Those who do not harden their hearts to the pain and need of others, who do not give evil entry to their souls, but suffer under its power and so acknowledge the truth of God—they are the ones who open the windows of the world to let the light in. It is to those who mourn in this sense that great consolation is promised. The second Beatitude is thus intimately connected with the eighth: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:10).
The mourning of which the Lord speaks is nonconformity with evil; it is a way of resisting models of behavior that the individual is pressured to accept because “everyone does it.” The world cannot tolerate this kind of resistance; it demands conformity. It considers this mourning to be an accusation directed against the numbing of consciences. And so it is. That is why those who mourn suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness. Those who mourn are promised comfort; those who are persecuted are promised the Kingdom of God—the same promise that is made to the poor in spirit. The two promises are closely related. The Kingdom of God—standing under the protection of God’s power, secure in his love—that is true comfort.
Jesus’ words concerning those persecuted for righteousness’ sake had a prophetic significance for Matthew and his audience. For them this was the Lord foretelling the situation of the Church which they were living through. The Church had become a persecuted Church, persecuted “for righteousness’ sake.”
The people who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake are those who live by God’s righteousness—by faith. Because man constantly strives for emancipation from God’s will in order to follow himself alone, faith will always appear as a contradiction to the “world”—to the ruling powers at any given time. For this reason, there will be persecution for the sake of righteousness in every period of history. This word of comfort is addressed to the persecuted Church of all times. In her powerlessness and in her sufferings, she knows that she stands in the place where God’s Kingdom is coming.
The Beatitude concerning the persecuted contains, in the words that conclude the whole passage, a variant indicating something new. Jesus promises joy, exultation, and a great reward to those who for his sake are reviled, and persecuted, and have all manner of evil uttered falsely against them (cf. Mt 5:11).
Let us turn now to one of the two Beatitudes still to be discussed: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Mt 5:6). This saying is intrinsically related to Jesus’ words concerning those who mourn and who will find comfort. In the earlier Beatitude, the ones who receive the promise are those who do not bow to the diktat of the prevailing opinions and customs, but resist it by suffering. Similarly, this Beatitude is concerned with those who are on the lookout, who are in search of something great, of true justice, of the true good.
The prevailing view today is that everyone should live by the religion—or perhaps by the atheism—in which he happens to find himself already. This, it is said, is the path of salvation for him. Such a view presupposes a strange picture of God and a strange idea of man and of the right way for man to live.
Does someone achieve blessedness and justification in God’s eyes because he has declared his opinions and wishes to be norms of conscience and so made himself the criterion? No, God demands the opposite. God demands that we become inwardly attentive to his quiet exhortation, which is present in us and which tears us away from what is merely habitual and puts us on the road to truth. To “hunger and thirst for righteousness”—that is the path that lies open to everyone; that is the way that finds its destination in Jesus Christ.
There is one more Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). The organ for seeing God is the heart. The intellect alone is not enough. In order for man to become capable of perceiving God, the energies of his existence have to work in harmony. His will must be pure and so too must the underlying affective dimension of his soul, which gives intelligence and will their direction. Speaking of the heart in this way means precisely that man’s perceptive powers play in concert, which also requires the proper interplay of body and soul, since this is essential for the totality of the creature we call “man.”
Man’s fundamental affective disposition actually depends on just this unity of body and soul and on man’s acceptance of being both body and spirit. This means he places his body under the discipline of the spirit, yet does not isolate intellect or will. Rather, he accepts himself as coming from God, and thereby also acknowledges and lives out the bodiliness of his existence as an enrichment for the spirit. The heart—the wholeness of man—must be pure, interiorly open and free, in order for man to be able to see God. Theophilus of Antioch (d. ca. 180) once put it like this in a debate with some disputants: “If you say, ‘show me your God,’ I should like to answer you, ‘show me the man who is in you.’…For God is perceived by men who are capable of seeing him, who have the eyes of their spirit open…. Man’s soul must be as pure as a shining mirror” (Ad Autolycum, I, 2, 7.).
We meet the motif of purity of heart above all in Psalm 24, which reflects an ancient gate liturgy: “Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully” (Ps 24:3–4). Clean hands and a pure heart are the condition. One fundamental condition is that those who would enter into God’s presence must inquire after him, must seek his face (Ps 24:6). The fundamental condition thus proves to be the same attitude that we saw earlier, described by the phrase “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Inquiring after God, seeking his face—that is the first and fundamental condition for the ascent that leads to the encounter with God. Even before that, however, the Psalm specifies that clean hands and a pure heart entail man’s refusal to deceive or commit perjury; this requires honesty, truthfulness, and justice toward one’s fellow men and toward the community—what we might call social ethics, although it actually reaches right down into the depths of the heart.
Purification of heart occurs as a consequence of following Christ, of becoming one with him. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). And at this point something new comes to light: The ascent to God occurs precisely in the descent of humble service, in the descent of love, for love is God’s essence, and is thus the power that truly purifies man and enables him to perceive God and to see him. The pure heart is the loving heart that enters into communion of service and obedience with Jesus Christ. Love is the fire that purifies and unifies intellect, will, and emotion, thereby making man one with himself, inasmuch as it makes him one in God’s eyes.
After this attempt to penetrate somewhat more deeply into the interior vision of the Beatitudes (the theme of the “merciful” is addressed not in this chapter, but in connection with the parable of the Good Samaritan), we must still briefly ask ourselves two questions that pertain to the understanding of the whole. In Luke’s Gospel, the four Beatitudes that he presents are followed by four proclamations of woe: “Woe to you who are rich…. Woe to you who are full now…. Woe to you who laugh now…. Woe to you when all men praise you” (Lk 6:24–26). These words terrify us. What are we to think of them?
Now, the first thing to say is that Jesus is here following the pattern that is also found in Jeremiah 17 and Psalm 1: After an account of the right path that leads man to salvation, there follows a warning sign to caution against the opposite path. This warning sign unmasks false promises and false offers; it is meant to save man from following a path that can only lead him fatally over the precipice. We will find the same thing again in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
If we have correctly understood the signposts of hope that we found in the Beatitudes, we recognize that here we are dealing simply with the opposite attitudes, which lock man into mere outward appearance, into provisionality, into the loss of his highest and deepest qualities and hence into the loss of God and neighbor—the path to ruin. Now we come to understand the real intention of this warning sign: The proclamations of woe are not condemnations; they are not an expression of hatred, or of envy, or of hostility. The point is not condemnation, but a warning that is intended to save.
But now the fundamental question arises: Is the direction the Lord shows us in the Beatitudes and in the corresponding warnings actually the right one? Is it really such a bad thing to be rich, to eat one’s fill, to laugh, to be praised? Friedrich Nietzsche trained his angry critique precisely on this aspect of Christianity. It is not Christian doctrine that needs to be critiqued, he says, it is Christian morality that needs to be exposed as a “capital crime against life.”. Nietzsche sees the vision of the Sermon on the Mount as a religion of resentment, as the envy of the cowardly and incompetent, who are unequal to life’s demands and try to avenge themselves by blessing their failure and cursing the strong, the successful, and the happy.
Much of this has found its way into the modern mind-set and to a large extent shapes how our contemporaries feel about life. Thus, the Sermon on the Mount poses the question of the fundamental Christian option, and, as children of our time, we feel an inner resistance to it—even though we are still touched by Jesus’ praise of the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure. Knowing now from experience how brutally totalitarian regimes have trampled upon human beings and despised, enslaved, and struck down the weak, we have also gained a new appreciation of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; we have rediscovered the soul of those who mourn and their right to be comforted. As we witness the abuse of economic power, as we witness the cruelties of a capitalism that degrades man to the level of merchandise, we have also realized the perils of wealth, and we have gained a new appreciation of what Jesus meant when he warned of riches, of the man-destroying divinity Mammon, which grips large parts of the world in a cruel stranglehold. Yes indeed, the Beatitudes stand opposed to our spontaneous sense of existence, our hunger and thirst for life. They demand “conversion”—that we inwardly turn around to go in the opposite direction from the one we would spontaneously like to go in. But this U-turn brings what is pure and noble to the fore and gives a proper ordering to our lives.
The Sermon on the Mount is a hidden Christology. Behind the Sermon on the Mount stands the figure of Christ, the man who is God, but who, precisely because he is God, descends, empties himself, all the way to death on the Cross. The saints, from Paul through Francis of Assisi down to Mother Teresa, have lived out this option and have thereby shown us the correct image of man and his happiness. In a word, the true morality of Christianity is love. And love does admittedly run counter to self-seeking—it is an exodus out of oneself, and yet this is precisely the way in which man comes to himself. Compared with the tempting luster of Nietzsche’s image of man, this way seems at first wretched, and thoroughly unreasonable. But it is the real high road of life; it is only on the way of love, whose paths are described in the Sermon on the Mount, that the richness of life and the greatness of man’s calling are opened up.
The Sermon on the Mount, as we have seen, draws a comprehensive portrait of the right way to live. It aims to show us how to be a human being. We could sum up its fundamental insights by saying that man can be understood only in light of God, and that his life is made righteous only when he lives it in relation to God.
