Imagine you are at a table sitting across from someone. Imagine that this person is your societal opposite—someone in our culture with whom you just don’t get along. If you are optimistic, they are pessimistic. If you are health-conscious and active, they eat junk food and lie around. Whichever way you lean politically, they run hard in the other direction. The things that motivate you the most don’t interest them. Now feel the tension between you that is inherent when worldviews collide and grind like repelling magnets forced to touch.
Holding that fresh feeling of tension, aversion, and discomfort, reset the thought experiment. Imagine you are at a table across from someone, but this time, that someone is God. You try to comprehend how your worldview is different from God’s, but you can’t. Every gaping difference between you and your opposite in the first example has become a similarity once compared with the differences between the way you see the world and the way God does.
How wondrous now is your awareness of God’s unfailing compassion, patience, and kindness! How unfathomable is the grace given to you, and how long suffering the tolerance afforded you that while your conception of the world could be so wrong-headed, God still chose you as a conversation partner. You have nothing but nonsense to add, but he listens anyway out of love for you.
This part of Matthew is called the Beatitudes, and the name comes from the Latin word for blessed. It is lovely, poetic, probably familiar, and hopefully comforting to you. It is also fundamentally alien to the way anyone (except God) sees the world. Jesus says blessed are those who mourn, while people say blessed are those who don’t have to mourn.
Every person blessed in the beatitudes is a sufferer. How much energy and effort do we put toward avoiding suffering? If this is our guide, maybe we need to rethink our goals. Let this reading wash over you, challenge you, and transform you. Let it humble you to open your mind to others when you are so sure they are wrong. In any hardship you are experiencing, take courage because God is working for your blessing.
Prayer:
God, I need more of you. I need more of your presence, and I need more of your worldview and less of mine. Come and transform the way I see the world and give me the vision for it that only you have. I give you my mind, my heart, my voice, and my body, Lord God. Remake me in your image. Amen.
Reflection:
- Isaiah 55:8-9 reminds us that God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. How is God’s worldview different from yours?
- What is the great heavenly reward mentioned in Matthew 5:12?
- Pray through each Beatitude. Who do you know who fits the description of those described? Imagine being shaped by God so you, too, fit the description of those who are blessed.