KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 6 November
He taught them saying, blessed are you
The Beatitudes complement and complete the ethical and educational project of The Book of Exodus. At issue is our awareness of an ethical principle, the idea of the Good which shapes and informs all our thinking and doing. The Beatitudes mark the beginning of Christ’s famous Sermon on the Mount. They present us with a challenging set of ethical principles that are profoundly counter-culture and yet belong to a long and rich tradition of ethical and philosophical thinking. To read them in the lead up to the Remembrance Day observances along with Christ’s words about sacrificial love, “greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends,” words which adorn a thousand cenotaphs throughout the world, is particularly poignant.
The Beatitudes are the great Christian ethic of grace and belong to the challenge about what truly defines us, a question which belongs to the traditions of ethical and philosophical thinking. Socrates argues that it is far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. He lived and died what he taught, accepting the suffering imposed upon him by Athens, his death for teaching (accused of corrupting the youth). Confucius in the Analects calls attention to the inner qualities of ren, of virtue and goodness. Sri Krishna advises Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita to follow his dharma as a warrior but without attachment to results or outcomes. Buddhism will extend the theme of detachment from desires to the extent of the complete extinguishment of the self. There is no you. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all teach the theme of renunciation and sacrifice, the idea of being defined by something greater than yourself that shapes thought and action.
“Blessedness includes every concept of goodness,” the great mystic Cappadocian theologian of the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa, observes, “from which nothing answering to good desire is missing.” He goes on to note that “to tell the truth, blessedness is the divine itself.” The Beatitudes are about nothing less than our participation in the illuminating, purifying, and perfecting grace of God which dignifies and defines our humanity. Nothing could be more counter-culture and nothing could better help our remembering about the sombre realities of the devastating and destructive wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They speak to what God seeks for us even in spite of ourselves.
