Everyone loves a story. So here’s “A Tale of Two Rulebooks.” It goes like this:
In 1971 Saul Alinsky published Rules for Radicals, his famous guide to community organizing. On the dedication page he wrote: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history … the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”1
Alinsky didn’t believe in anything so primitive (in his view) as the devil. So his words are ironic and mainly for shock value. But his book is very useful for understanding recent American politics and national leadership. And they make a good comparison with another, rather different set of rules.
Rules for Radicals echoes Machiavelli and the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci as a shrewd map to seeking power. But Alinsky sees himself as going beyond Machiavelli. Instead of teaching rulers how to hold power, he will instruct the have-nots on how to take it away: “The ego of the organizer is stronger and more monumental than the ego of the leader … The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach—to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God.”2 Rules seeks to create a just and happy world through strong-willed, and sometimes ruthless, action to fix it. For Alinsky, activists are in a war against the establishment, and in war, the ends justify almost any means.3
Alinsky is blunt about this: “You have to do what you can with what you have, and clothe it with moral arguments.”4 It makes sense, then, that Alinsky prescribes tactics that rely on manipulation, lying, and demonizing opponents. Make your enemies insecure, he teaches. Ridicule them. Don’t attack institutions; attack people. None of these ugly tactics is new to American public life, of course. What is new is the systematic nature of their application—an organized vindictiveness and addiction to power in today’s politics that barely bothers to hide itself behind a veil of sloganeering.
The word “radical” comes from the Latin radix, which means “root.” Radical ideas speak to the root nature of things. And in that sense, the core sin of Rules for Radicals is that it’s not nearly radical enough. Rather, it’s the familiar human appetite for power dressed up in progressive-left language. And it stands in sharp contrast to the kind of true radicalism demanded by a Christian life.
Over the centuries men and women have served the poor and fought injustice by another set of rules. These rules long predate Alinsky’s. They’ve influenced far more people. And their founder knew no worldly success. He healed the sick, but he didn’t abolish sickness. He “fought the power,” and when the powerful murdered him, he forgave them. His rules are radical because they turn our human ideas of power upside down. That radical, of course, is Jesus of Nazareth. And we know his rules as the Beatitudes.
At first glance, the Beatitudes seem impossibly idealistic. They seem to pull us farther away from the realities of modern life the harder we try to live them. In fact, we can’t ever live them perfectly. So maybe they’re not for ordinary Christians—people who live in the world of mortgages, tough jobs, and complaining children.
But not so. The Beatitudes are meant for all Christians in the routines of their daily lives. They’re meant for plumbers and doctors, teachers and salesmen, mothers and fathers. And their purpose is to help us live in a way that speaks the truth in love. We can find the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1–12 and Luke 6:20–22. But we’ll use Matthew’s version:
Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
“Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Jesus plays various roles in the Gospels. Here he’s the teacher. Typical of rabbis of his time, he sits down with his disciples and starts to instruct them.5 If we study what Jesus says, we’ll notice something surprising: The Beatitudes aren’t actually “rules.” We might expect this young teacher to give us a new set of laws, but he doesn’t really do that. Instead of giving commands, Jesus makes promises.6 This is because the New Law of the covenant that Jesus brings isn’t burned onto tablets of stone. It isn’t a new Ten Commandments. Rather, it’s the love of God inscribed on our hearts through faith in Christ.7
The Beatitudes, then, are promises that show what God will accomplish in those who belong to him. As the Old Law constituted the Jews as a people under God, the Beatitudes constitute the kingdom of Jesus Christ. The Beatitudes don’t supersede the Old Covenant—God can never go back on his word—but they do transcend it. They gather the promises God made about the Promised Land and point them to the kingdom of heaven. They show a new Israel (the Church) what her life with God will look like.8
They also show us that just as God came to his people on Mount Sinai in thunder, he now comes to his people more intimately, as one man to another. God came in violent majesty then. Now God comes to suffer violence himself.9 And just as the Old Law revealed the love and justice of God, so the Beatitudes reveal the tenderness of God’s heart.10 They show us the One who loves us, but they also offer us a challenge and invitation. Do we really want our hearts to look like the heart of Jesus? And if so, are we really willing to live as he did?
