(Audio)
Blessed are you who are poor,
for the kingdom of God is yours.
God looked on the lowliness of his handmade and the kingdom was conceived in her. Mary is par excellence a woman of the beatitudes. Are we poor enough that we know our need to trust in God? The danger for those of us who are rich is that life seems to keep working even when we don't remember him. But this is an illusion. Living in an illusion will not end well unless we recognize the illusion and turn back to God's truth.
Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.
God fills the hungry with good things but sends the rich away empty. We need to learn to rely on him for our daily bread more than our ability to procure it for ourselves. This is why Jesus taught us to pray to the Father for our daily bread and why he fed the crowds in the wilderness. This is why, ultimately, he gave himself to us to be our bread. If we truly cultivate a hunger for this spiritual bread we absolutely can know true satisfaction.
Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.
It is OK if we suffer. It doesn't mean that God doesn't love us or that we're doing something wrong. He asks us to prefer and hope in things that are unseen so that we can show our trust in him.
Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,
we are the most pitiable people of all.
The Kingdom is not yet fully come. Everything is not yet set right on earth. Jesus asks us to look to the reward held in store for us in heaven as our treasure. But he tells us that we can taste the blessedness of that reward even now even and precisely in the "now" of our weeping and exactly "when" people hate us. The reality of reversal has its source in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Through the Spirit it transforms Christians from the inside out in accordance with the beatitudes. As we are transformed we remake a world where the hungry are fed and those who mourn are comforted.
Blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD,
whose hope is the LORD.
He is like a tree planted beside the waters
that stretches out its roots to the stream:
it fears not the heat when it comes;
its leaves stay green;
in the year of drought it shows no distress,
but still bears fruit.
Ultimately, our circumstances don't have to dictate our blessedness. If we stay connected to the streams of living water that flow from the heart of Christ circumstances will not be able to overcome us. We will know a blessedness even here and now. We long for heaven all the more even as we remake the world to show forth the justice and mercy which are found there in perfection.
For the LORD watches over the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked vanishes.
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