The Beatitudes Matt 5, 1-12: Today we want to enter and look at the foundations of our faith. What kind of woman does God want you to be? Let us go back to that hill, that mount, that grassy slope where our Lord stood, and transmitted to us what we have to be through the paradoxes of the beatitudes.

The most noble words, the most magnetic and powerful words that our Lord proposed to these massive crowds on the hills of Judea were the beatitudes. They are made up of beautiful ideals, yet at the same time hold deep paradoxes: They are paradoxes because they reflect the completely different way in which God sees things, as opposed to the way the world sees them. Samuel says: God does not see as man sees, since man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Sam 16, 7). Maybe we too have been infected by that human way of seeing the ideal man, the ideal life, the truth about what it really means to be happy, to be serene, to be satisfied. Yet our Lord says no: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

If you and I really live the beatitudes, if we truly incorporate into our lives those divine words from that hill, we will be light of the world, we will be salt of the earth, preserving it from corruption.

Thumbnail: Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857. Musée D'Orsay, Paris.

Music: Adrian Berenguer, Fall (Album Singularity, 2017)

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