196. Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time (A)

Meditations no. 565 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The Beatitudes, the way to the glory of heaven.

THE LORD travels through Galilee surrounded by a crowd that awaits his teaching. One day, when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain. He sat down, and his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them.

Our Lord, with gestures reminiscent of the solemn manifestations of God in the Old Testament, attracts the attention of the vast people who follow him to explain to them about the Kingdom of God. An extraordinarily important teaching is going to come out of his mouth. Slowly, so that the words may be engraved in the memory and in the heart, with a special accent, he instructs them: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. … As one Father of the Church says, “The Lord, our Saviour, sets up as extremely solid steps, of precious stones, by which holy and faithful souls can climb and ascend to that supreme good which is the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount by revealing the true value of the things of the world in God’s eyes. Great must have been the surprise of the listeners when they heard how he reversed the criterion of what should be desired, hoped for, and asked. Our Lord presents, as a blessing from God, what everyone considers despicable, what most people try to avoid at all costs, considering them to be sufferings and misfortunes: poverty, sickness, persecution. … From the beginning, Jesus places his listeners in front of the mystery of the Cross. The teaching is clear: being happy does not consist in possessing money, health, fame, or power. Happiness based on human things-even good and noble things-going well, is very relative. The Lord tells us that true happiness has its root in love; and so even pain is a source of joy.

Jesus Christ reveals to us the divine plan that reaches all generations and that has as its cornerstone the Holy Cross, the divine sacrifice of Calvary. On this foundation rests the life of men; this is the wisdom that gives reason to our efforts. However, St. Josemaría once exclaimed, not infrequently souls are deceived. They are told of a liberation that is not that of Christ. The teachings of Jesus, his Sermon on the Mount, those beatitudes that are a poem of divine love, are ignored. We only seek an earthly happiness, which is not possible to achieve in this world.

The soul, children, has been created for eternity. Here we are just passing through. Do not have any illusions: pain will be an inseparable companion on the journey. Whoever insists only on not suffering will fail; and perhaps he will obtain no other result than to sharpen his own bitterness and that of others. No one likes people to suffer, and it is a duty of charity to strive as much as possible to alleviate the evils of others. But the Christian must also have the audacity to affirm that pain is a source of blessings, of good, of strength; that it is proof of God’s love; that it is fire, that purifies us and prepares us for eternal happiness.

The beatitudes contain a promise that fills with hope the effort in struggle and even suffering itself. If we unite ourselves to the Cross of the Lord in moments of difficulty, we will be sure that the harvest of joy, peace and fruit will be abundant. At the same time, these words of Jesus shed light on discovering the divine providence behind the events that contradict them. Their radiance makes us see that Jesus Christ, in those moments, especially wants us to be co-redeemers. And they guide us to know how we must act in order to always behave as children of God.

Christian sense of suffering.

THE BEATITUDES assure happiness, but they do not promise a comfortable path. They only affirm that pain, difficulty, darkness, weariness, which are often present in life, have a divine, redemptive value, because they have been chosen by Jesus Christ. Christian teaching on pain is not a program of easy consolations. It is, in the first place, a doctrine of acceptance of that suffering, which is in fact inseparable from every human life. I cannot hide from you - with joy, because I have always preached and tried to live that, where the Cross is, there is Christ, Love - that pain has frequently appeared in my life; and more than once I have felt like crying. On other occasions, I have felt my disgust grow in the face of injustice and evil. And I have tasted the uneasiness of seeing that I could do nothing, that - despite my desires and my efforts - I could not improve those iniquitous situations.

It is the Cross of the Lord that comes to meet us and that is liberation, happiness. “God, lover of men, mixes work and sweetness, a style that he follows with all his saints. He does not give us constant dangers or consolations, but from one to the other He weaves together the life of the just.” When we know that we are children of God, these difficulties do not crush us, even if they involve suffering and effort. This is how the first Christians behaved: in everything troubled, but not anguished; perplexed, but not desperate; persecuted, but not abandoned; knocked down, but not annihilated, always carrying in our bodies the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.

Certainly, at times the temptation can be insinuated - full of false eloquence - that what we do is useless; at other times a failure - big or small - produces a deeper dissatisfaction that pushes us to throw everything into action; at other times the mirage of a lack of firm foundation on which to walk may appear, or the contrast between the liberating ideals that Christianity presents to us and the miserable deception offered by a strongly hedonistic society in many cases is magnified. In any case, the opportunity to give divine meaning to setbacks and suffering must not be missed. The loss of the Christian sense of pain is a fearsome enemy because it seeks to take away from us the faith and hope that God grants us as we walk on earth.