The Christian life involves hardship and action. The Beatitudes sugarcoat none of the challenges. But note the main word they use to describe life in the Spirit: Blessed. In New Testament Greek the word is makarioi, which means “blessed” or “happy.” The Latin word is beati, which means the same, and it’s where we get the name Beatitudes. So the first thing that the Beatitudes teach us about the life of Jesus is that he was happy. Countless sages have offered their answers to the great human question “How can I be happy?” Here on the mount, Jesus gives God’s response.11
The Catechism notes that our desire for happiness is part of human nature, and that “God has placed it in the human heart in order to draw man to the One who alone can fulfill it.”12 We see this most famously, perhaps, in the Confessions of Augustine.13 As Augustine put it, our hearts are restless until they rest in God.14 After trying so many other options, Augustine concludes that we best live the happy life by rejoicing over God. Joy in the truth is the happy life, and that means joy in God.15 The Beatitudes show us what a life that rejoices in God looks like. They give us a portrait of the kind of happiness that Jesus knew.
But what a seemingly paradoxical happiness. The Beatitudes speak not of wealth, prosperity, and safety, but of poverty, hunger, and persecution. If the words of Jesus are a map, they seem to point to things we’re trying our best to escape. The Beatitudes involve suffering not because suffering is good, but because suffering always accompanies love. Love is a risk because it can always be misused or rejected. The rewards are immense, but the costs can be heavy. Thus Jesus’ life was one of great love—and also great risk and suffering for the sake of that love. Being a disciple of Christ means having a life that looks like his.
The Beatitudes tell us that if we follow Christ, we’ll suffer. But we’ll also find that mysterious joy that comes from choosing the way to eternal life. There’s a reason we call eternal happiness with God “beatitude.” That’s what we were made for, as the Catechism reminds us: to become “partakers of the divine nature” and enter into the joy of the Trinitarian life.16 The paths to that life lie along the road shown to us by the Ten Commandments, the parables of Jesus, the teaching of the apostles, and especially the Beatitudes. “Sustained by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we tread [those paths], step by step, by everyday acts. By the working of the Word of Christ, we slowly bear fruit in the Church to the glory of God.”17
The Beatitudes, then, are intimately connected to the idea of hope. They promise us blessing amid our sorrows. They direct our eyes to the promise of happiness in heaven, even as they name the trials we’ll inevitably encounter—trials in which Jesus walks with us every step of the way.18
* * *
IT’S WORTH PAUSING TO reflect on each of the Beatitudes. And with the moral theologian Servais Pinckaers, O.P., as our guide, we can start to think about how we might live them in our own lives. So let’s begin.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The first Beatitude reminds us of one of the strongest themes of Scripture: God’s love for the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable. We see this in the Old Covenant, in which God instructs the people of Israel to care for the poor and the alien in their midst. He tells the Israelites not to harvest every speck of grain in their fields, but to leave some for the poor and the stranger who have no food of their own (Lev 19:9–10). He also commands them to set aside every fiftieth year as a Jubilee. In that year, property that was bought or sold must be returned to its original owners (Lev 25:8–28).
Through the prophets God rebukes those who violate the spirit of these commands: “Therefore because you trample upon the poor and take from him exactions of wheat, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not dwell in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and turn aside the needy in the gate” (Amos 5:11–12).
Later Jesus says that, in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, he is the one on whom the Spirit of the Lord rests, the one whom the Lord has anointed to preach good news to the poor (Lk 4:16–21).19 In our own time we tend to distinguish between spiritual and material poverty. But in the Bible, these concepts are tightly linked. The rich have wealth, but they become overly proud and ignore or oppress others. They use their money to buy influence and exploit the needy. They forget their dependence on God. The poor man, by contrast, is always reminded of his dependence. He will be humble and trust in the Lord.20
We see this clearly in Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man. The rich man had elegant clothes and ate sumptuously. But he ignored Lazarus, who sat right at his gate, covered in sores that the dogs licked. Every time he entered or left his house the rich man would pass Lazarus, yet he did nothing to ease his needs. When the rich man died, he ended up in Hades. Now he suffered, while Lazarus sat in the bosom of Abraham.
