4th Sunday in Ordinary Time 02-03-08

Scripture Readings
First Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13
Second 1 Corinthians 1:26-31
Gospel Matthew 5:1-12a

Prepared by: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• God chooses the weak, the lowly, and those who count for nothing to manifest his glory;
authentic Christian heroism.
• We are made for beatitude.
• The beatitudes are happiness, joy.

2. Exegetical Notes
• “Seek the Lord, all you humble of the earth:” “The humble are those people who have
remained faithful to God, those led and taught by God” (Robert A. Bennett, NIB).
• “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world
to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly…those who count for nothing:” “God has
called the lowly, the poor, the slaves, and—most shocking of all paradoxes—the
‘nonentities.’… Thus he might destroy the pretensions of all who account themselves as
something…. Paul is alluding to his basic doctrine that the call to faith is due to the merciful
goodness of God and not to the world of man” (JBC).
• “Blessed are….:” makarios. “Beatitude represented the attribution of happiness to someone
because of a gift received or a state of blessedness experienced…. The beatitudes are a
‘yes’ given by God in Jesus. Jesus presents himself as the one who fulfills the aspiration for
happiness. What is more, Jesus wished to ‘incarnate’ the beatitudes by living them perfectly”
(Xavier Leon-Dufour).

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• 1697 The way of Christ is summed up in the beatitudes.
• 1711 The human person is from his very conception ordered to God and destined for eternal
beatitude.
• 1717 The Beatitudes depict the countenance of Jesus Christ and portray his charity. They
express the vocation of the faithful…; they shed light on the actions and attitudes
characteristic of the Christian life; they are the paradoxical promises that sustain hope in the
midst of tribulations; they proclaim the blessings and rewards already secured.
• 1718 The Beatitudes respond to the natural desire for happiness. This desire is of divine
origin: God has placed it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can
fulfill it.
• 1719 The Beatitudes reveal the goal of human existence, the ultimate end of human acts:
God calls us to his own beatitude.
• 1721 Beatitude makes us "partakers of the divine nature" and of eternal life. With beatitude,
man enters into the glory of Christ and into the joy of the Trinitarian life.
• 1726 The Beatitudes teach us the final end to which God calls us: the Kingdom, the vision of
God, participation in the divine nature, eternal life, filiation, rest in God.
• 1728 The Beatitudes confront us with decisive choices concerning earthly goods; they purify
our hearts in order to teach us to love God above all things.
• 1820 Christian hope unfolds from the beginning of Jesus' preaching in the proclamation of
the beatitudes. The beatitudes raise our hope toward heaven as the new Promised Land;
they trace the path that leads through the trials that await the disciples of Jesus.
• 1967 In the Beatitudes, the New Law fulfills the divine promises by elevating and orienting
them toward the "kingdom of heaven."
• 2546 The Beatitudes reveal an order of happiness and grace, of beauty and peace.
• 2821 The petition “thy Kingdom come” is taken up and granted in the prayer of Jesus which
is present and effective in the Eucharist; it bears its fruit in new life in keeping with the
Beatitudes.

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities

• St. Cromacious of Aquileya: “This is a splendid principle of celestial doctrine. The Lord
begins not through fear, but through beatitude.”
• St. Gregory of Nyssa: “Beatitude is a possession of all things held to be good, from which
nothing is absent that a good desire may want…. We are made the friend of the Blessed One
through the blessings of the Beatitudes. For Beatitude is the property of God par excellence.
Participation in the Beatitudes means nothing else but to have communion with the
Godhead…. It seems to me that the Beatitudes are arranged in order like so many steps, so
as to facilitate the ascent from one to the other.”
• Gerald Vann, O.P.: “To be poor in spirit, to be meek, to be clean of heart; all these things
denote an attitude of soul towards the world; but primarily they denote an attitude of soul
towards God…. The beatitudes mean…that man…is succeeding in the struggle to kill the
false self by the daily asceticism of accepting and welcoming God’s will, the struggle to find
God by that daily searching and listening which is the life of prayer, and the struggle with the
mind’s waywardness to gain, after immense difficulty and constant failure, that abiding sense
 of the presence of God which is the condition of our ability to see and will all things in union
with him.”
• Servais Pinckaers, O.P.: “The Sermon on the Mount gives the practical teaching necessary
to show us the ways of the Holy Spirit and to convey His inspirations to us…. It is no longer
made up of sheer imperatives…. The purpose of the Sermon is to show us what the Holy
Spirit wishes to accomplish in our lives here and now through His grace, if we respond to Him
with the Yes of faith, with the eagerness of hope, and with the availability of love…. The
Sermon gradually reveals to us the feelings, the soul, the spiritual face of Christ. We can
then relate the words of the Sermon to Christ himself and discover how He has fulfilled them
in His own life. Through the Sermon we can perceive the sentiments of His heart. The
Sermon on the Mount is the most faithful portrait of Christ we possess, and by the same
token the most perfect life model we could be given.”
• Servais Pinckaers, O.P.: “The beatitudes, each in its own way, detail all the happiness man
can hope for…. The chief purpose of the beatitudes to form in us that spiritual appetite which
is the prerogative of the poor, the humble, the meek, and all who follow Christ on the road of
suffering…. The beatitudes...often transcend our ideas and feelings and even turn them
upside down, so as to lead us further into the reality of things under the guidance of faith….
We might say that the beatitudes seek us out, rather than we they, since they contain a Word
incomparably more penetrating than human words clothed in human language…. Each time
we accept to commit ourselves to the path of one of the beatitudes, the Lord Himself
mysteriously accompanies us by the grace of His Spirit, and travels anew, with us and in us,
the road to the Kingdom which He has taught us.”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars