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| Marten van Valckenborch - Christ defends the plucking of the ears of grain on the Sabbath (1585) |
2 Some of the Pharisees said, 'Why are you doing something that is forbidden on the Sabbath day?'
3 Jesus answered them, 'So you have not read what David did when he and his followers were hungry-
4 how he went into the house of God and took the loaves of the offering and ate them and gave them to his followers, loaves which the priests alone are allowed to eat?'
5 And he said to them, 'The Son of man is master of the Sabbath.'
6 Now on another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and began to teach, and a man was present, and his right hand was withered.
7 The scribes and the Pharisees were watching him to see if he would cure somebody on the Sabbath, hoping to find something to charge him with.
8 But he knew their thoughts; and he said to the man with the withered hand, 'Get up and stand out in the middle!' And he came forward and stood there.
9 Then Jesus said to them, 'I put it to you: is it permitted on the Sabbath to do good, or to do evil; to save life, or to destroy it?'
10 Looking around at them all, he then said to him, "Stretch out your hand." He did so and his hand was restored.
11 But they became enraged and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.
Jesus unmasks his opponents with a question: Is the Sabbath day for good or harm? The implied answer is obvious (for good) and designed to expose the malice of the Pharisees (6:7). For regardless of what Jesus does, they are already planning to harm him. In the end, it is the Pharisees who violate the Sabbath and walk straight into their own trap. Jesus looks to the Sabbath as the most suitable day to relieve the oppressed of their burdens. Allegorically (St. Bede, In Lucam): the crippled man signifies mankind corrupt and fallen from grace. His hand is withered in sin because it stretched forth to eat the forbidden fruit in paradise. Christ now comes with forgiveness to restore man to spiritual health.
The observance of the Sabbath was a central law, one of the Ten Commandments. This was a very ancient Law the value of which was stressed after the Exile. During the Exile, the people had to work seven days a week from morning until evening, without any conditions to meet and meditate on the Word of God, to pray together and to share faith, their problems and their hopes. Therefore, there was an urgent need to stop at least one day a week to get together and encourage one another during the very difficult situation of the exile. Otherwise they would have lost their faith. It was then that faith was reborn and the observance of Saturday was reestablished.
The Pharisees invoke the Bible to say it was a transgression of the Law of Saturday. Immediately Jesus responds recalling that David himself also did things which were prohibited. Jesus neither affirms nor disputes their interpretation of what counts as work. Instead, he brings the discussion to a different level, answering their question with a counterquestion. He refers to an incident recorded in 1 Sam 21:2-7, when David and his companions were fleeing for their lives from the murderous King Saul. En route, David stopped at the house of God (which at that time was the meeting tent, since the temple had not yet been built) to beg some bread for himself and his hungry men. Since there was no ordinary bread on hand, the priest, Ahimelech, responded by giving David some of the bread of offering, the holy bread that was kept on a special altar and that priests alone could eat (Exod 25:30; Lev 24:5-9). The fact that the holy bread was available suggests that that incident too took place on the sabbath (Lev 24:5-9).
Jesus knew the Bible and referred to it to show that the arguments of others had no foundation. In Matthew, the response of Jesus is more complete. He not only recalls the story of David, but also quotes the Legislation which permits the priests to work on Saturday and he quotes Prophet Hosea: “Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice”. Jesus ends with the following phrase: The Son of Man is Master of the Sabbath! The Lord of Saturday! Jesus, Son of Man, who lives in intimacy with God, discovers the sense of the Bible not from outside, from without, but from inside, that is, discovers the sense starting at the roots, beginning from his intimacy with the author of the Bible who is God himself.
comments by Edward Sri, professor of theology and Scripture:
It is astonishing the Jesus' self-identification as Lord of the sabbath. The Sabbath is a divine institution (Gen 2:3), and when God speaks of the Sabbath he refers to it as his own: “my Sabbath” (Exod 31:13; Lev 19:3, 30; Isa 56:4). Therefore in calling himself “Lord of the Sabbath” Jesus puts himself on par with God, the one who instituted the Sabbath. As such, he has authority over how the Sabbath law is to be observed.
After this confrontation, Jesus goes into their synagogue, where he encounters a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees ask Jesus, Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath? The Old Testament itself does not outlaw healing on the Sabbath, and healing is not one of the thirty-nine acts later specified by the rabbis as unlawful on the Sabbath. But later Jewish tradition viewed medical assistance on the Sabbath as permissible only in emergency cases; non-life-threatening conditions, such as having a withered hand, were to be treated after the Sabbath rest. This, it seems, is the opinion of the Pharisees. Their question takes on a hostile tone. They want to gain legal evidence against him, so that they might accuse him. They ask their question in order to provoke Jesus, hoping he will perform a healing, which many Jews would see as a violation of the Sabbath rest.
Jesus responds by noting that they themselves would rescue one of their sheep if it fell into a pit on the Sabbath. If a Jew would save livestock on the Sabbath, how much more should he rescue a man from physical sufferings on the Sabbath, for a person is much more valuable . . . than a sheep. Jesus concludes: So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath. Jesus thus keeps the Sabbath, while rejecting the Pharisaic view of what Sabbath observance requires.
On Sundays, Christians are to withdraw from the earthly tasks that preoccupy them throughout the week and enter into God’s Sabbath rest. At the same time, we must remember that “it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath” (12:12). In fact, Sunday is a day well-suited for charitable works. The Catechism recommends that on Sunday Christians pursue “good works and humble service of the sick, the infirm, and the elderly” (Catechism 2186). Thus Sunday is a particularly good day to volunteer at a soup kitchen, give alms to the poor, or visit the sick in hospitals and nursing homes. Moreover, the good that Christians should do on the Sabbath can also take place right in their own homes, “by devoting time and care to their families and relatives, often difficult to do on other days of the week” (Catechism 2186). Indeed, with every other day filled up with constant projects, tasks, and errands, observing the Sabbath rest forces us to set aside the busyness of life and focus on our most important relationships. By not treating Sunday as a day to catch up on yard work, shopping, and bills, we can enter more fully into the Sabbath and catch up with the family and friends God has placed in our lives, so that in leisure we can begin to “see the true face of the people with whom we live".
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
For Israel, observing the Sabbath with scrupulous care is the central expression of life in Covenant with God. Even the superficial reader of the Gospels realizes that the dispute over what does and does not belong to the Sabbath is at the heart of Jesus’ differences with the people of Israel of his time. The conventional interpretation is that Jesus broke open a narrow-minded, legalistic practice and replaced it with a more generous, more liberal view, and thereby opened the door for acting rationally in accord with the given situation. Jesus’ statement that “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mk 2:27) is cited as evidence, the idea being that it represents an anthropocentric view of reality, from which a “liberal” interpretation of the commandments supposedly follows naturally. It was, in fact, the Sabbath disputes that became the basis for the image of the liberal Jesus. His critique of the Judaism of his time, so it is said, was a freedom-loving and rational man’s critique of an ossified legalism—hypocritical to the core and guilty of dragging religion down to the level of a slavish system of utterly unreasonable obligations that hold man back from developing his work and his freedom. It goes without saying that this interpretation did not favor a particularly friendly image of Judaism. Of course, the modern critique—beginning with the Reformation—saw in Catholicism the return of this supposedly “Jewish” element.
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27f.). In Matthew and Luke, the first sentence is missing. They record Jesus as saying simply: “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Mt 12:8; Lk 6:5). Perhaps the explanation is that Matthew and Luke omit the first sentence for fear that it will be abused. Be that as it may, it is clear that according to Mark the two sentences belong together and interpret one another.
To say that the Sabbath is for man, and not man for the Sabbath, is not simply an expression of the sort of modern liberal position that we spontaneously read into these words. In the Son of Man, man is revealed as he truly ought to be. In terms of the Son of Man, in terms of the criterion that Jesus himself is, man is free and he knows how to use the Sabbath properly as the day of freedom deriving from God and destined for God. “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” The magnitude of Jesus’ claim—which is an authoritative interpretation of the Law because he himself is God’s primordial Word—becomes fully apparent here. And it also becomes apparent what sort of new freedom devolves upon man as a result—a freedom that has nothing to do with mere caprice. The important thing about this Sabbath saying is the overlapping of “man” and “Son of Man”; we see how this teaching, in itself quite ordinary, becomes an expression of the special dignity of Jesus.
At any rate, the question about Jesus—who he really was, and what he really wanted—as well as the whole question as to what Judaism and Christianity actually are: This is the point at issue. Was Jesus in reality a liberal rabbi—a forerunner of Christian liberalism? Is the Christ of faith, and therefore the whole faith of the Church, just one big mistake?
When we read the dispute over the healings on the Sabbath and the accounts of Jesus’ angry grief at the hard-heartedness of those who spoke for the dominant interpretation of the Sabbath, we see that these debates concern deeper questions about man and about the right way to honor God. This side of the conflict is therefore by no means simply “trivial.” The Sabbath is therefore not just a negative matter of not engaging in outward activities, but a positive matter of “resting,” which must also be expressed in a spatial dimension: “So to keep the Sabbath, one remains at home. It is not enough merely not to work. One also has to rest. And resting means, re-forming one day a week the circle of family and household, everyone at home and in place”(p. 80). The Sabbath is not just a matter of personal piety; it is the core of the social order. This day “makes eternal Israel what it is, the people that, like God in creating the world, rest from creation on the Seventh Day” (p. 74).