The story underscores a simple fact: If we don’t love the poor, we will go to hell. If we let our possessions blind us to our dependence on God, we will go to hell. If we let food and clothes and all the other distractions of modern life keep us from seeing the needs of our neighbors, we will go to hell.
We might assume that Scripture condemns the wealthy. But that’s not the case. As the early Church Fathers noted, the Lazarus parable is really a tale of two rich men: an unnamed callous one, and the patriarch Abraham. Abraham was a rich man who never forgot his dependence on God. Whereas the wealthy sinner let Lazarus wallow in squalor, Abraham welcomed the three strangers in the Old Testament who visited him, and he fed them with rich food. Abraham was generous and shared his abundance, always remembering that everything he owned was a gift from God. The lesson is obvious: Possession is really about service. When it’s not, we become slaves to our goods instead of living in a culture of interior freedom.21
Poverty comes in many forms, and Father Pinckaers names some that are familiar: illness, loneliness, age, failure, ignorance, and sin. All of these come back to the poverty at the heart of our very being: We didn’t create ourselves, and someday everything we have will be taken away by death. Even our body will turn to dust. Our poverty, in turn, puts us at a crossroads. We can either rebel against God, or let ourselves be shaped by suffering and become more open to God and others.
For believers, then, the poverty we experience purifies us. It keeps us from getting weighed down by excess baggage on the road to heaven. The first Beatitude is addressed to all of us.22 It asks us how we will respond to the blessings and sufferings of life. Even if we don’t embrace the complete poverty of a Dorothy Day, the principle of her life still speaks to us. In giving away our treasure and our very selves, we find life and freedom. Only if our hearts are open can we receive the kingdom of heaven, which is the richest gift of all.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Let’s put aside the second Beatitude for just a moment and focus on this one, the third, because it relates intimately to the first. For too many of us, this Beatitude will conjure up a sanitized Jesus with rosy cheeks and soft blond hair. He’s gentle and sweet. In order to follow him, we need to make ourselves precious or emasculated. We start to wonder if Nietzsche was right in his contempt for Christianity as a slave religion, a cult of the weak trying to dominate the strong.
But this is remote from real meekness. Meekness is the poverty and self-mastery of Jesus, the king who rode a donkey instead of a war charger into Jerusalem.23 Remember that Aslan—C. S. Lewis’s great Narnia figure for Jesus—was a meek lion, but very far from a soft or weak one. Real meekness is the quiet self-discipline and courage with which Jesus opposed the Pharisees and Sadducees. Think of a mother who commands her children’s respect not by raising her voice, but by her quiet authority. That’s meekness. The meek person is strong and gentle because he’s filled with the confidence of God’s wisdom and love.24 Far from any hint of weakness, Pinckaers writes, meekness is “the outcome of a long struggle against the disordered violence of our feelings, failings and fears. In such instances meekness implies tremendous inner strength.”25
Meekness meets injustice and suffering with the endurance that comes from Jesus Christ and the mercy of God the Father.26 And, as Jesus teaches, the meek will inherit the earth. In the Old Testament, God promises land to Abraham and Israel. Here he promises that those who follow in his footsteps of meekness will inherit a new land, the kingdom of heaven.27 The meek person is able to live out the Beatitudes from the strength he or she has in Christ. That’s why we can meet violence with charity. That’s why we can be peacemakers. In a sense, the meek person is already living the life of heaven now.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
When we think of mourning, we usually recall someone who has just died and the feelings of loss he or she leaves behind. We’ve all seen photos of a mother weeping over the death of a child. Her heart aches. Her body responds with tears. The life she birthed and nurtured is gone. Nothing, it seems, can ease her grief. Yet Jesus promises that she—and the countless more like her—will be comforted. Mourning is a universal experience because death comes to us all. Mourning honors the unrepeatable beauty of a life that has passed away. But life in this world is not where the story of each person ends. Jesus will dry our tears. And he knows the pain of those tears because Jesus himself mourned. Scripture says he mourned over Jerusalem (Lk 19:41) and wept over the death of his friend Lazarus (Jn 11:35).
