There is only one gospel passage assigned for All Saints Day – every year, it’s the same old Beatitudes. This has always rankled; I’ve tended to dismiss the Beatitudes as a how-to guide (albeit, Jesus’ how-to guide...) and I’m not big on the idea of people striving for sainthood. That’s God’s to give.
But it’s time for me to get over this little prejudice and more fully explore this famous laundry list of saintly characteristics – remembering that “saint” means Christ-follower. Jesus is speaking to his followers on a “mountain” – probably a hill, but Matthew wants to draw some parallels between Moses giving the Law on Mount Sinai in the old covenant, and Jesus giving the “law” of the new covenant. (Luke, a Gentile, seems less interested in demonstrating continuity between the Jesus movement and its Jewish roots. In his Gospel, this scene takes place on a plain, on level ground – reinforcing his theme of Jesus as the great leveler, equalizer.)
Jesus has been teaching them every chance he gets, but on this day he has a particular message. In the face of the hardship they will endure as his followers, he wants them to understand an important marker of their identity as his disciples. He wants them, above all, to know they are, blessed. This is the one word he repeats over and over.
What does it mean to be blessed? It means to stand in the light of God’s love and favor. Just as we cannot make ourselves saints, we cannot bless ourselves – we have to let it happen to us.
And God’s blessing, it would seem, is often counter-intuitive – the attributes Jesus associates with blessing are not the one the world equates with success. Once again Jesus overturns the “logical” order of human priorities and introduces the upside-down reality of God’s realm. The people of Jesus’ day thought prosperity and health and offspring were signs of God’s blessing… Jesus says, “Look deeper.”
With what do you associate blessing? In what ways do you feel blessed or unblessed?
Might you ask the Holy Spirit to show you in what ways God sees you as blessed? I often invite us to hold other people in our mind’s eye and imagine them showered with God’s holy, healing light – that is an image of blessing. So today maybe we want to imagine ourselves in that light. And know we are blessed, no matter what we feel like on a given day.
As followers of Christ, we are blessed to be a blessing. We are one of the ways God is blessing the world. And we’re a whole lot more effective when we’re in touch with our blessedness. The next time someone says to you, “God bless you,” whether or not you’ve sneezed, say, “I'll take it!”
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