by CCW | 3 November 2024 10:00
“For our citizenship is in heaven”, Paul writes. “Whose is this image and superscription?” Jesus asks the Pharisees who sought to “entangle him in his talk”. These readings complement wonderfully the readings for All Saints’, both the image of heaven from Revelation as “a great multitude” beyond all number of “all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues” united in the praise of God the Trinity and the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. How? Because they reveal the summum bonum, the highest good for our humanity as restored to our being in the image of God. They set before us what belongs to the radical truth and dignity of our humanity.
Christ’s question to the Pharisees is really his question to us: in whose image are we and what is written over us? Questions and claims about the images of the self proliferate and abound in our culture. That we are imago dei or imago Christi or imago Trinitatis speak to the deeper reality of our being with God and in God, to our heavenly citizenship even in and through the tribulations of our lives. We are reminded of our blessedness. “His banner over me was love”, as the Song of Songs puts it.
The Beatitudes show us what it means to be in the image of God or Christ or the Trinity – they are all the same reality – and speak to the ultimate or highest good for our humanity. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics says that happiness is our greatest good. The word he uses is eudaemonia. What he means by happiness is not what we might assume. Happiness for us is mostly subjective and personal, passive and accidental; in short, something existential. For Aristotle happiness is objective and substantial; in short, living in accord with virtue. It is the activity of the rational soul acting in accord with the qualities of human excellence. While the treatise focuses on the moral practices that belong to that activity, in the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of practical life, he argues that the highest activity or form of happiness is contemplation; moral activities are secondary. Contemplation is about what is the highest in us, the life of the mind, because it seeks what is everlasting and complete as distinct from what is passing and incomplete. The highest form of happiness approximates the life of the gods because the highest power in us, in his view, is the mind.
He says that “we ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality”, words which sound like Paul, to “do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest in us”, which is the life of the intellect. This kind of intellectualism may seem off-putting but it speaks, I think, to the deeper understanding that today’s readings in the context of All Saints’ provide. He says that “the life of the gods is altogether happy, and that of man is happy in so far as it contains something that resembles the divine activity”. The word he uses here is not eudaemonia but makarios, meaning blessed. It is the very word which Jesus uses nine times in the twelve verses of the Beatitudes.
Aristotle famously says that the life of the gods is too high for us but that is where the Gospel comes into play. God teaches and empowers us and makes us “partakers of the divine nature”. Grace does not destroy but perfects our human nature. That is, I think, the power and the beauty and the truth of the Beatitudes. They show us what belongs to our heavenly citizenship, to the restoration of our being in the image of God.
Each of the Beatitudes is an image of our true being as made in the image of God, of Christ or of the Trinity. They speak to the qualities of perfecting grace that belong to the highest good of our humanity. They unpack the qualities of our heavenly citizenship in contrast to the confusions and uncertainties of our worldly lives, not in a rejection or flight from the world into some fantasy of our minds, but as the redemption of the world and ourselves to God. The blessednesses are not simply about something hereafter, what Marx said was “pie in the sky by and by”, a distant and pious hope, religion as the opiate of the peoples. The blessednesses are about what is, our being in the eternal being of God. They are the qualities of divine grace perfecting human character. They are now and forever.
The Beatitudes are framed by the idea of the kingdom of heaven. It is the reward or result of both the first and the last Beatitude. “Blessed are the poor in spirit”; “blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake”: for “theirs”, in both cases, “is the kingdom of heaven”. But the qualities of that heavenly kingdom, our citizenship, are there in the other six beatitudes: the qualities of comfort, of the proper use of creation, of justice, of mercy, of the vision of God, and of being the children of God. And to bring all the Beatitudes home to each of us in the face of the hatreds and animosities that come with Christian witness, “rejoice and be glad”, Jesus tells us, “for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you”, not to mention his own crucifixion. It is true that he speaks of our reward as being in heaven but the point of the Beatitudes is that the kingdom of heaven is always present, always is. We are partakers of our end in glory now. How? Through praise and prayer, through our seeking the grace which God gives and provides for us.
The poor in spirit are precisely those who are not puffed up with a spirit of self-importance and self-regard, literally unable to see anyone or anything beyond themselves. Such is ancient hubris and pride, conditions of soul which negate and deny the truth of God in forms of self-contradiction. Pride unselves us. The poor in spirit are the humble who are open to what dignifies and redeems us. “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. Those who mourn are blessed, too, “for they shall be comforted”. That is future, but only because the condition of mourning is temporal, it is about the past in the present of our emotions and feelings of loss. The point is that it is not forever. We are not to be defined by grief and loss. Why not? Because of the grace of God in Christ who gathers all those whose death we mourn into himself. Such is the power and meaning of All Saints’ as shown too in the Solemnity of All Souls. The golden thread of Christ’s passion and resurrection runs through the grave of our common death. Even in death we are made “partakers of the divine nature”, for Christ has died for us that he might live in us. “As dying, we live”.
“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”. That too seems to be about the future. The meek are the gentle ones who do not seek to dominate and manipulate the earth as if it exists only for them. In the gentleness of wisdom, they know the earth as God’s creation and as such are at home in it. That they shall inherit it signals that the whole of creation shares in the work of redemption. The kingdom of heaven includes the earth without being reduced to it. This brings us to the fourth beatitude about hungering and thirsting after righteousness. That is to be constantly seeking the justitia dei, the justice of God which ever is. Not unlike Plato and Aristotle, we seek to approximate and to participate in that eternal form of justice in our own lives.
The fifth Beatitude makes clear the whole meaning of the Beatitudes as the perfecting grace of God at work in us. “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy”. All these ‘shall be’s’ are really about the eternal present and nowhere more clearly than here. Mercy for mercy. It is the recurring theme of the Gospels, of all the words of Christ, of the fullest meaning of forgiveness and grace. It is all mercy, meaning the eternal goodness of God towards us. It follows marvelously upon our seeking justice because “mercy seasons justice”, as Portia famously says in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. This Beatitude is the heart of the Beatitudes, the highest of the highest qualities of our humanity for it is to act as God acts. Mercy for mercy perfects and restores to perfection. Mercy is.
The pure in heart “shall see God”. That is blessedness. To see and know as God sees and knows ourselves; this is the vision of God and his kingdom which the Beatitudes in part and as a whole impart to us. Likewise “blessed are the peace-makers: for they shall be called the children of God”. This is our vocation and the truth of our being in Christ from the very beginning of our lives. In baptism we are made the child of God. This too is about acting as God acts who is “the author of peace and concord”, “the peace which passeth all understanding”, meaning that it is altogether about the blessedness that God himself bestows on us in our “knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ”, as the Blessing, yes, the Blessing, which concludes our Liturgy, puts it, the Blessing, yes, “the Blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost”, which is “amongst you and remains with you always”.
All of these Beatitudes belong to our joy and gladness in our life in Christ, They belong to our witness to his eternal truth and infinite goodness. They remind us of the qualities of our life in Christ now and for evermore. What greater blessing, what greater good can there be?
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 23, 2024 (In the Octave of All Saints’)
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