Rejoice and be glad

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

***

Today’s gospel (Matthew 5:1-12) could be easily mistaken for a set of moral injunctions. When Jesus says blessed are the meek or blessed are the peacemakers, He seems to be telling us to be meek and peaceable. And so He is … but that that is not all. That these precepts are not merely a set of moral injunctions becomes apparent in other parts of this discourse.

Happy are those who mourn; happy the pure in heart; happy those who are persecuted. These are not prescriptions for behaviour. Rather they are about the inner transformation of the disciples. And the inner transformation of the disciples is not purely a moral agenda but a spiritual one; we might even say, a mystical one.

Which is as much to say that the following of Jesus is not like membership in a club whose rules we observe. The following of Jesus is more like a spousal relationship in which our very hearts are moulded in a new way.

Invite your spouse the Paraclete to make of our hearts a living Holy House.

The truth is that we either want this or not. But too often, we commit to it on the surface but do not accept it in some parts of our hearts. This is of course because we are not yet poor in spirit, preferring instead the satisfactions we derive from the chintz curtain arrangements of our reputations and our supermarket-value pleasures. Hoodwinked into thinking our intentions have been pure, we then find every excuse to dodge the responsibilities that fall upon us, all the while asking the very Mother of God to pray that the Holy Spirit would transform us like He once transformed her humble house in Nazareth. The cheek of it! I mean, the sheer cheek of it!

But we do not fail because we cannot to live up to the standard. We fail because we are still too actively building the city of man in our hearts instead of letting Him build the city of God. We fail because some parts of our hearts have not really surrendered to the Father’s forming action. It is not because we are weak; when our hearts have ceased to choose sin openly, we still act out our selfishness in more subtle ways, assuming instinctively that we can realise those beatitudes by our own powers. And then of course we realise we are weak but not in the way we thought. Ultimately, that is because we have still not grasped the fullness of the call to life and love, the call to the fullness of joy, and the call to wholeness, and let these calls - His calls - fill the sails of our souls.

What power on earth could make us rejoice and be glad when we are abused and persecuted and when people speak calumny against us? We could only rejoice in such circumstances if the treasure of our hearts was truly the love of God, and it only becomes our treasure through His gift. The beatitudes are not, as I said above, a set of moral injunctions. They are rather a map of the transformation of those souls who are so deeply in love with God that their hearts and minds are already living the life of the blessed, steeped in the immense love that can only come from the Holy Spirit.

Are we right to aspire to this? Are we right to think that this could be the reality of our own lives? Jesus has no doubts about this. He has already said: follow me. He has already said: If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too.

And then, when we love Him, we will find him everywhere: smiling at us through the crowd as the busyness of our days pulls us apart, shedding tears we can wipe away from the face of a neighbour, asking too much of us through some needy client, only to help us surrender more to the urging of His love; waiting for us in the prayers we offer before the tabernacle, as in those snatched from the dimness of some half sleep.

Rejoice and be glad for your reward will be great in heaven. The more our hearts belong to Him under the influence of the Holy Spirit, the more that rejoicing and gladness become ours even now.