In this sense, the theological virtues are indispensable to achieve the goal that God points out to us: our holiness and that of all souls. It would be naïve to deny the repeated presence of pain and discouragement, of sadness and loneliness, during our pilgrimage on this soil. Through faith we have learned with certainty that all this is not the product of chance, that the destiny of the creature is not to walk towards the annihilation of his desires for happiness. Faith teaches us that everything has a divine meaning, because it is proper to the very heart of the call that leads us to the Father’s house. This supernatural understanding of the earthly existence of the Christian does not simplify human complexity; but it assures man that this complexity can be traversed by the nerve of God’s love, by the cable, strong and indestructible, that links life on earth with definitive life in the Fatherland.

Without faith and supernatural vision, it is impossible to discover the true meaning of man’s passage on earth. Rejoice and rejoice, because your reward will be great in Heaven, the Lord assures us, because these difficulties invite us to look to glory and to foretaste eternal happiness. Pain is a blessing from God. Blessed be pain! Beloved be pain! Sanctified be pain! Glorified be pain! What would the world be without pain? It would be a shame! A picture without shadows is not a picture. Are there only lights? No, no; there must be shadows. And pain, carried by Love, is something very tasty, wonderful. All mothers know this. All wives and husbands know it. All fathers know that pain is very good.

So wanting to be free from pain, poverty, misery, is wonderful; but that is not liberation. Liberation is the other. Liberation is … to bear poverty with joy!, to bear pain with joy!, to bear sickness with joy!, to bear with a smile the choking of coughs!

The certainty of the prize that we want to achieve above all else, must lead us to resort to the appropriate means so that our hope is not darkened: the confession that renews our strength; the Confidence, made with a deep supernatural and human sense, which restores to us clarity, serenity and hope. It is the time to pray more intensely, to unite ourselves to Christ and thus to recover the divine meaning of our lives.

Carry the daily cross with love.

There will be no lack of moments of greater difficulty in life. The long illness - our own or that of others - that makes us live every day with intense pain; situations of serious economic scarcity, which cause us to suffer when there is no human way out; circumstances of unemployment, or professional instability; a natural disaster that affects many innocent people and, at times, entire nations; a sudden death in the family or among the closest friends, which causes great confusion. … To the physical or moral pain can be added another even more intense and profound one, because it has a spiritual root: the apostolic difficulties caused by the distancing of souls from God - especially those to whom we are most united - which puts their eternal salvation at risk.

On some occasions it will be possible to find the solution to that pain or, at least, to alleviate it. It is pleasing to God our Lord that we put the means to remove suffering, but it is not in our power to avoid all encounters with the Cross. That is why it is important to try to take advantage of these situations, which our Father God has foreseen in his providence for our spiritual health. There is no other way than to take up the Cross and follow you. But what a pity: we have been in Christianity for twenty centuries and many Christians do not understand the meaning of pain, they rebel against everything that is suffering, they want a crucifix without a Cross. The result is that they suffer more and uselessly, because they do not please you, Lord, and they do not take any supernatural advantage.

These painful realities, if they have a certain significance, put faith and trust in God to the test. If we do not feel that we are his children, disorientation can arise because it is difficult to make the evil suffered compatible with the goodness of the Lord, using an earthly criterion; nor do words of human consolation always help; rather, it is necessary to have compassion, to condole with those who suffer; and, above all, to look to the Lord and consider before a crucifix that freedom was won for us by Christ on the Cross; that he climbed the scaffold of the Cross for our love, to win our freedom; that freedom and liberation are not liberation from pain, contradictions, slander, defamation, poverty: all these affirmations are lies. Read the Beatitudes: blessed are the poor, blessed are those who weep … (Mt 5:3ff): that liberation is liberation from sin. And that when the heart feels free from these miseries, it rebels, but it rebels against the miserable who want to poison the soul. It does not rebel against poverty, it accepts it; it does not rebel against work, it accepts it; it does not rebel against authority, it accepts it; it does not rebel against disease, it accepts it… .

A Christian must have the courage to affirm that it is not true that we are alone in the face of pain and death. Although no one can replace us in this moment of trial, we have an infallible remedy: to unite ourselves to the Cross of Christ. I spoke to you earlier of pain, suffering, tears. And I do not contradict myself if I say that, for a disciple who lovingly seeks the Master, the taste of sadness, sorrow, afflictions is very different: they disappear as soon as the Will of God is truly accepted, as soon as his plans are willingly fulfilled, as faithful children, even if the nerves seem to break and the torture seems unbearable.

The consideration of our divine filiation is an indispensable condition for giving Christian meaning to suffering. We will then savor that cross and we will see how invaluable is the help of grace, of our brothers and sisters and of the special Communion of Saints that we live in Opus Dei. Think that God wants you to be happy and that, if you do what you can, you will be happy, very happy, most happy, even if at no time do you lack the Cross. But that Cross is no longer a scaffold, but the throne from which Christ reigns. And at his side, his Mother, our Mother too. The Holy Virgin will give you the strength you need to walk decisively in the footsteps of her Son.