Zep 2:3; 3:12-13 | Ps 146 | 1 Cor 1:26-31 | Mt 5:1-12a
Throughout the Scriptures, we hear the consistent message that God does not operate in the ways we would imagine. God regularly proclaims a preference for the poor and oppressed and a special care for the widow and orphan. When God enters human existence, it is not as a triumphant king but as a vulnerable infant born into poverty. God offers us salvation not through a visible victory but through the apparent defeat of the cross. God defeats death by going through death himself.
None of this is how the world usually operates or how we like to see it work. God’s ways are not our ways.
The Beatitudes of today’s gospel make this explicit. Jesus here preaches the reversal of expectations, to which his whole life bears witness. In this world, we often think of those who are “blessed” as those who are safe and healthy, productive and successful, financially secure, and usually married with children. When we “count our blessings,” we are usually counting external things such as these. It is not wrong to be grateful for these things; in fact, recognizing them as gifts from God can be an important spiritual practice. But Jesus insists that, as good as these things are, they are not the point. His definition of blessedness has nothing to do with external blessings. The ones who Jesus calls blessed are defined by more internal characteristics, and the blessings they receive are not visible or worldly ones.
This can be tough to take in. We are deeply accustomed to thinking of blessings in a way that’s been shaped by our capitalist and consumerist society. The invisible nature of this blessedness means that we might not get to know who among us has found favor with God. This is unsettling because, of course, we want to know. But it is also good news, for all of us, because all of us are broken in some way. And what Jesus tells us here is that our brokenness, our lacks, our failures, none of these exclude us from blessedness.
The outside world, or simply enough, we ourselves, may consider us to be disappointments in any number of ways. We’re all on the Island of Misfit Toys; but, none of that keeps us from being looked on by favor with God and ultimately finding peace and happiness with God! Those of us who struggle with mental illness can still partake fully in God’s promised love and life. So can those of us whose careers have stalled, those whose finances are a mess, those excluded from marriage despite their deep longing for a partner, those suffering from infertility.
All of us; and, because God doesn’t offer love on the condition that we attain some baseline level of achievement or life experience. God did not come to collect our achievements, but rather, numbers every hair on our heads and collects all our tears. God is here for us. This is the God who wants so deeply to be with us that God took on flesh and entered into human existence, in all the absurdity and pain that it entails. And Jesus didn’t accomplish much by the world’s standards, either: three years of ministry (hardly a career), followed by an apparent defeat on a cross. And then triumph, but a triumph of whispers and rumors, one we can hardly dare believe. Even Jesus himself isn’t the sort of success story that the world understands. This is all very reassuring. God’s preference for the broken is a lovely idea when we reflect on the ways we are broken and vulnerable. But there is also a call to responsibility here, for power dynamics are complexly interwoven through all our lives and all of us, in some ways, also carry power in our relationships. All of us have the ability not to be meek and merciful. All of us can, at times, be something of an oppressor. This can be true of employers to employees, of older to younger siblings, of spouses to each other, priests to the parishioners (and parishioners to their priests), and especially of parents to children.
Parents can be especially vulnerable to the temptation to grasp at control and to parent out of fear rather that out love. Being in such a deep relationship as parents have with their children involves giving up a great deal of control, and that can be terrifying. When parents see their children as a reflection of themselves and their parenting, complex dynamics of pride pull up deep insecurities. It can be a challenge to relate to one’s children, who were or are fully dependent, as full human beings with all the dignity that entails. But that is the call here—to parent out of loving humility. Because in all our relationships, humility is the key. It’s the theme that runs throughout the Beatitudes and that our first reading reminds us to seek out. Humility isn’t a pleasant or easy virtue, but we are called to grow in it anyway. Where we do have power, we are called to enact it as God does, always in love and always with an eye toward and a preference for those who are more vulnerable than we are.