We are dealing not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precisely, a Christological one. The heart of the Sabbath disputes is the question about the Son of Man—the question about Jesus Christ himself. Jesus understands himself as the Torah—as the word of God in person. The tremendous prologue of John’s Gospel—“in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1)—says nothing different from what the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels says. The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel and the Jesus of the Synoptics is one and the same: the true “historical” Jesus.
What disturbs Rabbi Jacob Neusner about Jesus’ message concerning the Sabbath is not just the centrality of Jesus himself. He throws this centrality into clear relief, but it is not the ultimate bone of contention for him. Rather, he is concerned with the consequence of Jesus’ centrality for Israel’s daily life: The Sabbath loses its great social function. The Sabbath is one of the essential elements that hold Israel together. Centering upon Jesus breaks open this sacred structure and imperils an essential element that cements the unity of the People of God.
Jesus’ claim entails that the community of his disciples is the new Israel. How can this not unsettle someone who has the “eternal Israel” at heart? The issue of Jesus’ claim to be Temple and Torah in person also has implications for the question of Israel—the issue of the living community of the people in whom God’s word is actualized.
At this point, the question arises for the Christian: Was it a good idea to jeopardize the great social function of the Sabbath, to break up Israel’s sacred order for the sake of a community of disciples that is defined, as it were, solely in terms of the figure of Jesus? This question could and can be clarified only within the emerging community of disciples—the Church. We cannot enter into this discussion here. The Resurrection of Jesus “on the first day of the week” meant that for Christians this “first day”—the beginning of the creation—became the “Lord’s day.” The essential elements of the Old Testament Sabbath then naturally passed over to the Lord’s day in the context of table fellowship with Jesus.
The Church thus recuperated the social function of the Sabbath as well, always in relation to the “Son of Man.” An unmistakable signal of this was the fact that Constantine’s Christian-inspired reform of the legal system granted slaves certain freedoms on Sundays; the Lord’s day was thus introduced as a day of freedom and rest into a legal system now shaped on Christian principles. I find it extremely worrying that modern liturgists want to dismiss this social function of Sunday as a Constantinian aberration, despite the fact that it stands in continuity with the Torah of Israel. Of course, this brings up the whole question of the relationship between faith and social order, between faith and politics.
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you” (Ex 20:12)—this is the version of the fourth commandment that is given in the Book of Exodus. It speaks of the land and of the stable continuance of life in the land. In other words, it connects the land, as the place for the people to live, with the basic order of the family. But this is exactly the connection that Jesus calls into question. He is told that his mother and brothers are outside waiting to speak to him. His answer: “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” And he stretches out his hand over his disciples and says: “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mt 12:46–50).
Faced with this text, Rabbi Jacob Neusner asks: “Does Jesus not teach me to violate one of the two great commandments…. that concern the social order?” (p. 59). The accusation here is a twofold one. The first problem is the seeming individualism of Jesus’ message. While the Torah presents a very definite social order, giving the people a juridical and social framework for war and peace, for just politics and for daily life, there is nothing like that to be found in Jesus’ teaching. Discipleship of Jesus offers no politically concrete program for structuring society. The Sermon on the Mount cannot serve as a foundation for a state and a social order, as is frequently and correctly observed.
This restructuring of the social order finds its basis and its justification in Jesus’ claim that he, with his community of disciples, forms the origin and center of a new Israel. Once again we stand before the “I” of Jesus, who speaks on the same level as the Torah itself, on the same level as God. In Jesus’ case it is not the universally binding adherence to the Torah that forms the new family. Rather, it is adherence to Jesus himself, to his Torah. For the rabbis, everyone is tied by the same relationships to a permanent social order; everyone is subject to the Torah and so everyone is equal within the larger body of all Israel. Neusner thus concludes: “I now realize, only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking”
We come to the same conclusion as in our earlier analysis of the commandment to keep the Sabbath. The Christological (theological) argument and the social argument are inextricably entwined. If Jesus is God, then he is entitled and able to handle the Torah as he does. On that condition alone does he have the right to interpret the Mosaic order of divine commands in such a radically new way as only the Lawgiver—God himself—can claim to do.
But here the question arises: Was it right and proper to create a new community of disciples founded entirely on him? Was it good to set aside the social order of the “eternal Israel,” founded on and subsisting through Abraham and Jacob according to the flesh? To declare it to be an “Israel according to the flesh,” as Paul will put it? Is there any point that we can discover to all of this? When we read the Torah together with the entire Old Testament canon, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Wisdom Literature, we realize very clearly a point that is already substantially present in the Torah itself. That is, Israel does not exist simply for itself, in order to live according to the “eternal” dispositions of the Law—it exists to be a light to the nations. In the Psalms and the prophetic books we hear more and more clearly the promise that God’s salvation will come to all the nations. We hear more and more clearly that the God of Israel—being, as he is, the only God, the true God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the God of all peoples and all men, who holds their fate in his hands—does not wish to abandon the nations to themselves. We hear that all will come to know him, that Egypt and Babylon—the two secular powers opposed to Israel—will give Israel their hand and join together in worshiping the one God.
So what has your “Messiah” Jesus actually brought asked Neusner? He has not brought world peace, and he has not conquered the world’s misery. So he can hardly be the true Messiah, who, after all, is supposed to do just that. Yes, what has Jesus brought? We have already encountered this question and we know the answer. He has brought the God of Israel to the nations, so that all the nations now pray to him and recognize Israel’s Scriptures as his word, the word of the living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one great definitive promise to Israel and the world. This universality, this faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—extended now in Jesus’ new family to all nations over and above the bonds of descent according to the flesh—is the fruit of Jesus’ work. It is what proves him to be the Messiah. It signals a new interpretation of the messianic promise that is based on Moses and the Prophets, but also opens them up in a completely new way.
The vehicle of this universalization is the new family, whose only admission requirement is communion with Jesus, communion in God’s will. For Jesus’ “I” is by no means a self-willed ego revolving around itself alone. “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mk 3:34f.): Jesus’ “I” incarnates the Son’s communion of will with the Father. It is an “I” that hears and obeys. Communion with him is filial communion with the Father—it is a yes to the fourth commandment on a new level, the highest level.
Jesus’ intention is not to abolish either the family or the Sabbath-as-celebration-of-creation, but he has to create a new and broader context for both. It is true that his invitation to join him as a member of a new and universal family through sharing his obedience to the Father does at first break up the social order of Israel. But from her very inception, the Church that emerged, and continues to emerge, has attached fundamental importance to defending the family as the core of all social order, and to standing up for the fourth commandment in the whole breadth of its meaning. Likewise it soon became clear that the essential content of the Sabbath had to be reinterpreted in terms of the Lord’s day. The fight for Sunday is another of the Church’s major concerns in the present day.
All in all, it would be good for the Christian world to look respectfully at this obedience of Israel, and thus to appreciate better the great commandments of the Decalogue, which Christians have to transfer into the context of God’s universal family and which Jesus, as the “new Moses,” has given to us. In him we see the fulfillment of the promise made to Moses: “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren” (Deut 18:15).
Jesus does nothing new or unprecedented when he contrasts the practical, casuistic norms developed in the Torah with the pure will of God, which he presents as the “greater righteousness” (Mt 5:20) expected of God’s children. He takes up the intrinsic dynamism of the Torah itself, as further developed by the Prophets, and—in his capacity as the Chosen Prophet who sees God face-to-face (Deut 18:15)—he gives it its radical form.
In the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus stands before us neither as a rebel nor as a liberal, but as the prophetic interpreter of the Torah. He does not abolish it, but he fulfills it, and he does so precisely by assigning reason its sphere of responsibility for acting within history. Consequently, Christianity constantly has to reshape and reformulate social structures and “Christian social teaching.” There will always be new developments to correct what has gone before. In the inner structure of the Torah, in its further development under the critique of the Prophets, and in Jesus’ message, which takes up both elements, Christianity finds the wide scope for necessary historical evolution as well as the solid ground that guarantees the dignity of man by rooting it in the dignity of God.
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
The Pharisees’ zeal for sabbath observance was motivated by the belief that disobedience would lead to disaster for the whole nation. Indeed, as punishment for disobedience (Deut 28:15, 36-37, 63-64), Israel had gone into exile and Jerusalem had been destroyed: “If you do not obey me and keep holy the sabbath day ... I will set fire to its gates . . . and it will consume the palaces of Jerusalem” (Jer 17:27). In Jesus’ time, the effects of exile still continued, since Israel’s tribes were scattered and the land was controlled by a Gentile oppressor. In order to hasten Israel’s restoration, therefore, obedience was necessary, especially with regard to observances like the sabbath that safeguarded Israel’s identity. However, these Pharisees failed to see that in Jesus the time of restoration was at hand.
comments by Jimmy Akin (Catholic author):
Jesus exercised his sovereign power to abrogate the sabbath law in at least some way. This is why he states, "For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath" (Mt 12:8). Both "Son of Man" and "Lord" are references to Christ's sovereign power.
