Beatitudes

'If we want to know what man really is, in his state of brokenness and fallenness, we must look at Christ in his agony. Ecce homo (John 19:5).'

Gospel Luke 6:20-26

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. To an age suffering from affectlessness, 'Blessed are those who mourn' is, paradoxically, a more necessary message than 'Rejoice in the Lord always' because there can be no true rejoicing until we have stopped running away from mourning. But this is not the only reason why mourning is pronounced blessed. To pursue the meaning of our beatitude further, we must once again return to the consideration of the whole strategy of redemption. Why was it 'necessary' for the Christ to suffer (Luke 24:26)? Why is it that only those who are willing to take up their cross can be accounted his followers (Matt. 10:38 etc)? What sense is there in St Paul's claiming to be 'filling up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ' (Col. 1 :24)? Surely there is only one answer to these questions: Christ had to suffer and die because suffering and death were where mankind was. If he was to redeem mankind, he had to go, like the good shepherd, to where the lost sheep was. The point is dramatically made in the story of the harrowing of Hell. That is where man was. That is where Christ went to fetch him.? Any other kind of redemption would have been a fake, it would not have been a true redemption of true mankind. But a similar realism is called for on the part of those to be redeemed. We must acknowledge where we are if we are to be redeemed from there. This is in accordance with man's peculiar position in creation. Man is not just passive, even in his own creation. Man is God's co-worker (cf. 1 Cor. 3:9), he is co-creator even of himself. In St Gre­gory of Nyssa's startling phrase, each man has to be his own begetter." Similarly with redemption. It is not, of 'course, that man has anything of his own to contribute to it independently of God. But, when he is dealing with man, God's act creates a corresponding act in man. God's act does not let man off doing it for himself; it is rather the other way about. 'Work out your own salvation ... because it is God who works within you' (Phil. 2:12f). This means that God's acceptance of our pain, in Christ, creates a corresponding acceptance in us of our own pain. It is because Christ has carried the cross of each one of us that we have to carry our own and one anothers' crosses. Human beings are created interdependent on one another, as we can see even from our biological interconnectedness. We are involved in 'creating' one another. Because of sin, we are also involved in devastating one another. But redemption does not sep­arate us off from one another, however prudent such a move might seem to us; we are involved in redeeming one another. So we are told, 'Carry each other's burdens and in this way you will fulful the law of Christ' (Gal. 6:2). If we want to know what man really is, in his state of brokenness and fallenness, we must look at Christ in his agony. Ecce homo (john 19:5). That is what we are. And it is a double revelation. That is what we are: his agony, his helplessness, his dying, they are all ours. But even worse, that is what we are: we are the people who do that, who kill and torment, who react to love, even to God's love, with that kind of fury, that kind of cruelty, that kind of cynical mockery. Ecce homo. In the light of that, is it not right to weep? In the rather artificial scheme devised by St Augustine for linking the seven beatitudes with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, this beatitude of the mourners is linked with the gift of knowledge. To know the truth of our human predicament is to know it as something that can be met only with mourning. And this is the kernel of true contrition. It is more than likely that St Matthew was thinking especially of penitential mourning in our beatitude, and it is precisely penitential mourning that results from an honest awareness of what man is and that it is, in one way or another, man himself who has made himself what he is. But yet, blessed are whose who mourn. On the face of it, seeing the human condition clearly for what it is is little more than a formula for despair. The author of 4 Esdras presents himself as replying to a divine communication: This is the first thing I want to say and it is the last: it would have been better for the earth never to have brought Adam forth, or, once he had been brought forth, for him to have been constrained not to sin. What use is that we all live now in sadness and have only punishment to hope for when we are dead But the Christian does not simply see the human condition in itself. In the broken face of a man he sees the broken yet redeeming face of Christ. And, perhaps even more importantly, he knows that he is not alone in his seeing of the human plight. If we are courageous and humble enough to see it clearly for what it is, that very seeing is a way of identifying ourselves with Christ. Our mourning becomes a singularly profound mode of identification with his redeeming suffering of our lot. Simon Tugwell O.P., Reflextions on the Beatitudes, pp, 61-63, DLT London. 1980,.