And he came down with the Twelve and stood on a stretch of level ground…
In last week’s Gospel, Jesus chose his first disciples, the fishermen Simon, James and John. In the meantime, many disciples have gathered around him. In the passage immediately preceding today’s Gospel, he chose from among these the Twelve, with whom he now descends and stands on a stretch of level ground.
Before making this important decision, Jesus had first gone apart to pray as he often does throughout Luke’s Gospel before significant decisions and events. On this occasion he had out in to the hills and spent the whole night in continuous prayer to his Father before choosing the Twelve when day came. From this it is clear that, although he himself is equal to the Father in nature, and as such in the bond of love they are one in mind and will, Jesus nevertheless never presumes to make decisions on his own, but only in communion with the Father, from whom he knows he receives everything. Refreshed, renewed and strengthened by his prayer, he sees himself and the world about him anew with his Father’s eyes.
And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said: “Blessed are you…
When Jesus descends from the mountain to the plain, the image is evocative of Moses’ descent from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Law. But this new Moses does not come as a law-giver. The first words that come forth from his mouth are “Blessed are you…” He speaks these words not simply from himself and his own ideas, but from out of the gift he has received, his own experience of blessings received from his Father in his prayer out in the hills. Having himself been blessed, freely and gratuitously, it would be contrary to his divine nature to hold on to this being blessed for himself alone. Rather, he wants to give just as the Father gives in the freedom of his begetting, he wants to pass on to others the blessing he has received, non-reductively, a blessing that expresses the fullness of the Father.
But to do this he must find those who are receptive to this blessing.
In the Beatitudes, he does not provide his disciples with a list of what they are to do. We can “do” the commandments, you can’t really “do” the Beatitudes. They are given to us. We undergo the Beatitudes, they happen to us. They are not the fruit of our striving. They cannot be compelled by our good works or ascetical discipline, or by fulfilling a list of commandments. They lie beyond our activity and are received as a divine gift.
The Beatitudes are not about doing the good, but about being shaped by the good. The transcendent good, first of all, of course, is God, whose first name is love. Jesus’ fundamental experience is of being loved. He loves from the Father’s love, He does not first of all strive for the love of the Father who then gives it, but receives it as given and gives it away. So it is for us: “we love because [God] first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
The limitation of commandments when seen as primary, is that we can tend to undertake them starting from ourselves, as our own project, as something to be mastered, projecting on to them our own ideas of the good life, of life in God, of his will and so on. Meanwhile, never really moving beyond ourselves as the main point of reference. We remain stuck in ourselves. Through them we construct a persona for ourselves and in the end they serve as little more than a strengthening of our own ego. Moreover, we can find ourselves so self-enclosed and blinded that God has little chance of getting in. This is what happened in the encounter with Jesus and the Pharisees, their very faithfulness as they conceived it shut him out.
The Beatitudes on the other hand call us out beyond ourselves into a new world of God and of our neighbor as genuinely other. We do not choose the Beatitudes. The crowd on the plain before him did not choose to be poor, they did not choose to hunger and thirst, they did not choose to weep, they did not choose to be hated, excluded or reviled. They find themselves in this condition, they undergo it, they suffer it. Likewise, they cannot choose blessing. Blessing always remains a free gift.
The Beatitudes are fundamental for the Christian. Therefore, it seems to me that far from being an impractical ideal, every Christian must undergo this fundamental reorientation from giving priority to my own striving, my own attempts at excellence, virtue, fulfillment, happiness and so on, and give the priority to receiving, to making room for the divine by allowing ourselves to be patient in undergoing poverty, hunger and thirst, weeping, in being hated, excluded and reviled for the sake of Christ and the promise of the gift of his blessing, the promise of beatitude; which is to have life within his life, who knew all these things.
To receive, to undergo what we have not chosen is to suffer. To become blessed persons who bless, We need the patience that abides in suffering, in suffering that wears away, that strips us of the masks of the false self that we have constructed for ourselves and put forward to the world as our public face and that all too often serves as the only face we allow to be visible to ourselves interiorly. Until we are released beyond ourselves into the good, that is no longer merely the good that we have conceived for ourselves, but the good that comes to us from above, and that shows itself to be more intimate to us than we are to ourselves, we can never really love God and our neighbor for themselves as they call us to love and to serve them.
In this patience in undergoing what I do not want to undergo I find myself blessed by God in a way infinitely surpassing anything my small willing could ever have conceived. From here a new manner of willing can be born, that having been broken open by suffering opens me to understanding the suffering of others and the willingness to share in their suffering. My eyes and ears can be opened to hear and to see God less and less in reference to myself and more and more in reference to God as he wishes to show himself to me and be known and understood. Likewise, my relation with my neighbor, especially those most in need, the poor, the hungry, the rejected and excluded takes place less and less in reference to myself but is open to hear the cry of their appeal, an appeal that calls us beyond ourselves to see them and their needs with God’s eyes and love them from the riches of the blessing we have received according to the blessing that God wishes to give them. In being blessed I know that I have been loved and can become one who loves.
Brothers and sisters, as those open to receive a blessing from God, we can in turn becomes persons who bless others, and become a blessing for them, and from this humble beginning, a community of those in the service of the divine love as blessing and compassion can be formed.
Not least of all, rooted blessing of the Beatitudes, we can become persons in community who bless God from the fullness of the blessing he himself has bestowed. And say with St. Paul, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessings in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him.”