The sabbath command is the only one of the Ten Commandments which can be altered in any way, because only it is a part of the ceremonial law.
The other commandments of the Decalogue are precepts of the natural law, obligatory at all times and unalterable. Hence, after the abrogation of the Law of Moses, all the Commandments contained in the two tables are observed by Christians, not indeed because their observance is commanded by Moses, but because they are in conformity with nature which dictates obedience to them.
This Commandment about the observance of the sabbath, on the other hand, considered as to the time appointed for its fulfillment, is not fixed and unalterable, but susceptible of change and belongs not to the moral, but the ceremonial law. Neither is it a principle of the natural law; we are not instructed by nature to give external worship to God on that day, rather than on any other. And in fact the sabbath was kept holy only from the time of the liberation of the people of Israel from the bondage of Pharaoh.
The observance of the sabbath was to be abrogated at the same time as the other Hebrew rites and ceremonies, that is, at the death of Christ. . . . Hence St. Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, when reproving the observers of the Mosaic rites, says: "You observe days and months and times and years; I am afraid of you lest perhaps I have labored in vain amongst you" (Gal 4:10). And he writes to the same effect to the Colossians (Col 2:16).
For Christians the ceremonial observance of Sunday replaces that of the sabbath. Properly speaking, we're not celebrating the sabbath on Sunday. We're celebrating something else, but it's something that the sabbath points toward. As the Catechism says, the Jewish sabbath announces man's eternal rest in God and prefigures some aspects of Christ. Sunday thus fulfills what the sabbath pointed toward.
Christians have celebrated the Lord's day since the first century. In fact, in the very first chapter of Revelation, we read that John experienced the inaugural vision of the book on "the Lord's day." He writes:
"I John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet"
Commissioning of the Twelve Apostles (Luke 6:12-16)
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| Ghirlandaio Domenico - Calling of the Apostles (1481) |
13 When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named apostles:
14 Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew,
15 Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot
16 and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
Jesus undertakes a prayer vigil to prepare for his selection of the twelve apostles in the morning (6:13). The apostles will preach the gospel and lead the early Church. They are emissaries invested with Christ's royal and priestly authority (9:1-6; Mt 28:16-20) (CCC 765, 1577). Like the 12 patriarchs of Israel (Gen 35:22-26), Jesus chooses 12 men to be the father figures of the renewed kingdom of Israel, the Church (22:28-30; Gal 6:16; Rev 21:14). From Luke's perspective, they are an important group who because of their association with Jesus from the time of his baptism to his ascension (Acts 1:21-22) provide the continuity between the historical Jesus and the church of Luke's day and who as the original eyewitnesses guarantee the fidelity of the church's beliefs and practices to the teachings of Jesus.
Simon who was called a Zealot: The Zealots were the instigators of the First Revolt of Palestinian Jews against Rome in A.D. 66-70. Because the existence of the Zealots as a distinct group during the lifetime of Jesus is the subject of debate, the meaning of the identification of Simon as a Zealot is unclear.
Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17–49)
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| Carl Heinrich Bloch - The Sermon on the Mount (1877) |
18 who had come to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. People tormented by unclean spirits were also cured,
19 and everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him because power came out of him that cured them all.
20 Then fixing his eyes on his disciples he said: How blessed are you who are poor: the kingdom of God is yours.
21 Blessed are you who are hungry now: you shall have your fill. Blessed are you who are weeping now: you shall laugh.
22 'Blessed are you when people hate you, drive you out, abuse you, denounce your name as criminal, on account of the Son of man.
23 Rejoice when that day comes and dance for joy, look!-your reward will be great in heaven. This was the way their ancestors treated the prophets.
24 But alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now.
25 Alas for you who have plenty to eat now: you shall go hungry. Alas for you who are laughing now: you shall mourn and weep.
26 'Alas for you when everyone speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets.
27 'But I say this to you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
28 Bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.
29 To anyone who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek as well; to anyone who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic.
30 Give to everyone who asks you, and do not ask for your property back from someone who takes it.
31 Treat others as you would like people to treat you.
32 If you love those who love you, what credit can you expect? Even sinners love those who love them.
33 And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit can you expect? For even sinners do that much.
34 And if you lend to those from whom you hope to get money back, what credit can you expect? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount.
35 Instead, love your enemies and do good to them, and lend without any hope of return. You will have a great reward, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
36 'Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate.
37 Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven.
38 Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap; because the standard you use will be the standard used for you.'
39 He also told them a parable, 'Can one blind person guide another? Surely both will fall into a pit?
40 Disciple is not superior to teacher; but fully trained disciple will be like teacher.
41 Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the great log in your own?
42 How can you say to your brother, "Brother, let me take out that splinter in your eye," when you cannot see the great log in your own? Hypocrite! Take the log out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take out the splinter in your brother's eyes.
43 'There is no sound tree that produces rotten fruit, nor again a rotten tree that produces sound fruit.
44 Every tree can be told by its own fruit: people do not pick figs from thorns, nor gather grapes from brambles.
45 Good people draw what is good from the store of goodness in their hearts; bad people draw what is bad from the store of badness. For the words of the mouth flow out of what fills the heart.
46 'Why do you call me, "Lord, Lord" and not do what I say?
47 'Everyone who comes to me and listens to my words and acts on them -- I will show you what such a person is like.
48 Such a person is like the man who, when he built a house, dug, and dug deep, and laid the foundations on rock; when the river was in flood it bore down on that house but could not shake it, it was so well built.
49 But someone who listens and does nothing is like the man who built a house on soil, with no foundations; as soon as the river bore down on it, it collapsed; and what a ruin that house became!
Together, the Beatitudes present a new set of ideals that focus on love and humility rather than force and exaction; they echo the highest ideals of his teachings on spirituality and compassion.
27 love your enemies and do good to them, and lend without any hope of return: Early church thinkers saw this as one of Jesus' most important teachings, but the history of the early church shows that very few church fathers actually lived up to the literal ideal it espouses. By the Middle Ages, the verse had become seen as problematic in regard to war, and so it was re-interpreted so as to only apply to relations between individuals rather than those between nations, countries, faiths, or ideologies. Several later thinkers rejected this view as a blatant attempt to re-write things that one disagreed with rather than accept that it contradicts ones own stance at face value,and Leo Tolstoy specifically read this verse as a rejection of militant nationalism.
29 To anyone who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek as well; to anyone who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic.
The idea of "offering one's cheek" to a smiter is also seen in Lamentations 3:30, where the context indicates a form of penitence or submission to oppressors, with the hope of being spared. In everyday speech, the phrase "turn the other cheek" is often used to mean something like "turn away from aggression and ignore it rather than retaliate." Morality lessons that teach turning the other cheek as a good or Christian value would typically emphasize nonviolence and non-confrontation.
Several Church Fathers interpreted Jesus' teachings as advocating nonviolence. For example:
Whatever Christians would not wish others to do to them, they do not to others. And they comfort their oppressors and make them their friends; they do good to their enemies…. Through love towards their oppressors, they persuade them to become Christians.
—The Apology of Aristides 15
Luke 6 Vers 47-49: The usual interpretation goes back to John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), who wrote in his Homily 24 on Matthew:
By "rain" here, and "floods," and "winds," He is expressing metaphorically the calamities and afflictions that befall men; such as false accusations, plots, bereavements, deaths, loss of friends, vexations from strangers, all the ills in our life that any one could mention. "But to none of these," says He, "does such a soul give way; and the cause is, it is founded on the rock." He calls the steadfastness of His doctrine a rock; because in truth His commands are stronger than any rock, setting one above all the waves of human affairs. For he who keeps these things strictly, will not have the advantage of men only when they are vexing him, but even of the very devils plotting against him. And that it is not vain boasting so to speak, Job is our witness, who received all the assaults of the devil, and stood unmoveable; and the apostles too are our witnesses, for that when the waves of the whole world were beating against them, when both nations and princes, both their own people and strangers, both the evil spirits, and the devil, and every engine was set in motion, they stood firmer than a rock, and dispersed it all.
This Sermon on the Plain was a sermon given by Jesus of Nazareth according to the Gospel of Luke 6:17-49; it may be compared to the longer Sermon on the Mount. Some of Jesus' most famous teachings come from the Sermon on the Mount, which contains the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer. It is one of five collections of teachings in Matthew.
The beatitudes in Matthew (5:3-12) are:
* Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
* Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
* Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
* Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
* Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
* Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
* Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
* Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
* Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
The beatitudes as given in the Gospel of Luke (6:20-26) are:
* Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.
* Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.
* Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.
* Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.
The beatitudes present only in Matthew are:
* The meek. The text says that they will "inherit the earth".
* The merciful. The text says that they will "obtain mercy".
* The pure of heart. The text says that they will "see God".
