PLATFORM J316 - The Beatitudes

God has placed in our hearts such an infinite desire for happiness that nothing can satisfy it but God himself. All earthly fulfillment gives us only a foretaste of eternal happiness. Above and beyond that, we should be drawn to God [cf CCC 1718-1719, 1725].

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We become happy by trusting in Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes.

The Gospel is a promise of happiness to all people who wish to walk in God’s ways. Especially in the Beatitudes (Mt 5:3-12), Jesus has told us specifically that eternal blessedness (→BLESSING) is based on our following his example and seeking peace with a pure heart.

Those who yearn for the kingdom of God look to Jesus’ list of priorities: the Beatitudes.

From Abraham on, God made promises to his people. Jesus takes them up, extends their application to heaven, and makes them the program for his own life: the Son of God becomes poor so as to share our poverty; he rejoices with those who rejoice and weeps with those who weep (Rom 12:15); he employs no violence but rather turns the other cheek (Mt 5:39); he has mercy, makes peace, and thereby shows us the sure way to heaven.

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The beatitudes respond to the innate desire for happiness that God has placed in the human heart in order to draw us to himself. God alone can satisfy this desire. [CCC 361]

The path to true happiness is found only in Jesus: he said of himself that he is the way (Jn. 14:6). If you wish to find ultimate happiness, it is therefore important to invest in your relationship with God. You will find that happiness, because God will help you to discover what you should do with your life.

The Beatitudes

CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH PART THREE: LIFE IN CHRISTSECTION ONE: MAN'S VOCATION LIFE IN THE SPIRITCHAPTER ONE: THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMAN PERSONARTICLE 2 OUR VOCATION TO BEATITUDE

from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC)

I. THE BEATITUDES

1716 The Beatitudes are at the heart of Jesus' preaching. They take up the promises made to the chosen people since Abraham. The Beatitudes fulfill the promises by ordering them no longer merely to the possession of a territory, but to the Kingdom of heaven:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
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 sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad,

for your reward is great in heaven.¹²

1717 The Beatitudes depict the countenance of Jesus Christ and portray his charity. They express the vocation of the faithful associated with the glory of his Passion and Resurrection; they shed light on the actions and attitudes characteristic of the Christian life; they are the paradoxical promises that sustain hope in the midst of tribulations; they proclaim the blessings and rewards already secured, however dimly, for Christ's disciples; they have begun in the lives of the Virgin Mary and all the saints.

II. THE DESIRE FOR HAPPINESS

1718 The Beatitudes respond to the natural desire for happiness. This desire is of divine origin: God has placed it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can fulfill it:

We all want to live happily; in the whole human race there is no one who does not assent to this proposition, even before it is fully articulated.¹³

How is it, then, that I seek you, Lord? Since in seeking you, my God, I seek a happy life, let me seek you so that my soul may live, for my body draws life from my soul and my soul draws life from you.¹⁴

God alone satisfies.¹⁵

1719 The Beatitudes reveal the goal of human existence, the ultimate end of human acts: God calls us to his own beatitude. This vocation is addressed to each individual personally, but also to the Church as a whole, the new people made up of those who have accepted the promise and live from it in faith.

III. CHRISTIAN BEATITUDE

1720 The New Testament uses several expressions to characterize the beatitude to which God calls man:

- the coming of the Kingdom of God;¹⁶ - the vision of God: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God"¹⁷

- entering into the joy of the Lord;¹⁸

- entering into God's rest:¹⁹

There we shall rest and see, we shall see and love, we shall love and praise. Behold what will be at the end without end. For what other end do we have, if not to reach the kingdom which has no end?²⁰

1721 God put us in the world to know, to love, and to serve him, and so to come to paradise. Beatitude makes us "partakers of the divine nature" and of eternal life.²¹ With beatitude, man enters into the glory of Christ²² and into the joy of the Trinitarian life.

