The Beatitudes are among the literary and religious treasures of the human race. We can savor them, affirm them, meditate on them, and engrave them on plaques to hang on our walls. But a major question remains: How are we supposed to live in response to them?
 
This isn’t an idle question. Misunderstanding the “blesseds” given by Jesus in Matthew 5 has caused pain and confusion down through the ages that continues today.
 
Strangely enough, his blesseds have not uniformly been a blessing.
 
It’ll help us know what to do—and what not to do—with the Beatitudes if we can discover what Jesus himself was doing with them.

Things we hear all the time—even important things—can become so familiar we stop really paying attention. Seriously. Think about the last time you were actually absorbed in what the flight attendant said just before takeoff.

There’s a vital part of Christian liturgy—28 words so important that Jesus said every other word in the Bible hangs from them—the Church has repeated week after week almost without exception. Year after year. Decade after decade. For millennia.

Yada. Yada. Yada.
This week though, we’re gonna pay attention. 

This final session explores Type 7 and adds some concluding thoughts.

In this week’s Gospel reading, Matthew relates a plan by some really smart people to trap Jesus in a lose/lose situation. Either way he answers them, he gets into trouble.

In today’s political terms, it’s a “gotcha” question.

Ultimately, though, he’s not the one who got gotcha’d.

Columbia Business School professor, W. Edwards Deming famously said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.” Think about it.

Similarly, we live in a day that seems perfectly designed to get the results that it does: anxiety. North Korea. Mexico City. Hollywood. Las Vegas. California. Harvey. Irma. Equifax. And that’s just the past few weeks. From memory. It can be sickening.

The Apostle Paul, however, offers one antidote.