Isaiah describes the messiah as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” and in fulfilling those words, Jesus bore our griefs and carried our sorrows (Is 53:3–4). Jesus is the one who will give those who mourn in Zion “a garland instead of ashes … the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit” (Is 61:3). And after the Last Supper, Jesus promised his disciples: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish for joy that a child is born into the world. So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (Jn 16:20–22).
As Christians, therefore, we will mourn. But not all mourning is the same. There’s a toxic kind of mourning that has lost all hope. It’s bitter and vindictive, mistrustful of love and truth. And it slowly consumes the soul. Yet there’s another kind of mourning; the mourning of those who love truth and justice and see how these beautiful things are despised in the world. These mourners are different.28 They weep for the man in the homeless shelter, the woman kicked out of her home because she’s pregnant, the gay teenager caught between promiscuity and condemnation. They weep when people mock Jesus Christ and his Church. This is mourning as witness.
Thomas Aquinas identifies three more kinds of weeping and the ways in which Jesus provides consolation for each.29 First, there’s the grief we feel for our own sins and for those of others. It recognizes that sin grieves God and kills our souls. There’s a reason that the Desert Fathers talk about the gift of tears, when the Holy Spirit so moves our heart that we shed tears because of our sins.
Second, there’s the grief caused simply by living in this world with its many sorrows. With good reason we tell the Virgin Mary that we send up our sighs, “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Even when we aren’t immediately hurt by our sins, we’re acquainted with suffering. Our parents die, leaving us orphaned. We lose a job or our investments for no reason. Some of us lose children. But God promises that we’ll be consoled with the joy of eternal life. The book of Revelation describes heaven as a place where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, “and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:4). He promises us that our wounds will be healed and that we’ll know joy forever.
There’s a third kind of mourning that’s unique to Christians: the sorrow of those who accept the cross of Jesus Christ in this life, die to the world, and prefer the joys of God to worldly offerings. This kind of mourning comes from those who hurt because of their commitment to Jesus. Being disciples makes their lives harder. Maybe it’s enduring ridicule from doctors because they’re not on the birth control pill and they’ve had their fourth kid. Maybe their tithing means they can’t take a vacation they hoped for. Or maybe it’s taking a pay cut because working more would take them away from their family. Christ calls us to die to ourselves, and that always hurts. But if our hearts are open, we receive great consolation from the Holy Spirit, the one Jesus sends to comfort us in fulfillment of this Beatitude.
All the Beatitudes are about suffering, but this one homes in on it like a laser. It allows us to meet suffering with confidence in Jesus because he’s gone before us on the same path. Christ, too, endured ridicule, material loss, and the pains of his mission. He was tortured and put to death on a cross, but he rose from the dead. The same body that died on the cross was transformed. His scars became trophies of love. His wounds became glorious. Jesus’ resurrected body conquered suffering.
By faith in him, our suffering becomes a source of purification. It strips the clutter from our minds and brings us to the raw truth of life, leaving us with the choice between faith and hope in Jesus or, alternatively, despair. Even more than that, suffering becomes an instrument by which our love becomes more Christlike. It becomes a means of our salvation.30 Or at least it can be, if we have faith. The Beatitudes aren’t self-help platitudes. Without Jesus, suffering is meaningless evil. But with him we find consolation, and more.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
By and large, modern America is a land of abundance. Grinding hunger and material scarcity are not visceral experiences for most U.S. citizens. Moreover, we’ve figured out many ways of keeping ourselves amused. Billions of dollars are spent every year not on life’s essentials, but on cars, pets, handbags, cable TV, movies, Facebook, Twitter, and other amusements. Whole industries exist to cater to our appetites. And yet surrounded by our wealth, we remain dissatisfied. We may live in a land of plenty, but, as Augustine would say, we find our hearts to be a land of want.