1722 Such beatitude surpasses the understanding and powers of man. It comes from an entirely free gift of God: whence it is called supernatural, as is the grace that disposes man to enter into the divine joy.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." It is true, because of the greatness and inexpressible glory of God, that "man shall not see me and live," for the Father cannot be grasped. But because of God's love and goodness toward us, and because he can do all things, he goes so far as to grant those who love him the privilege of seeing him. . . . For "what is impossible for men is possible for God."²³

1723 The beatitude we are promised confronts us with decisive moral choices. It invites us to purify our hearts of bad instincts and to seek the love of God above all else. It teaches us that true happiness is not found in riches or well-being, in human fame or power, or in any human achievement - however beneficial it may be - such as science, technology, and art, or indeed in any creature, but in God alone, the source of every good and of all love:

All bow down before wealth. Wealth is that to which the multitude of men pay an instinctive homage. They measure happiness by wealth; and by wealth they measure respectability. . . . It is a homage resulting from a profound faith . . . that with wealth he may do all things. Wealth is one idol of the day and notoriety is a second. . . . Notoriety, or the making of a noise in the world - it may be called "newspaper fame" - has come to be considered a great good in itself, and a ground of veneration.²⁴

1724 The Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, and the apostolic catechesis describe for us the paths that lead to the Kingdom of heaven. Sustained by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we tread them, step by step, by everyday acts. By the working of the Word of Christ, we slowly bear fruit in the Church to the glory of God.²⁵

IN BRIEF

1725 The Beatitudes take up and fulfill God's promises from Abraham on by ordering them to the Kingdom of heaven. They respond to the desire for happiness that God has placed in the human heart.

1726 The Beatitudes teach us the final end to which God calls us: the Kingdom, the vision of God, participation in the divine nature, eternal life, filiation, rest in God.

1727 The beatitude of eternal life is a gratuitous gift of God. It is supernatural, as is the grace that leads us there.

1728 The Beatitudes confront us with decisive choices concerning earthly goods; they purify our hearts in order to teach us to love God above all things.

1729 The beatitude of heaven sets the standards for discernment in the use of earthly goods in keeping with the law of God.

12 Mt 5:3-12.13 St. Augustine, De moribus eccl. 1,3,4:PL 32,1312.14 St. Augustine, Conf. 10,20:PL 32,791.15 St. Thomas Aquinas, Expos. in symb. apost. I.16 Cf. Mt 4:17.17 Mt 5:8; cf. 1 Jn 2; 1 Cor 13:12.18 Mt 25:21-23.19 Cf. Heb 4:7-11.20 St. Augustine, De civ. Dei 22,30,5:PL 41,804.21 2 Pet 1:4; cf. Jn 17:3.22 Cf. Rom 8:18.23 St. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres. 4,20,5:PG 7/1,1034-1035.24 John Henry Cardinal Newman, "Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle," in Discourses to Mixed Congregations (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906) V, 89-90.25 Cf. the parable of the sower: Mt 13:3-23.

Source: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a2.htm

The Beatitudes: A Concise Summary

By DEACON DOUGLAS MCMANAMAN

In the 6th century B.C., God promised, through the prophet Ezekiel, that He would gather his people, cleanse them and impart to them a new spirit: "I am going to take you from among the nations and gather you together from all the foreign countries, and bring you home to your own land.

I shall pour clean water over you and you will be cleansed... I shall give you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you; I shall remove the heart of stone from your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead. I shall put my spirit in you, and make you keep my laws and sincerely respect my observances. You will live in the land which I gave your ancestors. You shall be my people and I will be your God" (Ez 36, 26).

Christians believe that God fulfilled his promise in the Person of Christ who gathers from all nations (kata holos) all who belong to God, and he forms them into the new Israel through a new covenant. The beatitudes are the basic outline, the interior contours, of this new spirit. Jesus, the new Moses, writes these not on tablets of stone, but on the human heart changed and elevated by grace. Thus, the new law is an interior law.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out that genuine happiness (eudaemonia) is complete and sufficient unto itself, that is, not precarious and dependent upon outside factors like the weather or the stock market. Thus, true happiness endures. But happiness was not possible for everyone, according to Aristotle, and the happiness of which he speaks is natural happiness, the result of emotional stability brought about by the virtues and the joy of natural contemplation of the highest things. But Jesus is God in the flesh, and God became man so that man could "become" God, so to speak, that is, so that he might be elevated by divine grace, which is a sharing in the supernatural life of God; it is by entering into the Person of Christ that we enter into his joy.

Each beatitude begins with Makarios ("Blessed are..."), which is the blessedness that is sufficient unto itself, complete, and the first taste of life eternal. As a whole, they describe the spirit of the one who lives in the Person of Christ. Let's examine each contour of this new life.

"Blessed are the Poor in Spirit; the kingdom of heaven is theirs."

