4 Sunday of Ordinary Time, year A
Jesus’ Beatitudes challenge our usual ideas of success by revealing that true blessedness is not found in comfort or status, but in right relationship with God and with one another. Even in poverty, grief, or struggle, a person can experience deep fulfilment through trust in God and a life shaped by self-giving love. Lived out in the Christian community, this paradoxical way of life becomes a powerful witness to the Gospel and a sign of God’s work among us.
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We hear the words of Jesus so often, especially the words we heard in the Gospel today, the Beatitudes, such a familiar and beloved teaching. We can become so accustomed to hearing them that they lose their power to surprise us. And yet, when we listen carefully, the teaching of Jesus, particularly in the Beatitudes, really should shock us. It is strange. It is paradoxical. At first glance, it does not make much sense. Today we are invited to allow ourselves to be surprised once again by the teaching of Christ.
For those who first heard Jesus preach, the Beatitudes would have been deeply unsettling. If we were asked to identify someone who was most blessed in life, we would probably not point to the people Jesus describes. In Jesus’ time, just as in our own, to be blessed meant to be fortunate, fulfilled, and successful. It meant good health, a strong family, financial security, comfort, and perhaps social standing. This is what it meant to live a good life. And yet Jesus turns all of this upside down. He declares blessed the poor, the meek, those who mourn, and those who are persecuted. This is unexpected and unsettling, and it should give us pause.
Jesus is not glorifying suffering for its own sake, nor are Christians meant to seek out hardship. What Jesus teaches in the Beatitudes is that while the good things of life are indeed gifts from God, they are not the final measure of blessedness. Even in the midst of struggle, poverty, grief, or persecution, a person can still be blessed. True beatitude, true fulfilment, comes from living in right relationship with God and in right relationship with one another. When we live in communion with Christ, we can experience blessedness even amid difficulty and struggle.
Jesus often points to children as a model for how we are to relate to God. This truth struck me in a particular way this past Wednesday during our parish PREP program, when we celebrated First Confession for about fifty children, mostly in Grade Two, with some a little older. That evening, I was feeling a bit on edge and distracted, carrying the weight of many concerns. Yet as I listened to these young children make their confessions, something remarkable happened. No matter how heavy my heart may have been, the simple and sincere faith of these children was deeply moving.
In them we see a profound trust in God, a simplicity and directness, and a genuine sense that God is a loving parent who cares for them. This is precisely the relationship Christ invites us into. Each time we pray the Our Father, at Mass and throughout the day, we approach God as children who trust in their Father’s care. When we live with this kind of trust and abandonment to God, we can experience peace, fulfilment, and blessedness even in the midst of life’s struggles.
We also experience this blessedness through right relationship with one another. In the Beatitudes, Jesus gives us a picture of life in the Kingdom of God, a way of living marked by mercy, humility, forgiveness, and generosity. This way of life is sometimes described as the law of the gift, a phrase articulated by figures such as Saint John Paul II. It captures the paradox at the heart of the Beatitudes and of the Christian life itself. At first, this way of living does not seem logical. Yet we discover its truth when we live it. We find our life and our fulfilment precisely when we give our lives as a gift to others, when we serve, forgive, and place the needs of others before our own.
In today’s readings, Saint Paul reminds us that not only the teaching of Jesus but the very life of the Christian community can appear strange to the world. Writing to the Corinthians, Paul explains that God did not choose the powerful or the wise by worldly standards, but those who seemed insignificant. The wisdom of the cross stands in contrast to the wisdom of the world. Historically, many early Christians came from the margins of society, including the poor and the enslaved, people who recognized in the Gospel a message of liberation and hope.
A Roman governor named Pliny, writing around the year 115, described this new movement of Christians to the emperor. He noted that Christians lived within society and contributed to its well being, yet they also lived differently. They shared what they had, refused to deceive or defraud others, and sought to live honest and faithful family lives. Even from the perspective of a pagan observer, their way of life stood out as something unusual and paradoxical.
Today, Jesus once again invites us to be surprised by the strangeness of the Beatitudes. This teaching may appear illogical, but its truth becomes clear when it is lived. As a parish community, we are called to be a place where the Beatitudes are made visible, where this paradoxical blessedness is lived out. May we commit ourselves anew to being people of the Beatitudes, trusting that true joy and fulfilment are found not in the absence of difficulty, but in living in right relationship with God and with one another.
