One of the great tendencies of twentieth century theology and spirituality has been to reduce the words of Our Lord, and this applies particularly to the beatitudes we just heard in the Gospel, to the material alone. The spiritual, or the transcendental, element of Our Lord’s teachings were either forgotten or underplayed. And so, it is good that today, after we heard a series of “Blessed are those”, Our Lord speaking through the Gospel tells us:
Blessed are you when people hate
you,
and
when they exclude and insult you,
and
denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.[italicized
emphasis added]
In other words, Blessed are you when you suffer, but only when you suffer on account of your confession of, or your belief in, the Son of Man, that is, Our Lord. This, of course, makes a lot of sense, because it is not the desire of Our Lord that we be poor, hungry, or weep in our material lives. That we are poor, hungry or sad, is not His desire, or intention. If He desired, or even praised these conditions it would be perverse. If at all any of these things exist in the world, they exist because of sin, not because of the will of God. If anyone suggests that poverty in itself is some spiritually beneficially hotspot, ignore them. They are simply wrong.
But let us return to the point I seek to make, we are blessed only when we suffer because of our confession of Christ. If you are merely virtuous, a good person who helps, who cries, with other people, you will not be counted among the blessed on the day of the Final Judgment. I think in particular of all those who believe that they do not need the support of the Eucharist, or the Catholic faith, because they are “good people.” You do not go to heaven for these acts of virtue, for the simple reason that those who do not genuinely confess Our Lord, effectively count on themselves. As the prophet Jeremiahs says in the first reading:
Cursed is the one who trusts in
human beings,
who
seeks his strength in flesh,
whose
heart turns away from the LORD.
To trust in human strength, in our own capacities, and virtues, is to seek our strength in flesh alone, to place our faith only in the world of politics and man, and to not recognize the grace that flows from the heart of Christ. To trust in the human and physical alone, is to turn our heart away from the Lord.
Both the reading from Jeremiah and the psalm today repeat the same image, telling us that he who trusts in the Lord;
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.
In other words, when we trust in the Lord, then whenever we suffer; whether hunger, or poverty, or grief, then, we are able to respond to these situations of misery in a way that is different from when we trust only in our own capacities. In the words of the Prophet Jeremiah, we show no distress, but still bear fruit!
These images of tree and river of life are very usefully repeated in the final book of the Bible, Revelation (22:1-2), where we read:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Having read from the book of Revelation we see that this image of the tree that stretches its roots to the stream can be very usefully compared to our relationship with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We are the tree, and the stream of the living waters is that which springs from the Sacred Heart of Jesus!
My dear brothers and sisters, the comparison to the Sacred Heart is not an idle comparison. As Pope Francis teaches in his recent encyclical Dilexit Nos, because of the resurrection of His body, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a heart that physically exists. His Glorious Body exists with all the wounds that were inflicted on it in the course of His Passion. For this reason, His Sacred Heart functions with a hole in it from the lance that pierced His side, and from that side, from that wound in His Most Sacred Heart, flow the life-giving waters of grace that ensure that we are not “like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season,” “like chaff which the wind drives away.”
One final point; a few paragraphs earlier I had suggested that when we trust in the Lord, we are able to respond to situations of misery in a way that is different from when we trust only in our own strength and capacities. How exactly do we do this? One way to do this is to realize that when we suffer, we can choose to suffer with Christ, and in this way contribute to His task of redeeming the world. To do this, I often use the following words of St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians (1:24): “in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ for the sake of His body, …the church.” In the face of crisis, of troubles, I repeat these words as a prayer, over, and over again; I invite to do similarly.
My dear brothers and sisters, Our Lord suffered as we do, and His wounds were transformed into the glorious signs of His victory over death and sin. If we join our sufferings with those of Christ, then our sufferings too will be transformed into banners in the war against the Devil, and as St Paul assures us today in his first letter to Corinthians, we will be raised from the dead, and as then, as the Gospel acclamations assures us; “your reward will be great in heaven.”
God bless you all.
(A version of this homily was first preached in Concanim to the faithful at the parish church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda, on 16 Feb 2025.)
(Image reference: “The Fountain of Grace” (detail),
Workshop of jan van Eyck, 1441, Museo del Prado.)
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