• St. Benedict Joseph Labre was a Frenchman born in 1748 whose love for God was so great
that he longed to enter the contemplative religious life. Repeatedly his desires were thwarted
by the mental illness that afflicted him throughout his life. Inspired by God, he spent the final
thirteen years of his life as a pilgrim beggar in the city of Rome where he was noted for his
devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin Mary. He died in Rome April 16,
1783 and was canonized by Pope Leo XIII on December 8, 1881. Pope Leo said at Benedict
Joseph Labre’s canonization, “He was holiness itself.”

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI

• “People sense very strongly…the double implication of the Sermon on the Mount, that this is,
on the one hand, the message of a new inwardness, a maturity, and kindness, bringing
freedom from superficiality and external things, yet at the same time making a more serious
claim on us. And this claim is so great that man, were he left on his own, would be crushed
by it…. [It] would at least be asking too much…if it were not in the first place lived out in
Jesus Christ and if the whole thing were not the result of a personal encounter with God.”
• “Luke recounts in the story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth that when Mary’s greeting rang out
John ‘leaped for joy in his mother’s womb’ (1:44). To express that joy he employs the same
word σкιρτάν (leap) that he used to express the joy of those to whom the beatitudes are
addressed (Lk 6:23)”
• “The Beatitudes express the meaning of discipleship…. What the Beatitudes mean cannot
be expressed in purely theoretical terms; it is proclaimed in the life and suffering, and in the
mysterious joy, of the disciple who gives himself over completely to following the Lord.”
• “Catholics are not promised an ‘exterior’ happiness but rather a deep interior security through
communion with the Lord. That he is an ultimate light of happiness in one’s life is in fact a
part of all this…We are so alienated from God’s voice that we simply do not recognize it
immediately as his. But I would still say that everyone who is in some sense attentive can
experience and sense for himself that now he is speaking to me. And it is a chance for me to
get to know him. Precisely in catastrophic situations he can suddenly break in, if I am awake
and if someone helps me decipher the message.”
• “There is happiness only in the removal of the barriers of the self in moving into divinity, in
becoming divine. “
• “It is only by enduring himself, by freeing himself through suffering from the tyranny of
egoism, that man finds himself, that he finds his truth, his joy, his happiness. He will be all the
happier the more ready he is to take upon himself the abysses of existence with all their
misery. The measure of one’s capacity for happiness depends on the measure of the
premiums one has paid, on the measure of one’s readiness to accept the full passion of
being human.”

7. Other Considerations
• The greatest verification that the Beatitudes are true is the fact that Jesus fulfills them
himself. He begins his life in the poverty of the manger. He mourns publicly at the death of
Lazarus. He calls himself meek as if it were a title (Mt 21:5). He hungers in the desert in his
time of temptation, and he thirsts on the cross. His mercy extends even to the bestowal of
forgiveness to his crucifiers. The cleanness of his heart is revealed for all to see through the
opening made in his pierced side. “Peace” is his first word of greeting after the Resurrection.
The persecution of his Passion and the insults of Calvary remain his great trophies. No
wonder that those whom Christ declares blessed are, in the eyes of the world, as little
deserving of a reward as the workers hired late were deserving of their generous wages—the
word for “reward” and “wages” is the same (Mt 20:8).
Recommended Resources

Benedict XVI, Pope. Benedictus. Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006.

Benedict XVI, Pope. Jesus of Nazareth.

Biblia Clerus: http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerus/index_eng.html

Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach - Cycle A. Huntington: Our Sunday
Visitor, 2001.

Hahn, Scott:
http://www.salvationhistory.com/library/scripture/churchandbible/homilyhelps/homilyhelps.cfm
Martin, Francis: http://www.hasnehmedia.com/homilies.shtml

Pinckaers, Servais. The Pursuit of Happiness - God’s Way. Staten Island: Alba House, 1997.

Tugwell, Simon. The Beatitudes: Sounding in Christian Tradition. Springfield: Templegate, 1980.

Vann, Gerald. The Divine Pity: A Study in the Social Implications of the Beatitudes. Scepter:
2007.