* The peacemakers. The text says that they will be called "the sons of God"
Many Christians believe that the Sermon on the Mount is a form of commentary on the Ten Commandments. It portrays Christ as the true interpreter of the Mosaic Law. To most believers in Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount contains the central tenets of Christian discipleship, and is considered as such by many religious and moral thinkers—such as Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—, and it has been one of the main sources of Christian pacifism.
45 Good people draw what is good from the store of goodness in their hearts; bad people draw what is bad from the store of badness. For the words of the mouth flow out of what fills the heart.
Similar speech we can read in Matthew 16:17-20:
17 Do you not realize that everything that enters the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled into the latrine?
18 But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile.
19 For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy.
20 These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.
comments by Rev. Joseph Hung Tran (Order of the Carmelites - ocarm.org)::
In today’s Gospel we have the second part of the “Discourse of the Plain”. In the first part (Lk 6, 20-26), Jesus addresses himself to the disciples (Lk 6, 20). In the second part (Lk 6, 27-49), he addresses himself “to you who listen to me”, that is, the great crowds of poor and sick people, who had come form all parts (Lk 6, 17-19).
• Luke 6, 27-30: Love the enemies! The words that Jesus addresses to these people are demanding and difficult: to love the enemies, not to curse them, to present the other cheek to anyone who slaps you on one cheek, and do not protest or complain when somebody takes what is ours. Taken literally, these phrases seem to favour the rich who rob. But not even Jesus observes them literally. When the soldier struck him on the face, he did not offer the other cheek but rather reacted firmly: “If there is some offence in what I said, point it out, but if not why do you strike me?” (Jn 18, 22-23). Then, how are these words to be understood? The following verses help us to understand what Jesus wants to teach us.
• Luke 6, 31-36: The Golden Rule! to imitate God. Two phrases of Jesus help us to understand what he wants to teach. The first phrase is the so called Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would like people to treat you!” (Lk 6, 31). The second phrase is: “Be merciful as your Father in Heaven is merciful!” (Lk 6, 36). These two phrases indicate that Jesus does not want simply to change the situation, because nothing would change. He wants to change the system. The novelty which he wants to construct comes from the new experience of God the Father, full of tenderness who accepts all! The words of threat against the rich cannot be the occasion of revenge on the part of the poor! Jesus demands the contrary attitude: “Love your enemies!” Love cannot depend on what I receive from others. True love should want the good of others, independently of what he or she does for me. Love should be creative, because that is how God’s love is for us: “Be merciful, as your Heavenly Father is merciful!” Matthew says the same thing with other words: “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect” (Mt 5, 48). Never will anyone be able to say: Today I have been perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect! I have been merciful as the Father in Heaven is merciful”. We will always be below the measure which Jesus has placed before us. In Luke’s Gospel, the Golden Rule says: “Treat others as you would like people to treat you!” (Lk 6, 31). Matthew, in his Gospel, gives a different formulation: “Treat others as you would like others to treat you” And he adds: “That is the Law and the Prophets” (Mt 7, 12). Practically, all religions in the whole world have the same Golden Rule with a diverse formulation. This is a sign that a universal intuition or desire is expressed which comes from the bottom of the human heart.
• Luke 6, 37-38: “Do not judge and you will not be judged; do not condemn and you will not be condemned; forgive and you will be forgiven; give and there will be gifts for you; a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap; because the standard you use will be the standard used for you”. These are four advices: two in a negative form, do not judge and do not condemn; and two in positive form: to forgive and to give an abundant measure. When it says: “there will be gifts for you”, Jesus refers to the treatment which God wants to have with us. But when our way of treating others is mean, God cannot use with us the abundant and overflowing measure that he would want to use. Celebrate the visit of God. The Discourse of the Plains or the Sermon on the Mountain, from the beginning, leads the listeners to make a choice, to opt, in favour of the poor. In the Old Testament, several times, God placed people before this same choice, blessing or curse. People were given the freedom to choose: “Today I call heaven and earth to witness against you: I am offering you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live” (Dt 30,19).It is not God who condemns, but the people themselves according to the choice that they make between life and death, good or evil.
commentary by Pablo T. Gadenz, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Trenton (NJ) :
As a whole, the Beatitudes reverse the world’s understanding of true happiness, showing that it is found not in riches, gratification, entertainment, and fame, but in God. Learning this lesson on discipleship requires faith, since the promises and rewards may not be experienced until the heavenly kingdom. It also requires charity, as those with economic means are exhorted to tend to the needs of the poor, the hungry, and the weeping.
Beatitudes and Christian life: The Second Vatican Council called for a renewal of moral theology, saying that instruction on Christian living should draw more on the Scriptures.6 One fruit of this renewal is the retrieval of the teaching that the Beatitudes reveal God’s plan for our eternal beatitude, happiness in the life to come (Catechism 1716-29). A person learns to live the Beatitudes by practicing, with the aid of God’s grace, the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity; see 1 Cor 13:13) and the moral virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance; see Wis 8:7), and by being empowered by the Holy Spirit’s gifts (see Isa 11:1-2), so that the fruits of the Spirit, such as love, joy, and peace (see Gal 5:22), become manifest in one’s life.
49 But someone who listens and does nothing is like the man who built a house on soil, with no foundations; as soon as the river bore down on it, it collapsed; and what a ruin that house became!
Building our lives on rock. Do I listen to Jesus’ words—the Word of God in Scripture—and act accordingly (see 6:47; 8:21; 11:28)? Pope Benedict XVI writes that “those who build their lives on his word build in a truly sound and lasting way ... Many things in which we trust for building our lives . . . prove ephemeral. Possessions, pleasure, and power show themselves sooner or later to be incapable of fulfilling the deepest yearnings of the human heart. In building our lives we need solid foundations.” God’s word gives us this firm foundation: “Your word, lord, stands forever; / it is firm as the heavens” (Ps 119:89).
comments by Francis Martin, president of Father Francis Martin Ministries (FFMM), "commentary on the Gospel of John":
6:35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.
Similarly we have in John 13:34-35:
“34. A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Jesus’ command, “Love one another as I love you” (John 13:34), is foundational to the entire Christian life (Catechism 1827). It is so simple and yet so difficult. When we look upon the cross in faith, we see the love of God revealed, a love that is totally self-giving for others’ good. It is the same love that Jesus tells us we must practice. One reason why it is so difficult to love as Jesus does is that we are sinners, bound up in prideful selfishness. To love as God does, we must be constantly dying to our own sinfulness and selfishness and living for God. And we live for God by obeying the Father’s will and loving one another.
We need God’s help to love others in this way. To produce the fruits of love, we must remain on the vine and be pruned by the Father. Put differently, if we are to love others as God does, we need to remain and grow in communion with Jesus, through such things as prayer, the sacraments, and works of penance. Through these spiritual practices, we open ourselves to God’s action in us whereby we increasingly die to our own sinfulness and become conformed to the Fathers will. Thus we will come to joyfully experience the Father’ love and be able to love others as he calls us to do.
comments by Edward Sri, professor of theology and Scripture, "the gospel of Matthew":
Jesus’ beatitudes represent a reversal of values, turning the world’s standards for happiness upside down. Many of the people whom the world would consider to be among the most miserable—the poor, the mourning, the meek, the persecuted— Jesus proclaims to be in an advantageous situation, for God looks now with favor on them and assures them of consolation in the future. Jesus thus challenges his followers to see life from God’s viewpoint, not the world’s. When his followers live by God’s standards, they are truly in a fortunate state in life, no matter what their circumstances may be, for they bring a glimmer of the joy and hope of the heavenly kingdom into the afflictions of the present world.
Ultimately the beatitudes are nothing less than a portrait of Christ’s own life.
Matthew depicts Jesus as meek (Matthew 11:29; 12:15-21; 21:5), merciful (Matthew 9:27-31; 15:22; 17:14-18; 18:33; 20:29-34) and persecuted (Matthew 27:27-31, 39-44). As an indirect portrait of Jesus, the beatitudes “display the mystery of Christ himself, and they call us into communion with him.”
In the first beatitude, the poor refers not just to those in economic hardship. During the Old Testament period the term also began to describe the oppressed people of God who were in particular need of God’s help (Ps 37:14-17; Isa 10:2; 26:6; 61:1-2). Jesus’ reference to the poor in spirit puts the emphasis not on material poverty but on one’s inner attitude. It refers to people who take their powerlessness to heart, who recognize that God is the only one who can help them, and who trust that God will act on their behalf. Jesus indicates that despite their poverty they share in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3).
How are those who mourn to be considered happy? In this beatitude, Jesus does not commend mourning as such but praises those who grieve over wickedness, whether it be afflicting others or causing them suffering directly (Tob 13:14; Isa 61:2; Ezek 9:4). From a worldly standpoint, these mourners appear to be quite unhappy. But Jesus says they are truly in a good situation because, although they may not be able to change the circumstances around them, they can resist evil internally by mourning. Moreover, they can have confidence that God will vindicate the faithful and that they will be comforted. This comfort belongs also to those who repent and mourn for their own sins (Ps 51) and to those who, like Daniel and Ezra (Dan 9:1-19; Ezra 9:5-15), mourn for the sins of God’s people.
