The Beatitudes: Teaching for Disciples Only! (OT.4.A)

 

The Ten Commandments are for everyone, even if the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell said they were like a final exam of ten questions, with the heading “answer only six.”

You don’t need much faith, if any, to recognize that most of the commandments are fundamental to living a decent life.

Not so the nine beatitudes that we have just heard. They are for disciples. Jesus is speaking “to those who are not only ready to listen to him but to accompany him.”

This is particularly clear for the ninth beatitude, which is obviously addressed directly to the disciples.

The great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar explains why this teaching is not something everyone can understand. Jesus gives the beatitudes as “a self-portrait that invites his listeners to follow him.”

“He is the one who has become poor for our sake, who weeps over Jerusalem. He is the non-violent one against whom all the world’s violence rages and is shattered. He is the one who hungers and thirsts for God’s justice … who has the pure heart who always sees the Father.”

“He is the one who is persecuted by the entire world because he has incarnated God’s righteousness.” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Light of the World: Brief Reflections on the Sunday Readings, p. 43)

And in all of this, Jesus is blessed by the Father and exults even in the midst of tribulation.

So, the big question for us today is not whether we believe the difficult teaching of the beatitudes. It’s whether we are ready to pay what the Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the cost of discipleship,” which according to the Scottish spiritual writer John Dalrymple is “not less than everything.”

In saying that, I may have put the cart before the horse. The real question is simply ‘are we ready to become disciples?’—not only to listen to Jesus but to accompany him all the way.

Our response to the beatitudes is like a rapid antigen test. Just a few minutes of reflection can tell us where we are on the discipleship path.

For that matter, looking at the beatitudes as Christ’s “self-portrait,” as “the pure expression of his most personal mission and destiny,” can tell us how well we know our Lord and invite us to go deeper with him.

Each of the nine beatitudes needs a separate homily, but today I will focus only on one: “Blessed are you when people revile you persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”

For me, this is more difficult than all the others.

But it is also, for me, the beatitude I have felt personally and painfully in the persecution of Cardinal George Pell, who died suddenly earlier this month. Probably because I care too much what others think of me, I can’t imagine any suffering greater than false accusation not to mention imprisonment.

At the same time, only the stories of the valiant martyrs whose blood has watered the Church’s soil from the beginning until now, have moved and challenged me as much as Cardinal Pell’s. When his prison journals came out in three volumes my first thought was “couldn’t he have found an editor?” Even St. Augustine and St. Therese made do with one diary.

Now, halfway through the first book I’m deeply grateful for how this journal paints a daily picture of a man with such faith in Jesus that he was able to put more hope in his vindication in heaven than on earth, even if that was eventually granted also.

His friend George Weigel writes that “Throughout his ordeal, Cardinal Pell was a model of patience and, indeed, a model of priestly character. Knowing that he was innocent, he was a free man even when incarcerated.”

It’s fair to say that a deep faith in Christ’s promise to those who are persecuted was the source of that freedom. The journal also makes clear that he embraced the Gospel teaching of loving and praying for his enemies, of which there were many.

My relatively high-profile position in our Archdiocese could expose me in future to a minor version of what Cardinal Pell experienced; few of you need to fear that. But surely everyone, especially the young, knows what it is to be reviled for their Catholic faith.

Some years ago a parishioner sent an office e-mail describing Holy Week to his fellow employees. He was formally reprimanded by his superiors for a respectful communication that would have been commended coming from someone of another faith.

Although anti-Catholic sentiments run high, actual persecution usually affects people in certain professions or at certain stages in their education or careers. If you are fortunate enough to be spared the worst of this, might I suggest choosing another beatitude—just one—and spending some time with it.

How, for instance, do we seek to be peacemakers, to be pure of heart? How do we imitate Jesus, the Prince of Peace, whose pure heart willed only the will of his Heavenly Father?

So here’s my “one sentence” challenge to disciples: dive personally into one of the beatitudes. Even one will test our willingness to follow Jesus by becoming like him.

And let us pray for all those who are persecuted for righteousness or on account of their faith in Christ and his Church. Let us pray also for the repose of the soul of Cardinal Pell, whose visit to our parish some years ago I now consider a very special grace and blessing.

We can end with a prayer from the martyr St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, better known as Edith Stein. Cardinal Pell prays it during his fifteenth week in prison, awaiting the result of his appeal: 

“We know not, and we should not ask before the time, where our earthly way will lead us. We know only this, that to those who love the Lord, all things will work together to the good, and further, that the ways by which our Saviour leads us point beyond this earth.”

Those interested in knowing more about Cardinal Pell can read the recollections of his friend (and mine) Father Raymond de Souza here and here. The internet abounds with accounts of the Cardinal's judicial proceedings, but I find the detailed analysis of the Jesuit priest and civil lawyer Father Frank Brennan particularly cogent.