The Beatitudes
01/29/17
Before I get into the familiar teaching of the Beatitudes, let me first speak of the reading from
the prophet Zephaniah. He certainly doesn’t hold back, does he? We’re not simply to seek the Lord, but
to also seek justice and humility. And if we do that, according to Zephaniah, we may be sheltered on the
day of the Lord’s anger. And what if God gets angry with us when we don’t rely on Him? What if we are
so arrogant, as one author calls it, that we don’t need God to help us with our faults?
If we don’t need God for help with our faults, then that could lead us to think we don’t need
God for anything. And we all know that would not be good, because God is with us every step along the
way. Fr. Ralph Kuehner says it’s sort of like fog. He suggests there’s a little dazzle to fog. It slips in during
the nighttime, unannounced and without fanfare. Mostly it’s just there, obscuring everything but itself.
That’s how fog is and that’s how God is sometimes, too. He’s there but not always in a concrete way.
Kuehner goes on to say that much of the time we are inclined to look for God in life’s high
points, at moments of success, at the summits of great strivings. However sometimes God settles into
the low spots, more like fog, a fog that comes on little cat feet.
But don’t we all want to be on those mountaintops? We want to be there because it’s nice
there. We want our nation to be the most powerful, our team to win a super bowl every year, and our
talents to be recognized by being employee of the month. We want to live in Garrison Keillor’s
hometown, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above
average.
Before I continue, let me share with you a couple alternate versions of the Beatitudes. One
suggests that Christ’s Beatitudes are really out of date, in our sophisticated age of materialist
individualism, where #1 is most important. The new beatitudes would sound like this:
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Blessed are the avaricious; blessed are those whose life is one big party; blessed are the
arrogant; blessed are those who are fed up with all the talk about justice; blessed are the tough; blessed
are the devious; blessed are the contentious; blessed are they who know who the bad guys are and are
not hesitant to blow them away verbally if not literally. There’s not a whole lot of Zephaniah’s meekness
and humility in any of those, is there? Author Geoff Wood takes Jesus’ Beatitudes and expands them
just a bit.
He says: blessed are the poor in spirit (whose happiness depends on something more than
dividends and limousines); blessed are they who know grief and are the wiser for it; blessed are they
who will never be satisfied until they are truly just and decent people; blessed are the merciful, because
they know how to forgive; blessed are the simple folk, those who look you in the eye and speak from the
heart; blessed are the peacemakers; blessed are they who quietly put up with ridicule for adhering to
these very Beatitudes. Wood says in the end, Jesus’ Beatitudes are a ticket to a saner world.
Fr. Kuehner suggests that if the Beatitudes tell us anything, it’s that God seeks us out in the low
spots of life, just as fog does, and that God is not to be found just in the pinnacles. God is most at home
with those who are not self-sufficient; that the breath of God’s comfort is felt more in tears of suffering
than in tears of jubilation; that God can and does bring us to our longed-for homeland when we don’t
insist on our own maps but are willing to walk the path we’ve come upon and when we live with what is;
that mercy breeds what is right and Godly, more than being right is able to breed mercy. Which is to say
that while the noonday sun can turn arid and ungodly, the lowland fog will bless and water our lives and
turn them lush.
So, I guess, in the end, the next time we’re caught up in a fog part of our life, we need to
remember if God is anywhere, he is right there with us. And He will lift us up to a mountaintop, to a
pinnacle. But He will do it in His time, not ours.
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