The third beatitude quotes Ps 37:11, where the meek are the lowly who patiently wait on the Lord amid their afflictions and refrain from responding in anger or with force against those who wrong them. They rely on God not their own strength to set things right. They will inherit the land. In Ps 37, this is a reference to the promised land. Jesus uses the image not geographically but spiritually as referring to the kingdom. God will vindicate the meek and give them the honorable position they did not aggressively seek for themselves. Biblical examples of meekness include Moses, when criticized by his sister and brother (Num 12:1-15); David, when King Saul was trying to kill him (1 Sam 24:1-20); and above all Jesus, at his arrest and throughout his passion (26:49-27:50). Jesus’ instructions regarding anger and retaliation illustrate what it means to be meek (5:21-26, 38-41).
The word righteousness can refer to ethical conduct, that is, to obedience to God, or to God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises. The image of hunger and thirst depicts someone seeking something with his or her whole heart. The person who hungers and thirsts for righteousness longs for God’s saving action and seeks to do God’s will “with the intensity of someone starving for food or dying of thirst.” This beatitude refers to those “who are not content with things as they are and refuse to stifle the restlessness of heart that points man toward something greater." Jesus teaches that they will receive their hearts’ desire: they will be satisfied.
The Old Testament repeatedly describes God as merciful, and Israel is called to imitate God’s mercy. Mercy involves an inward identification with those in need and an outward action of kindness and generosity toward them. In this beatitude Jesus emphasizes the reciprocal nature of mercy a theme Matthew develops throughout his Gospel. God will show his mercy to us to the extent that we are merciful to others (Matthew 6:12, 14-15; 18:21-35; 25:31-40).
In Hebrew, the heart is the center of a person’s inner life the emotions, the intellect, and most especially the will. The clean of heart are those who love God with undivided allegiance, with all their hearts (Deut 6:4). They pursue his will single-heartedly, without mixed motives. This beatitude echoes Ps 24:3-5, where entrance into the temple required not only external purity but also the internal disposition of a clean heart. Jesus commends those disciples whose external acts of faith reflect the inward attitude of a pure heart. They will see God not just metaphorically in the sense of Old Testament worship in the temple but face-to-face in heaven (1 Cor 13:12; l John 3:2; Rev 22:4).
The Hebrew understanding of peace includes more than the absence of hostility. It denotes well-being and rightly ordered personal relationships and society. The peacemakers are those who strive to bring about harmony with God and with others in society. They seek to unite those who are estranged from one another and to be reconciled with their own enemies. Since the peacemakers share in the Father’s mission of reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19), they shall be called children of God—a title that points to the intimate relationship Christ’s disciples will have with God, who, Jesus repeatedly tells them, is “your heavenly Father” (Matthew 5:16, 45, 48; 6:1, passim).
The eighth beatitude refers to those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. In their obedience to God’s law, they are persecuted by the world. This statement recalls the Old Testament theme of the persecuted just man (Ps 22; Wis 5) and the many heroes from the Israelite tradition, such as the prophets, who were killed for their faithfulness to God (5:12; 2 Chron 36:16; Neh 9:26), and especially the martyrs who died for the sake of the Torah in the time of the Maccabees (2 Macc 6-7). Christ’s faithful followers should expect similar trials. Early Christians who were suffering persecution saw—as Christians today see—in this beatitude a foreshadowing of their own situation, as well as a message of hope, since Jesus promises that theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Finally, the statements in verses 11-12 make clearer two important aspects of the beatitudes. First, it becomes evident that the beatitudes are not merely general principles for living life well but particular instructions for Christ’s committed followers. The persecuted are no longer a general “they” (5:10) but a personal “you” (Matthew 5:11), referring specifically to the disciples (Matthew 5:1): Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you.
These verses make explicit the christological basis of the beatitudes. Whereas Jesus initially spoke of people being persecuted for righteousness’ sake (v. 10), he now refers to his disciples being persecuted because of me. Obedience to God’s law is now associated with obedience to Christ himself. Other Jewish prophets and rabbis may have encouraged people to endure persecution for the sake of the Torah and out of obedience to God. Jesus, however, speaks of his disciples being persecuted because of him. Here, Jesus asserts an authority no prophet or rabbi in Israel claimed to possess, a claim that would be blasphemous if he were not the Son of God. He teaches loyalty not just to God’s law or even to his own teachings but also to himself. This underscores how the beatitudes are not merely ethical principles. They are statements about the unique authority of Jesus and what it means to orient our lives around him. Indeed, living the beatitudes is imitating Christ’s life, and that means sharing in his sufferings and persecution.
Jesus summons his disciples to be what God’s people were always meant to be: salt of the earth and light of the world. Salt was used to flavor and preserve food. Through living the beatitudes, Jesus’ disciples become salt of the earth, preserving goodness in the world. The disciple who does not embody the beatitudes is like salt that loses its taste: he becomes no longer good for anything. Similarly, the disciples are to be light of the world. In the Jewish tradition Israel was to be a light to the nations (Isa 60:1-3; Bar 4:2). Jesus calls his disciples to fulfill this role by living the beatitudes in such a way that the world may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.
comments by Pope Benedict XVI (JN):
The Beatitudes are not infrequently presented as the New Testament’s counterpart to the Ten Commandments, as an example of the Christian ethics that is supposedly superior to the commands of the Old Testament. This approach totally misconstrues these words of Jesus. Jesus always presupposed the validity of the Ten Commandments as a matter of course (see, for example, Mk 10:19; Lk 16:17). In the Sermon on the Mount, he recapitulates and gives added depth to the commandments of the second tablet, but he does not abolish them (cf. Mt 5:21–48). To do so would in any case diametrically contradict the fundamental principle underpinning his discussion of the Ten Commandments: “Think not that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Mt 5:17–18).
But what are the Beatitudes? First of all, they are situated within a long tradition of Old Testament teachings, such as we find in Psalm 1 and in the parallel text at Jeremiah 17:7–8: Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord. These are words of promise. At the same time, though, they are criteria for the discernment of spirits and so they prove to be directions for finding the right path. The setting in which Luke frames the Sermon on the Mount clarifies to whom the Beatitudes of Jesus are addressed: “He lifted up his eyes on his disciples.” The individual Beatitudes are the fruit of this looking upon the disciples; they describe what might be called the actual condition of Jesus’ disciples: They are poor, hungry, weeping men; they are hated and persecuted (cf. Lk 6:20).
These statements are meant to list practical, but also theological, attributes of the disciples of Jesus—of those who have set out to follow Jesus and have become his family. The Beatitudes, spoken with the community of Jesus’ disciples in view, are paradoxes—the standards of the world are turned upside down as soon as things are seen in the right perspective, which is to say, in terms of God’s values, so different from those of the world. It is precisely those who are poor in worldly terms, those thought of as lost souls, who are the truly fortunate ones, the blessed, who have every reason to rejoice and exult in the midst of their sufferings. The Beatitudes are promises resplendent with the new image of the world and of man inaugurated by Jesus, his “transformation of values.” They are eschatological promises. This must not, however, be taken to mean that the joy they proclaim is postponed until some infinitely remote future or applies exclusively to the next world.
The paradoxes that Jesus presents in the Beatitudes express the believer’s true situation in the world in similar terms to those repeatedly used by Paul to describe his experience of living and suffering as an Apostle: “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Cor 6:8–10). “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8–9). What the Beatitudes in Luke’s Gospel present as a consolation and a promise, Paul presents as the lived experience of the apostle. He considers that he has been made “last of all,” a man under a death sentence, a spectacle to the world, homeless, calumniated, despised (cf. 1 Cor 4:9–13). And yet he experiences a boundless joy. As the one who has been handed over, who has given himself away in order to bring Christ to men, he experiences the interconnectedness of Cross and Resurrection: We are handed over to death “so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor 4:11). In his messengers Christ himself still suffers, still hangs on the Cross.
The Beatitudes express the meaning of discipleship. They become more concrete and real the more completely the disciple dedicates himself to service in the way that is illustrated for us in the life of Saint Paul. What the Beatitudes mean cannot be expressed in purely theoretical terms; it is proclaimed in the life and suffering, and in the mysterious joy, of the disciple who gives himself over completely to following the Lord. This leads to the second point: the Christological character of the Beatitudes. The disciple is bound to the mystery of Christ. His life is immersed in communion with Christ: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). The Beatitudes are the transposition of Cross and Resurrection into discipleship. But they apply to the disciple because they were first paradigmatically lived by Christ himself.
Let us now take a somewhat closer look at each individual link in the chain of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. First of all, we have the much debated saying about the “poor in spirit.”. At the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judea, 90 percent of Judeans would have been counted among the poor; Persian tax policy resulted in another situation of dramatic poverty after the Exile. It was no longer possible to maintain the older vision according to which the righteous prosper and poverty is a consequence of a bad life. Now Israel recognizes that its poverty is exactly what brings it close to God; it recognizes that the poor, in their humility, are the ones closest to God’s heart, whereas the opposite is true of the arrogant pride of the rich, who rely only on themselves.
