JESUS BELIEVES IN THE “HEROIC CAPACITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON”

“Jesus went up the mountain with his disciples and sat down; he began to teach them, saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . they who mourn . . . they who are meek . . . they who hunger and thirst for righteousness . . . the merciful . . . the clean of heart . . . the peacemakers . . . and they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness . . .
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you
and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.’” Matthew 5:1-12a

The Sermon on the Mount contains a group of sayings known as the Beatitudes. Their form, “Blessed are,” occurs frequently in the Old Testament in the Wisdom literature and in the Psalms. So, these Beatitudes may be an attempt by Jesus and the evangelist to make us aware that we, as disciples, ought to be wise about the way we go about our everyday life and activity. These Beatitudes don’t so much tell us what to do; they tell us more about what should be in our minds and hearts while we are doing all the things we do.  The implication is that, while we need to be attentive to the many things we have to do each day, and to the rules and laws that apply to them – societal rules, state and township rules, business rules, family rules, Church rules, etc.- the more important rules are these Beatitudes, the wisdom rules that should regulate the interiority from which our actions proceed.

Ponder the wisdom of Jesus’ emphasis on the interiority of our responses in the following words of Father Donald Senior, whose Gospel of Matthew Series we are using in our parish Bible Study sessionsPonder the passages

Sister Loretta

“The requirements, the demands of Jesus teaching, exceed the demands of the traditional ways of responding. And with this notion of exceeding our traditional ways of seeing and acting,  Jesus’ teaching is emphasizing the interiority of our response. In other words, it’s not simply our external actions on which we need to focus. We need to look closely at “What is my intentionality?” What is in my heart? What motivates me, leads me to this action? And the action itself, is even to be more intense, more faithful, more complete, than what might have been satisfactory in the past.

“So, a deeper interiority, a more radical faithfulness to the teaching of the law, is going to characterize Jesus teaching. For example, as he says about the Fifth Commandment, it’s not enough simply to refrain from murdering someone, ‘Do not kill.’ but you also should not harbor in your heart hatred or animosity towards another person that could ultimately lead to violence against them. . . . It’s not enough simply to modify the kind of retaliation that we bring to people, the famous Law of Talion that’s found in the Old Testament “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” and that was meant to, in the sense regulate, restrain revenge. If you lose an eye, you only take one eye. If you lose a tooth, you only take one tooth. But Jesus is saying, not only that, but offer no resistance to injury. And understanding this properly, calls for careful attention to the language used. It’s not simply absorbing injury, as your being kicked around in some way, but it’s not handing on the violence. It’s not responding from violence to violence. It’s not perpetrating the cycle of violence that happens to a person. Instead of striking back at someone who has struck you, this disciple of Jesus takes another stance – not perpetrating the violence.”

. . . .

“So, in each instance, Jesus, here, in this heart of the Sermon on the Mount, lifts up the heroic capacity of the human person as created by God. And this is something very important about the Sermon on the Mount. We have here Jesus revealing what he believes the great capacity of the human person is for: it is for virtue.

“Jesus does not have a discounted view of the human person. The human person can rise to this kind of response. The human person has the capacity and the beauty to act in this way. For most of us, however, so many times, we don’t rise to the occasion.”

The Gospel of Matthew, Rev. Donald Senior, C.P., S.T.D., Ph.D., Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, IL learn25.com