That is the first and most fundamental condition for belonging to Christ, and thus the first condition for entering into the joy of the kingdom of God. Those who are poor in terms of material wealth are deeply aware of their lack. Similarly, those who are poor in spirit are aware of their spiritual lack, that is, they are aware of their utter need for God; thus, they open themselves up to Him. The result of that simple act of openness is the gift of the kingdom of heaven.

Mental illness is a very painful condition to have to deal with, but what I have found over the years is that many of those who suffer from mental illness have an acute awareness of their radical need for God, their poverty of spirit, and this has led them to call out to God in the midst of their darkness, which in turn has led to very intense moments of prayer. These are people selected by Christ to keep him company in Gethsemane where he experienced a heavy weight of mental anguish. Mental illness is a difficult cross, a painful gift, but if we consider those who live in prosperity, who are rarely sick and are so well off that their days are spent fulfilling their every whim, we notice that many of them have no awareness of their need for God and so they do not pray, and because of that they do not know makarios.
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

It seems rather counterintuitive that the mournful can be called 'happy', but this beatitude refers to a special kind of mourning. If we love God, we will love all those who belong to God, and every human being without exception comes from God and is loved by God with an incomprehensible love. And so the more we enter into the heart of God, the more we discover our neighbor there, and so we are moved to return to earth, so to speak, and we go looking for him or her, because we know that there we will find the God we have begun to love: we discover our neighbor in God, and we rediscover God in our neighbor.

Now when we truly love others, their happiness becomes our own, because we have begun to love them as "another self", and yet for the most part, we find them in pain, suffering, and struggling to be happy. Because we love them as "another self", their suffering too becomes our own. We mourn for them, for it is so hard to remain indifferent to the sufferings of others after we have discovered and entered into the heart of God. It is the sins of human beings, the cold indifference of others towards God and neighbor that fills us with sorrow. This, however, is a blessed sorrow, a sorrow that is not incompatible with joy, but exists with it, for it is the joy of having been invited into Christ's sorrow, which is a joy filled sorrow.
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

A meek spirit is a gentle spirit. The poor in spirit who mourn the misery of others because they really know that misery and are moved to share in it are gentle towards those who are suffering. The meek are not quick to take offense at others; they are very patient with others because they know that God has always been patient with them. When we take a good hard look at how often we have been wrong over the years, how often our impressions, inferences, conclusions, convictions, etc., have turned out to be mistaken, we tend to be less self-righteous, less confident in the way we see and interpret the actions of others. We hesitate to conclude definitively, and so it is easier to be more patient with others, gentler, and more open to listening to them, whomever they might be. Anger is a response to an injustice, but often what we interpret as an injustice is, on closer inspection, no such thing. Those who are quick to react with anger are those disposed to make quick inferences; they trust too readily in the way they see things, believing that their grasp of the real is far more comprehensive than it is.

But when a person finally realizes how tiny is the framework in which he sees and interprets the world at any one time, he tends to be more open to learning and is reluctant to jump to conclusions, and thus much less prone to react in anger. The meek are self-possessed, in control of their emotions, in particular the passion of anger. Meekness, however, does not mean the suppression of anger. Recall that Jesus became angry at the money changers in the temple and drove them out. Anger that is governed by reason and is a response to real injustice is not sinful, but virtuous; the deliberate decision to keep anger alive in a spirit of unforgiveness, however, is sinful.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for what is right; they shall be satisfied."

Scripture must be read in its historical context, and thus so too this particular passage. Hunger and thirst, as these words are used here, are something that few of us in the western world have experienced. What Jesus is referring to is the hunger pangs of a first century Palestinian laborer who knew what it was like to go without food for an extended period of time, and the thirst is that of a Palestinian who has experienced the heat of the desert and the thirst it induces. There is a tremendous amount of indifference in this world, and the reason is that indifference is rather painless. The indifferent do not suffer over the wounds of others; many in fact secretly delight in the misfortunes of others, which is why bad news spreads quickly. Many are simply not incensed at the injustices around them, and although they are very passionate about their goals, those ambitions often have little to do with making this a more just world and more to do with their own individual fulfillment.

But an indication that the Lord is drawing you into himself, into his own life, is that you are the kind of person who loves justice more than you love yourself, as opposed to the kind of person who looks out for himself first, and only later, after all his needs are met, concerns himself with others. Those who have entered into Christ will suffer a great deal of hunger and thirst, because there is so much injustice around us. The more intense your love, the more intense your hunger and thirst; blessed are you if you live with this kind of hunger and thirst, because that means you have entered into the hunger and thirst of Christ.
"Blessed are the merciful; they will be shown mercy."