The piety of the poor that grew out of this realization finds expression in many of the Psalms; the poor recognize themselves as the true Israel. In the piety of these Psalms, in their expression of deep devotion to God’s goodness, in the human goodness and humility that grew from it as men waited vigilantly for God’s saving love—here developed that generosity of heart that was to open the door for Christ. Silently evolving here was the attitude before God that Paul explored in his theology of justification: These are people who do not flaunt their achievements before God. They do not stride into God’s presence as if they were partners able to engage with him on an equal footing; they do not lay claim to a reward for what they have done. These are people who know that their poverty also has an interior dimension; they are lovers who simply want to let God bestow his gifts upon them and thereby to live in inner harmony with God’s nature and word. Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, Zachariah and Elizabeth, the shepherds of Bethlehem, and the Twelve whom the Lord called to intimate discipleship are all part of this current, which contrasts with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but also, despite a great deal of spiritual affinity.
There is no opposition between Matthew, who speaks of the poor in spirit, and Luke, in whose Gospel the Lord addresses the “poor” without further qualification. Some have claimed that Matthew took the concept of poverty that Luke originally understood in a totally material and real way, spiritualized it, and so robbed it of its radicalism. Yet anyone who reads the Gospel of Luke knows perfectly well that it is he who introduces us to the “poor in spirit”—the sociological group, one might say, among whom Jesus’ earthly journey, and that of his message, could begin. Conversely, it is clear that Matthew remains completely in the tradition of piety reflected in the Psalms and so in the vision of the true Israel expressed in them.
The poverty of which this tradition speaks is never a purely material phenomenon. Purely material poverty does not bring salvation, though of course those who are disadvantaged in this world may count on God’s goodness in a particular way. But the heart of those who have nothing can be hardened, poisoned, evil—interiorly full of greed for material things, forgetful of God, covetous of external possessions.
On the other hand, the poverty spoken of here is not a purely spiritual attitude, either. Admittedly, not everyone is called to the radicalism with which so many true Christians—from Anthony, father of monasticism, to Francis of Assisi, down to the exemplary poor of our era—have lived and continue to live their poverty as a model for us. But, in order to be the community of Jesus’ poor, the Church has constant need of the great ascetics. She needs the communities that follow them, living out poverty and simplicity so as to display to us the truth of the Beatitudes. She needs them to wake everyone up to the fact that possession is all about service, to contrast the culture of affluence with the culture of inner freedom, and thereby to create the conditions for social justice as well.
The Sermon on the Mount is not a social program per se, to be sure. But it is only when the great inspiration it gives us vitally influences our thought and our action, only when faith generates the strength of renunciation and responsibility for our neighbor and for the whole of society—only then can social justice grow, too. And the Church as a whole must never forget that she has to remain recognizably the community of God’s poor.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In both Matthew and Luke the promise assigned to them is as follows: “Theirs [yours] is the Kingdom of God [the Kingdom of heaven]” (Mt 5:3; Lk 6:20). “Kingdom of God” is the basic category of Jesus’ message; here it becomes part of the Beatitudes. This context is important for a correct understanding of this much disputed term. We have already seen this in our examination of the meaning of the expression “Kingdom of God,” and we will need to recall it frequently in the course of our further reflections.
But it may be a good idea—before we continue our meditation on the text—to turn for a moment to the figure whom the history of faith offers us as the most intensely lived illustration of this Beatitude: Francis of Assisi. The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out. Interpretation of Scripture can never be a purely academic affair, and it cannot be relegated to the purely historical. Scripture is full of potential for the future, a potential that can only be opened up when someone “lives through” and “suffers through” the sacred text. Francis of Assisi was gripped in an utterly radical way by the promise of the first Beatitude, to the point that he even gave away his garments and let himself be clothed anew by the bishop, the representative of God’s fatherly goodness, through which the lilies of the field were clad in robes finer than Solomon’s (cf. Mt 6:28–29). For Francis, this extreme humility was above all freedom for service, freedom for mission, ultimate trust in God, who cares not only for the flowers of the field but specifically for his human children. It was a corrective to the Church of his day, which, through the feudal system, had lost the freedom and dynamism of missionary outreach. It was the deepest possible openness to Christ, to whom Francis was perfectly configured by the wounds of the stigmata, so perfectly that from then on he truly no longer lived as himself, but as one reborn, totally from and in Christ. By looking at Francis of Assisi we see clearly what the words “Kingdom of God” mean. Francis stood totally within the Church, and at the same time it is in figures such as he that the Church grows toward the goal that lies in the future, and yet is already present: The Kingdom of God is drawing near….
In the text of Matthew’s Gospel, this third Beatitude is associated with the promise of the land: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land.” What does this statement mean? Hope for the land is part of the original content of the promise to Abraham. During Israel’s years of wandering in the desert, the promised land is always envisaged as the goal of the journey. In exile Israel waits for the return to the land. We must not overlook, however, that the promise of the land is clearly about something far greater than the mere idea of possessing a piece of ground or a national territory in the sense that every people is entitled to do.
The main issue in the foreground of the struggle for liberation prior to Israel’s exodus from Egypt is the right to freedom of worship, the people’s right to their own liturgy. As time went by, it became increasingly clear that the promise of the land meant this: The land was given as a space for obedience, a realm of openness to God, that was to be freed from the abominations of idolatry. The concept of obedience to God, and so of the right ordering of the earth, is an essential component of the concept of freedom and the concept of the land. From this perspective, the exile, the withdrawal of the land, could also be understood: The land had itself become a zone of idolatry and disobedience, and the possession of the land had therefore become a contradiction.
There is a sense in which the interplay between “meekness” and the promise of the land can also be seen as a perfectly ordinary piece of historical wisdom: Conquerors come and go, but the ones who remain are the simple, the humble, who cultivate the land and continue sowing and harvesting in the midst of sorrows and joys. The humble, the simple, outlast the violent, even from a purely historical point of view.
The gradual universalization of the concept of the land on the basis of a theology of hope also reflects the universal horizon that we found in the promise of Zechariah: The land of the king of peace is not a nation-state—it stretches from “sea to sea” (Zech 9:10). Peace aims at the overcoming of boundaries and at the renewal of the earth through the peace that comes from God. The earth ultimately belongs to the meek, to the peaceful, the Lord tells us. It is meant to become the “land of the king of peace.” The third Beatitude invites us to orient our lives toward this goal and harmonizes closely with the first: It goes some way toward explaining what “Kingdom of God” means, even though the claim behind this term extends beyond the promise of the land.
With the foregoing remarks, we have already anticipated the seventh Beatitude: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Mt 5:9). The faithful in Israel would be reminded of Solomon, whose Hebrew name is rooted in the word for “peace” (shalom). The Lord had promised David: “I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days…. He shall be my son, and I will be his father” (1 Chron 22:9f.). This brings to the fore a connection between divine Sonship and the kingship of peace: Jesus is the Son, and he is truly Son. He is therefore the true “Solomon”—the bringer of peace. Establishing peace is part of the very essence of Sonship. The seventh Beatitude thus invites us to be and do what the Son does, so that we ourselves may become “sons of God.”. This applies first of all in the context of each person’s life. It begins with the fundamental decision that Paul passionately begs us to make in the name of God: “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20). Enmity with God is the source of all that poisons man; overcoming this enmity is the basic condition for peace in the world. Only the man who is reconciled with God can also be reconciled and in harmony with himself, and only the man who is reconciled with God and with himself can establish peace around him and throughout the world. But the political context that emerges from Luke’s infancy narrative as well as here in Matthew’s Beatitudes indicates the full scope of these words. That there be peace on earth (cf. Lk 2:14) is the will of God and, for that reason, it is a task given to man as well. The Christian knows that lasting peace is connected with men abiding in God’s eudokia, his “good pleasure.” The struggle to abide in peace with God is an indispensable part of the struggle for “peace on earth”; the former is the source of the criteria and the energy for the latter. When men lose sight of God, peace disintegrates and violence proliferates to a formerly unimaginable degree of cruelty. This we see only too clearly today.
Let us go back to the second Beatitude: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Mt 5:4). Is it good to mourn and to declare mourning blessed? There are two kinds of mourning. The first is the kind that has lost hope, that has become mistrustful of love and of truth, and that therefore eats away and destroys man from within. But there is also the mourning occasioned by the shattering encounter with truth, which leads man to undergo conversion and to resist evil. This mourning heals, because it teaches man to hope and to love again. Judas is an example of the first kind of mourning: Struck with horror at his own fall, he no longer dares to hope and hangs himself in despair. Peter is an example of the second kind: Struck by the Lord’s gaze, he bursts into healing tears that plow up the soil of his soul. He begins anew and is himself renewed.
Tradition has yielded another image of mourning that brings salvation: Mary standing under the Cross with her sister, the wife of Clopas, with Mary Magdalene, and with John (Jn 19:25). We encounter here the small band of people who remain true in a world full of cruelty and cynicism or else with fearful conformity. They cannot avert the disaster, but by “suffering with” the one condemned (by their com-passion in the etymological sense) they place themselves on his side, and by their “loving with” they are on the side of God, who is love.
