The Blessed

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
27 Sep 2009

Christ is not a surname or family name like Smith or Nguyen, two of the most common names now in the Sydney White Pages.

Christ means the anointed one; a title the early Christians gave to Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph, to indicate he was the Messiah, the long awaited religious and political saviour.  In other words, it is a name he earned because of his achievements as teacher, healer and religious leader.

Jesus' teachings on God, love and salvation are remarkable and beautiful.  I often suggest that interested enquirers should start with Jesus' parables, although they can be baffling.  But the beatitudes constitute another rich set of teachings.

These sayings are collected in two different, but overlapping versions in Matthew's (ch5) and Luke's (ch6) gospels.  For Matthew it was the sermon on the Mount, while Luke has Jesus speaking on the plain.

In the beatitudes Jesus describes three groups as happy or blessed.  I prefer "Blessed" as a better translation of the Greek of the gospels, because it is difficult enough to work out how those who mourn or those who are persecuted can be said to be blessed, but it is not feasible to describe them as happy.

Jesus was a provocative teacher who made people think, delighting some and infuriating others.  While his categories of people overlap somewhat, we might distinguish three different groups who are described as blessed.

The first group are praised for their personal qualities; the gentle, merciful, pure in heart and poor in spirit.

The second group are doers, workers for justice and peacemakers, while it is the third group who throw up the biggest challenges.

Those who mourn, those who are abused and calumniated for doing the right thing, those who speak up for Christ are all described as blessed.

Luke's version provides another set of difficulties with a list of woes or curses because it is not murderers or rapists or drug traffickers who are rejected, but the rich, the well fed, those who are laughing and those who are praised by all!

The beatitudes do not constitute the whole of Christ's teaching, but they are one essential element which wrestles with the problem of suffering.  They explicitly endorse the notions of reward or punishment for our activities and life after death has to be part of the picture for them to be understood.

They encapsulate something of the values of heaven; not this world's common sense.