Our hunger for happiness isn’t new. Nor is our attempt to satisfy that hunger with material things. Many centuries ago Saint Gregory the Great noted that we experience a desire for material goods before we possess them, and they attract us strongly. Then we attain them, and we find that after a brief satisfaction, we typically end up disgusted.31 By contrast, Gregory continues, we don’t value spiritual goods until we’ve tasted them. But experiencing them arouses our desire. It makes us seek them further. This hunger doesn’t lead to full satisfaction either, but there’s no disgust.32 That’s the feeling we have when we leave a retreat wanting more, but feeling full, or when the Mass makes us desire heaven but also empowers us to love those around us here and now.
This Beatitude reminds us that only spiritual things finally satisfy us. It calls us to detach ourselves from material appetites by adopting the posture of the Beatitudes: poverty, humility, meekness. This will involve a good deal of self-denial and willingness to accept suffering. But the paradox of the Beatitudes is that there’s no other way to happiness.33
Now that we’ve talked about hunger, what about righteousness? Righteousness comes from being in proper relationship with God. Under the Old Covenant, that meant binding ourselves to the precepts of the Jewish law in all of its intricacies. Under the New Covenant, it means walking by faith in Jesus Christ, which unites us to his righteousness.34 The fact that righteousness comes by faith underscores that for the Bible, justice is not an abstract ideal of equality. It’s not distant and blind, like our statue of the blindfolded Lady Justice with her scales. Rather, justice is about being in right relationship with others, first and foremost with God, who is the source of righteousness and justice.35
To the extent that sin persists in the world, unrighteous relationships will always afflict us. The poor will be persecuted. The powerful and “enlightened” will scoff at God. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will never be satisfied in this life. But their ache will drive them on to share the mercy and love of God with others. Their hunger for the spiritual won’t drive them away from the earthly. Rather, it will make them love earthly things rightly. And knowing that their righteousness comes from God alone will give them the Gospel freedom to work for him and not for themselves.
Holiness is not about earning points. Rather, good works flow forth from faith, hope, and love.36 True disciples acknowledge their hunger for happiness by striving forward along the path to heaven, confident that when they see God face-to-face, the Beatitude promise will be fulfilled, and they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Right after the Beatitude focusing on God’s righteousness and justice, we have another focusing on mercy. The Latin word for mercy, misericordia, captures it well. It means being moved in our hearts at the misery of others. It means a persistent attitude of kindness and forgiveness toward others. People often oppose justice and mercy, even in God. They’ll talk about the mercy of God winning out over the justice of God, as though God wants to punish us on the one hand but feels sorry for us on the other.
But God doesn’t have conflicted feelings the way we do. His justice and mercy go hand in hand. They complement each other. In fact, mercy is the musical key in which God’s justice is played. God manifests his mercy by tempering his justice, but never by being unjust. If God’s mercy were in some way to diminish his righteousness or ours, it would be a false pity. God loves us too much to let us remain anything less than perfect, which is why he sent his Son out of mercy to lead us into his righteousness.
The previous Beatitudes we’ve looked at describe particular needs or painful situations. But this Beatitude and the two that follow it describe qualities that merit a reward.37 We often think of mercy as a feeling, like pity or empathy, and impulses like those are certainly part of mercy. But ultimately, mercy—like hope as we discussed in the previous chapter, and like peace and purity in the subsequent Beatitudes—is more than a feeling. It’s about what we do, and what makes us act the way we act. It’s rooted in our will.38
True mercy, as Pope Francis saw so vividly in creating the 2015–16 Jubilee Year of Mercy, disrupts our normal calculations about justice. We tend (understandably) to see things as rights and wrongs, and we want to fix or punish wrongs vigorously. We aren’t interested in letting our opponents off the hook. We see that instinct clearly in Saul Alinsky’s Rules. So many of his tactics are designed to break and humiliate the opponent, leaving him reduced to nothing, all in the name of bringing about a more just society.