At the foot of Jesus’ Cross we understand better than anywhere else what it means to say “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Those who do not harden their hearts to the pain and need of others, who do not give evil entry to their souls, but suffer under its power and so acknowledge the truth of God—they are the ones who open the windows of the world to let the light in. It is to those who mourn in this sense that great consolation is promised. The second Beatitude is thus intimately connected with the eighth: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:10).
The mourning of which the Lord speaks is nonconformity with evil; it is a way of resisting models of behavior that the individual is pressured to accept because “everyone does it.” The world cannot tolerate this kind of resistance; it demands conformity. It considers this mourning to be an accusation directed against the numbing of consciences. And so it is. That is why those who mourn suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness. Those who mourn are promised comfort; those who are persecuted are promised the Kingdom of God—the same promise that is made to the poor in spirit. The two promises are closely related. The Kingdom of God—standing under the protection of God’s power, secure in his love—that is true comfort.
Jesus’ words concerning those persecuted for righteousness’ sake had a prophetic significance for Matthew and his audience. For them this was the Lord foretelling the situation of the Church which they were living through. The Church had become a persecuted Church, persecuted “for righteousness’ sake.”
The people who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake are those who live by God’s righteousness—by faith. Because man constantly strives for emancipation from God’s will in order to follow himself alone, faith will always appear as a contradiction to the “world”—to the ruling powers at any given time. For this reason, there will be persecution for the sake of righteousness in every period of history. This word of comfort is addressed to the persecuted Church of all times. In her powerlessness and in her sufferings, she knows that she stands in the place where God’s Kingdom is coming.
The Beatitude concerning the persecuted contains, in the words that conclude the whole passage, a variant indicating something new. Jesus promises joy, exultation, and a great reward to those who for his sake are reviled, and persecuted, and have all manner of evil uttered falsely against them (cf. Mt 5:11).
Let us turn now to one of the two Beatitudes still to be discussed: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Mt 5:6). This saying is intrinsically related to Jesus’ words concerning those who mourn and who will find comfort. In the earlier Beatitude, the ones who receive the promise are those who do not bow to the diktat of the prevailing opinions and customs, but resist it by suffering. Similarly, this Beatitude is concerned with those who are on the lookout, who are in search of something great, of true justice, of the true good.
The prevailing view today is that everyone should live by the religion—or perhaps by the atheism—in which he happens to find himself already. This, it is said, is the path of salvation for him. Such a view presupposes a strange picture of God and a strange idea of man and of the right way for man to live.
Does someone achieve blessedness and justification in God’s eyes because he has declared his opinions and wishes to be norms of conscience and so made himself the criterion? No, God demands the opposite. God demands that we become inwardly attentive to his quiet exhortation, which is present in us and which tears us away from what is merely habitual and puts us on the road to truth. To “hunger and thirst for righteousness”—that is the path that lies open to everyone; that is the way that finds its destination in Jesus Christ.
There is one more Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). The organ for seeing God is the heart. The intellect alone is not enough. In order for man to become capable of perceiving God, the energies of his existence have to work in harmony. His will must be pure and so too must the underlying affective dimension of his soul, which gives intelligence and will their direction. Speaking of the heart in this way means precisely that man’s perceptive powers play in concert, which also requires the proper interplay of body and soul, since this is essential for the totality of the creature we call “man.”
Man’s fundamental affective disposition actually depends on just this unity of body and soul and on man’s acceptance of being both body and spirit. This means he places his body under the discipline of the spirit, yet does not isolate intellect or will. Rather, he accepts himself as coming from God, and thereby also acknowledges and lives out the bodiliness of his existence as an enrichment for the spirit. The heart—the wholeness of man—must be pure, interiorly open and free, in order for man to be able to see God. Theophilus of Antioch (d. ca. 180) once put it like this in a debate with some disputants: “If you say, ‘show me your God,’ I should like to answer you, ‘show me the man who is in you.’…For God is perceived by men who are capable of seeing him, who have the eyes of their spirit open…. Man’s soul must be as pure as a shining mirror” (Ad Autolycum, I, 2, 7.).
We meet the motif of purity of heart above all in Psalm 24, which reflects an ancient gate liturgy: “Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully” (Ps 24:3–4). Clean hands and a pure heart are the condition. One fundamental condition is that those who would enter into God’s presence must inquire after him, must seek his face (Ps 24:6). The fundamental condition thus proves to be the same attitude that we saw earlier, described by the phrase “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Inquiring after God, seeking his face—that is the first and fundamental condition for the ascent that leads to the encounter with God. Even before that, however, the Psalm specifies that clean hands and a pure heart entail man’s refusal to deceive or commit perjury; this requires honesty, truthfulness, and justice toward one’s fellow men and toward the community—what we might call social ethics, although it actually reaches right down into the depths of the heart.
Purification of heart occurs as a consequence of following Christ, of becoming one with him. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). And at this point something new comes to light: The ascent to God occurs precisely in the descent of humble service, in the descent of love, for love is God’s essence, and is thus the power that truly purifies man and enables him to perceive God and to see him. The pure heart is the loving heart that enters into communion of service and obedience with Jesus Christ. Love is the fire that purifies and unifies intellect, will, and emotion, thereby making man one with himself, inasmuch as it makes him one in God’s eyes.
After this attempt to penetrate somewhat more deeply into the interior vision of the Beatitudes (the theme of the “merciful” is addressed not in this chapter, but in connection with the parable of the Good Samaritan), we must still briefly ask ourselves two questions that pertain to the understanding of the whole. In Luke’s Gospel, the four Beatitudes that he presents are followed by four proclamations of woe: “Woe to you who are rich…. Woe to you who are full now…. Woe to you who laugh now…. Woe to you when all men praise you” (Lk 6:24–26). These words terrify us. What are we to think of them?
Now, the first thing to say is that Jesus is here following the pattern that is also found in Jeremiah 17 and Psalm 1: After an account of the right path that leads man to salvation, there follows a warning sign to caution against the opposite path. This warning sign unmasks false promises and false offers; it is meant to save man from following a path that can only lead him fatally over the precipice. We will find the same thing again in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
If we have correctly understood the signposts of hope that we found in the Beatitudes, we recognize that here we are dealing simply with the opposite attitudes, which lock man into mere outward appearance, into provisionality, into the loss of his highest and deepest qualities and hence into the loss of God and neighbor—the path to ruin. Now we come to understand the real intention of this warning sign: The proclamations of woe are not condemnations; they are not an expression of hatred, or of envy, or of hostility. The point is not condemnation, but a warning that is intended to save.
But now the fundamental question arises: Is the direction the Lord shows us in the Beatitudes and in the corresponding warnings actually the right one? Is it really such a bad thing to be rich, to eat one’s fill, to laugh, to be praised? Friedrich Nietzsche trained his angry critique precisely on this aspect of Christianity. It is not Christian doctrine that needs to be critiqued, he says, it is Christian morality that needs to be exposed as a “capital crime against life.”. Nietzsche sees the vision of the Sermon on the Mount as a religion of resentment, as the envy of the cowardly and incompetent, who are unequal to life’s demands and try to avenge themselves by blessing their failure and cursing the strong, the successful, and the happy.
Much of this has found its way into the modern mind-set and to a large extent shapes how our contemporaries feel about life. Thus, the Sermon on the Mount poses the question of the fundamental Christian option, and, as children of our time, we feel an inner resistance to it—even though we are still touched by Jesus’ praise of the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure. Knowing now from experience how brutally totalitarian regimes have trampled upon human beings and despised, enslaved, and struck down the weak, we have also gained a new appreciation of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; we have rediscovered the soul of those who mourn and their right to be comforted. As we witness the abuse of economic power, as we witness the cruelties of a capitalism that degrades man to the level of merchandise, we have also realized the perils of wealth, and we have gained a new appreciation of what Jesus meant when he warned of riches, of the man-destroying divinity Mammon, which grips large parts of the world in a cruel stranglehold. Yes indeed, the Beatitudes stand opposed to our spontaneous sense of existence, our hunger and thirst for life. They demand “conversion”—that we inwardly turn around to go in the opposite direction from the one we would spontaneously like to go in. But this U-turn brings what is pure and noble to the fore and gives a proper ordering to our lives.
The Sermon on the Mount is a hidden Christology. Behind the Sermon on the Mount stands the figure of Christ, the man who is God, but who, precisely because he is God, descends, empties himself, all the way to death on the Cross. The saints, from Paul through Francis of Assisi down to Mother Teresa, have lived out this option and have thereby shown us the correct image of man and his happiness. In a word, the true morality of Christianity is love. And love does admittedly run counter to self-seeking—it is an exodus out of oneself, and yet this is precisely the way in which man comes to himself. Compared with the tempting luster of Nietzsche’s image of man, this way seems at first wretched, and thoroughly unreasonable. But it is the real high road of life; it is only on the way of love, whose paths are described in the Sermon on the Mount, that the richness of life and the greatness of man’s calling are opened up.
The Sermon on the Mount, as we have seen, draws a comprehensive portrait of the right way to live. It aims to show us how to be a human being. We could sum up its fundamental insights by saying that man can be understood only in light of God, and that his life is made righteous only when he lives it in relation to God.
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