A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Glory to you, Lord. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside. After he had sat down, his disciples gathered around him, and then he began to teach them. How blessed are the poor in spirit?
The reign of god is theirs. Blessed too are the sorrowing. They shall be consoled. Blessed are the lowly. They shall inherit the land.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for holiness. They shall have their fill. Blessed are they who show mercy. Mercy shall be theirs. Blessed are the single hearted for they shall see god.
Blessed too are the peacemakers. They shall be called sons of god. Blessed are those persecuted for holiness sake. The reign of god is theirs. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you because of me.
Be glad and rejoice for your reward in heaven is great. They persecuted the prophets before you in the very same way, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. These statements of our blessed lord have, during down the centuries, accumulated an enormous volume of commentary. Because the first thing that seems to be most obvious about them is that they are not fulfilled.
And I suppose the reason is the sort of fulfillment that people are looking for is not precisely what Jesus had in mind. One of the commonest experiences one has in life, and it happens in our own lives, when things happen to us that we don't like, I don't care what they are, And without trying to account for them. In other words, what brought all of this upon my head? Because in in many instances, it's not obvious that I had anything to do with it all. Take a young mother, 27 or 28 years old, two or three young children stricken down with terminal cancer.
She certainly didn't bring it on herself for the most part unless she was smoking a lot. So the first question that comes to people's mind when something hits them is this, why me, oh lord? Why me? Now it takes a great deal of faith, of love, of confidence to rise and be able to accept these beatitudes on trust because it's not obvious that they're fulfilled in this life by a long shot. And yet you see, back of our heads, we still have that old testament attitude that the good in this life are rewarded and those who aren't so good get sucked.
That's the whole theme of the book of Job. I keep coming back to it. People don't read it. But read it. It's not a volume.
It's a very short text. And that has said everything that anybody can say about the mysterious workings of God and my attitude towards it. It's downright mysterious. But but the point that people miss when they deal with with statements of our lord, and this applies to all this business about the peace of god, the love of god, all of this, is that in many instances, what the person has in mind wasn't precisely what Jesus Christ had in mind. Notice this here where he's it's very explicit.
He says, when he says, blessed are you when they insult you. How many people have you met who rejoiced when they were being insulted? And when you are persecuted, how many people have you met, including yourself, that you rejoice when you're persecuted? And then when every kind of slander, meaning a lie, is told against you. And Christ says, when this happens to you, rejoice and be glad.
Why? Because your reward in heaven is great. See, there is there is the crooks of the problem. Christ doesn't say that you're gonna be happy and and overjoyed when you're slandered and persecuted. What he's saying is that the Christian, accepting it in his name will get a reward.
Christ doesn't hesitate to tell us, be good because you're going to get a reward for it. You see, believe it or not, but Christ anticipated doctor Skinner by a few centuries. Christ didn't hesitate at all to say, do this because you're going to get a reward. Where? Where?
Here in this life? Why me, oh god? Why am I the one that struck? Why should it happen to me? Look look at my life.
I've done everything for you, and I made sacrifices on sacrifice. Gosh. I've just been reading the life of of, Tolkien, the the author you know of the lord of the rings. Now he was a contemporary of Lewis. And the story of his mother, this goes back you see to the beginning of the turn of the century.
She married an Englishman. They went down into Africa. He died. The husband died at a very early young age, leaving her with two boys. She comes back to England, and this would be about 1908, and becomes a Catholic.
What happens to her? She's thrown out by both sides of the family. Her own parents ostracize her. Her her relations on her husband's side will have nothing more to do with her. She's cut off from support with two children because she became a Catholic.
And then she's tied in with Saint Philip Neri's Oratory in Birmingham which Cardinal Newman founded, where Cardinal Newman is buried out by Edmundston. So she gets to know one of the auditorium fathers and what happens? She's taken down with pneumonia and bronchitis and things of that sort. In a few years after struggling and trying to do what she could for her boys in every way, Her parents and her in laws would gladly have taken the boys, but they would have become Protestants, Church of England. And she wasn't about to do it.
She did everything she could for them. And what was her reward? She died of pneumonia. Then the boys were left total orphans and became entrusted to an oratorian father who, of course, was a who had known Newman. That was the result of the Oxford movement of the liberalized attitude in England towards becoming a Catholic.
So here she did everything was right, and she got socked right down the line. Bing. Bing. Bing. And how did it all work out?
One of the you all often heard about what Augustine wrote about his mother. Well, I just read what Tolkien wrote about his mother, calling her an unsung martyr. And let me tell you, truer words couldn't be spoke. But you see, what we what we've got to get into our heads some way or other that what that the world of Christ is not this world. You see, there's so much talk today of religion in terms of what I would call psychosocial values.
And psychosocial values are perfectly good values. Let let's be a Marxist. Let's be a socialist. Let's say, let's turn this world into a utopia. Okay.
Go ahead and do it. But don't tell me that that's the world of Christ. Don't tell me that's what our lord told me. Christ never came to make this a better world. There's not a there's not a single word in the gospels for that.
He came to to show us that we're in a world that's not this world. We are enemies of this world, and the world is enemies of us. We of course, we don't like to believe this. We think we can compromise. You cannot compromise.
And how do I know it? I've tried it. You've tried it. We've all tried it. We call it sin.
Now that brings me to the main point of my remarks this morning. They all there's always a point, you know. Have did you notice the first thing we said there this morning about praying god to heal the wounds of sin? To heal the wounds of the repentant man or woman. See, we we we sometimes forget this, that sin is a wound.
A person, after they commit a sin, any more than when they do something that is good, they're changed. There there's a residue. There's a residue, and that can be hard to live with sometimes. We have to be cured. And notice, we go to Christ for the cure.
I can't do it myself. Go to your psychiatrist. Get get involved in your in these couches and all the rest of it. Sometimes that's all overall for the good. But when you're talking about real guilt, you don't need a psychiatrist.
You need god almighty. And he's there. He's there. See, there's the whole point. And so when we take these beatitudes, take them for what they are.
This is this is strong stuff. This is nothing for children to play around with. Christ didn't play games. Carrying the cross is no joke. And yet he said, if you don't take up my cross, you're not one of my followers.
It's the only criterion of being a Christian that Christ gives. And so Christianity, as I said yesterday, it's our it's a commitment of joy because we've got it made in a sense. Here we pray. Here we're we're asking god to do what the world can't do is to heal the wounds of sin in the repentant soul. Believe it.
Take Christ at his word. You can't do much better. In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit. Amen.