As he ascends the mountain, in Matthew 5, the Lord shows himself as the new Moses, sharing anew the law of God. On Sinai, God’s presence was terrifying and dangerous. No one save Moses could approach on pain of death. Yet here the Son of God comes in person to speak not just to his disciples, but to the crowd.
These “blesseds” of Matthew 5 are the “beatitudes.” They are familiar, probably, because they form an easy centerpiece of the teaching of Jesus. When Hollywood wants a brief moment somehow summarizing the whole of the life of Christ, it can say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and we instantly recall the entire thing, perhaps because the beatitudes, and the whole sermon on the mount, are a summary of rabbinical teaching and an intensification of it. To its original hearers, it may have seemed a strange mixture of what was very familiar and what was totally, shockingly different.
The sermon also evokes one of the largest divisions in Christian interpretation of the New Testament. Do the beatitudes, and the sermon as a whole, represent a set of concrete instructions for a holy life, or do they represent an unattainable ideal? For large portions of the Protestant tradition, they are ideal and unattainable, and that is exactly the point: to suggest a kind of guilt and impossibility about human righteousness leading to a radical dependence on the grace of God. But this reading is founded historically in a sort of antisemitic reaction to the perceived Jewishness of Catholicism, which sees in the sermon not an unattainable ideal, but a real description of the saintly life. We see this traditional Catholic reading implied above all in the way the passage is used in the lectionary, as the perennial Gospel reading for All Saints Day, and a common option for other feasts of saints and martyrs.
In another sphere, many a modern Christian of more liberal persuasion finds in the sermon neither an unattainable ideal nor a description of sainthood, but rather a set of ethical principles that can be discretely drawn out and systematized. The chief problem with this view is its attempt to separate the beatitudes from, as one writer puts it, “the one alone who is the exemplification of righteousness.” So we’re left once again with a kind of idealism, because once we start to abstract the beatitudes from their speaker, “strategies are developed to help us avoid thinking that it applies to our lives” (Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew). For example, we might think they apply to the private moral realm but not to the sphere of public policy—or the exact opposite.
In the end, the Catholic emphasis on the Beatitudes as descriptive of the saints helps us navigate these questions and remember that their meaning is centered on our Lord himself and the Church, which he gathers to himself. The beatitudes are neither unattainable ideals nor abstract universal principles, but the facts of the kingdom, which is to say, not only is this the way the saints will look, but if you want to be in that number, you should aim to be “blessed” in these ways as well. This is possible not because we are naturally capable of this way of living, but because supernatural grace enables it by participation in the life of the divine Son. St. Chrysostom points out, in relation to the merciful who will attain mercy, that this system of rewards goes well beyond anything in nature. He writes, “The reward here seems at first to be only an equal return; but indeed it is much more; for human mercy and divine mercy are not to be put on an equality.”
You can find those among the Fathers suggesting a kind of hierarchy of the beatitudes, summing up seven particular virtues of saintly perfection, though we might also observe that, at least on the surface, they do not apply clearly to every saint in the same way. Virtue, in the final account, is all one, but there is diversity of expression, and that is part of the picture we see here: that the receptivity of the word of God looks different in different people. So we should not despair if we find meekness particularly difficult but poverty of spirit more attractive. We should resist the modern tendency toward a flattening sameness.
On this diversity in the saints, Caryll Houselander writes strikingly, “There must be, among the diverse multitudes of the saints, some whose personalities we do not like” (Guilt). For Houselander, this filtering of the saints is very tempting; we might try to get “underneath the accidents” and find the “kernel of the sanctity that fits “our own preconceived idea of what a saint should be like.” She finds—and I have to say this rings true to my own experience—this filtering treatment to be common, at least among the English, with Thérèse of Lisieux. The Englishman will, she says, “go so far as to say that the exterior things of her personality tell him nothing about her, and might well be suppressed. He imagines that he is scandalized by her, but the fact is that he is scandalized by Christ for choosing to become Teresa Martin, because Teresa Martin had a suburban mind, and was true in every detail to what she was, a very sentimental little French bourgeoise.”
And again, driving the point home:
The compelling fact is not that a suburban-minded girl or a verminous tramp will become Christ, but that Christ will become the one or the other, and that through that one he will utter the Word of God in language that Satan’s unconscious little imitators shut their sensitive ear against.
Houselander, as always, gets at the heart of things. The beatitudes are, of course, about the saints. But that doesn’t mean we get to think of them as about those exalted people over there who have nothing to do with us. Because we are meant to join them, even the ones that we find weird or distasteful—whether that’s the meek or the merciful or the poor!
Salvation doesn’t mean that we all leave our humanity and become identical abstract divine principles. It means that Christ’s life enters us and grows in us—not just that we dwell in him, but that he dwells in us, as we say in our Prayer of Humble Access. And this indwelling is the source of our happiness, the source of our joy and blessedness.
Christ wants to share his life with us, his blessedness. He shows us that every day in the Blessed Sacrament, which is given for us to eat, which again is a radical thing when you think about it, that God gives us himself to consume, to make ours. But because he is bigger than us—again as Chrysostom says, the divine mercy is nothing like our mercy—he is not ultimately consumed, but we are transformed, even with all our unique human personality, into his likeness.
Let this be our goal, then, as we slowly turn our hearts toward Lent and Easter: to be humble enough to recognize that Christ loves us even as we are, and to let that love drive us to him so that the beatitudes will one day be realized in us.