SUNDAY 4TH (A)
Mt 5,1-12
After sixty years of explaining the Beatitudes, I have realized that they are not capable of explanation. They are not directed to rationality but to being, to the heart. What audacity to say to someone who is hungry: Congratulations! How lucky you are, thank God for what is happening to you. It would be a cruel and unacceptable sarcasm.
It is completely absurd to tell the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the persecuted… endure, because one day the tables will turn and you will be like the one who now oppresses you. The archaic formulation prevents discovering their meaning. They want to say that true humanity does not consist of seeking pleasure, but of unfolding it to the maximum.
The most disparate things have been said about the blessings. For Gandhi, they were the quintessence of the gospel. For Nietzsche, they are a curse because they attack human dignity. What is the reason for this abysmal difference? Very simple. One speaks from mysticism. The other tries to understand them from reason.
Matthew places them in the first programmatic discourse of Jesus. It is not plausible that Jesus began his preaching with such a solemn and radical discourse. The setting of the sermon indicates how important he considers it. The “mountain” is clearly referring to Sinai. Jesus, a new Moses who promulgates the “new Law.”
It doesn’t matter whether Lucas proposes four and Matthew, nine. One would suffice to break the mental schemes of any human being. It is about the human being who suffers material or spiritual limitations due to whims of nature or due to another, and which sometimes manifest through hunger and other times through tears.
The vast majority of exegetes agree that the first three of Luke, also recorded in Matthew, are the original ones, and it can even be affirmed with some probability that they go back to the same Jesus. It seems that Matthew spiritualizes them, not only because he says “poor in spirit,” and “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” but also because he adds: “blessed are the peacemakers, the pure in heart, who take us away from materiality.”
The Beatitudes mean: it is better to be poor, than to be rich at the expense of the poverty of others. It is better to weep than to make another weep. It is better to go hungry than to be the cause of others going hungry. Blessed not for being poor, but for not impoverishing another. Blessed, not for being oppressed, but for not being oppressors.
If being poor is a reason for happiness, why did Jesus insist on freeing them from their miseries. And if poverty is a misfortune, why do we disguise it as a blessing. There we have the most radical contradiction in trying to rationally explain the Beatitudes.
As paradoxical as it may seem, the exaltation of poverty that Jesus makes has the goal of making poverty cease to exist. In no case can poverty be blessed. Any kind of poverty caused by man must be fought against as a scourge, and poverty caused by natural disasters must be shared and, as far as possible, alleviated.
The Beatitudes tell us that another world is possible. It is not fair that I am thinking about consuming more, while there are people who die for not having a handful of rice to eat. If you do not want to be an accomplice to injustice, choose poverty, do not set the goal on consuming. Understand that the less you need, the richer you are.
Neither the poor nor the rich can be considered in isolation. Wealth and poverty are two correlative terms; neither would exist without the other. Moreover, poverty is greater the greater the wealth, and vice versa. If poverty disappeared, so would wealth. If we were all equally poor or equally rich, there would be no problem at all.
Fray Marcos
English version translated with AI