Christ revealed God as absolute mercy. He came to die for us and cancel the debt of sin, which we were unable to pay. The Latin word for mercy is misericordia (miser, cor, dia). The word means "the heart (cor) of God (deus) touching our misery (miser). God enters into our misery by becoming man in the Person of Christ. He does so to inject the comfort of his presence into the depths of our darkness so that when life becomes dark for us, we do not have to suffer alone. When we have been touched by his mercy, we too become merciful; to follow him is to become a channel of his mercy.
"Blessed are the pure in heart; they shall see God."

What is pure is unmixed. For example, we speak of pure maple syrup that is unmixed with anything else. To be pure in heart is to have an undivided love for God, a heart unmixed with any other competing love. Some people love creation more than the Creator; they love things; they worship things, wealth, the pleasures of the earth, the glorification of the self, etc. They may love God, but their love is mixed with a disordered love of self.

Aristotle said: "As a person is, so does he see". What we see and don't see is in large part determined by our character, the kind of person we've made ourselves to be by our moral choices. We are what we love. The 'heart' is the most important factor is determining what it is we are able to see. It is always delightful to have a discussion with a group of young grade nine students who are both highly intelligent and who still have the purity and innocence of childhood. They are able to achieve a level of understanding of the loftiest theological concepts, something no longer possible for many senior students who have lost that purity. That is why the pure of heart shall see God, who calls us to love Him more than His gifts. If we eventually get to that point, we shall see Him as He is in Himself (the Beatific Vision).
"Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be called the children of God."

The Latin word for peace is 'pax', which means unity. As Ezekiel prophesied, the Lord will gather his people together from all nations; for love unites, hate divides. A peacemaker is one who strives to bring together, to maintain a genuine harmony among people. A peacemaker is not a "peacenik"; rather, he is one who is willing to 'make' peace, to work for it, even to fight for it. An unjust aggressor, which might include an entire nation, is intent on destroying the peace; so a true peacemaker is even willing to take up arms and fight, perhaps die for the pax of the nation, as our war veterans have done. So there is no requirement that one become a pacifist if one is a Christian.

Gossipers are not peacemakers, but love scandal and division. Controllers too are not peacemakers; for the controller desires to gather into a unity, but one that is under his control and that he can manage. He attempts to order everything for the sake of securing a safe environment for himself. If the controller is a priest or bishop, he may betray the duties of his office by refusing to speak out when necessary, by remaining silent on difficult moral matters because he loves his own "peace of mind" more than he loves the good of the flock. He may be tempted to rationalize his silence under the pretext of being a "peacemaker", that is, one who does not wish to "divide", an attitude contrary to Christ: "Do not suppose I have come to bring peace to the earth: it is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword" (Mt 10, 34).

The true peacemaker, however, is not an "organizer", but an instrument in the hands of Christ who orders and "brings together" in ways that are beyond our comprehension at the moment. It is only much later, when looking back, that we see that what appeared to be a life characterized by unintelligible randomness was really an ordered movement towards the realization of the larger plan of divine providence.
"Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of what is right, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

This final beatitude clearly implies that there is a real difference between joy and pleasure; for there is no pleasure in being persecuted, but you do find a secret joy in the very recesses of the soul, for you have become aware that you've received the gift of being drawn into the very heart of his silence. Christ is joy, and it is in being persecuted on account of him that you and I really come to know him. The silence of Christ is more joyful than the greatest joys the earth has to offer, and this is what persecution on account of Christ does for us, it takes us out of the noise of the world and into the profound rest of his other worldly silence.

This beatitude clearly implies that Jesus is no mere human being. How absurd it would be for me to call anyone blessed for suffering persecution on my account. What power do I have to offer them any kind of blessedness for what they choose to undergo for me? But Jesus can impart blessedness to those who suffer on account of belonging to him, because he is no mere man; he is fully God and fully man, and as God he chose to join a human nature to inject human suffering with the very joy of his supernatural life, which is so different from any other joy that indeed it strikes one silent. We rest in him; for we have found everything that the human heart is looking for but cannot find outside of him.

Source: https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/the-beatitudes-a-concise-summary.html

Some songs inspired by the Beatitudes:

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