Mercy takes a different tack. As Servais Pinckaers writes: “Mercy favors justice not only in action but also in the heart. In the eyes of the merciful the greatest misery is not to suffer injustice but to commit it and to end up by loving it. Beyond supposed unjust actions, mercy considers the person, always capable of returning to justice with the help of God’s grace, and continues to love him in spite of the wrongs he does … This is mercy’s work: to fight injustice with its own weapons and so to conquer it in our own heart and in the hearts of others.”39 Notice that mercy doesn’t give up and accept injustice, just as God doesn’t accept our sin and call it virtue. Rather, mercy opposes injustice with love. That’s far more radical than any demonization Alinsky could devise.
Mercy begins with a deep awareness of one’s own need for it. Whereas Alinsky first sees injustice in others, the man of mercy first sees sin within himself. But we also see how much mercy we’ve received from God in Christ’s passion, the sacraments, and the love we know in our families and in the Church. Having received great mercy, we can give much away. As Pinckaers remarks, “Having thus driven out harshness and the spirit of revenge, the merciful man will know better than anyone how to discern the best way to promote true justice.”40 Acting in mercy means acting according to God’s justice in the spirit by which God himself acts. It gives us a glimpse into the nature of God and allows us to live his divine life in our own ordinary lives.41
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Remember how we talked about the Beatitudes building on the Old Covenant and Jewish law? Here is a good example. Think about Psalm 24, which describes going up to the Temple to worship the Lord: “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false, and does not swear deceitfully … Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob” (Ps 24:3–4, 6). This Psalm reminds us that purity is a vital trait for those who come to worship the Lord in the liturgy. In the Old Covenant, this frequently—but not exclusively—took the form of performing rituals. In the New Covenant, Jesus focuses on the purity of our hearts.42
* * *
GIVEN THE HYPERSEXUALIZED NATURE of today’s culture, when we think of purity, we usually think of sexual purity. And thinking of sexual purity, we typically focus on abstinence. So purity somehow transforms into not experiencing a thing we want to experience. This is a distortion. Purity is about wholeness or integrity. It means that the body, mind, heart, and soul are rightly ordered toward God. Every element of who we are is doing its part to bring us to union with God, which is our ultimate happiness. Given the strength of the sexual desires we all feel, rightly acting on those desires is a key part of maintaining purity. For single people and celibates, as we noted earlier in these pages, it means offering those desires up to God and seeking to channel them in our love and service for others.
As a priest and bishop, that means that I should spend myself in being a good father to the members of our local Church. For married couples, purity means giving oneself to one’s spouse in every way. For them, chastity naturally involves sexual intimacy. But purity of heart isn’t limited to matters of sex. It’s about not letting lesser loves or sins distract us from the Lord. We need to guard our hearts not just against lust and pornography, but also against gossip, anger, pride, greed, and selfishness. This keeps us on a path to God with his grace, and it leads us to the joy of one day seeing him.
Purity, then, comes from having our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls conformed to Jesus Christ, united in purpose by his love. This means that in our lives we need to walk the path of servanthood that Jesus walked. We need to love as he loved. And we need to cling to the promise that if we do that, then by his help we will come before the face of God and receive the full joy for which we were created.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Our understanding of purity as conformity to Jesus Christ helps us understand this Beatitude. As Augustine said, peace is the tranquility of order. It’s not a warm, unfocused feeling, but the calm that results when everything is working as it should. And things work as they should when they’re conformed to the designs of God. God shows us what a man of peace looks like in Jesus Christ, who models the truth of what it means to be a human being. So peacemakers are those who live their lives conformed to Jesus. They make Christ’s order and peace present in their lives, which further conforms the world to them as well.
If we’re wondering how best to work for peace, then, the answer is surprisingly simple: Go to confession. Read the Word of God. Worship the Lord in Mass. Love and respect your husband. Revere and protect your wife. Treasure your children. Pay your employees a just wage. Obviously, there are many other vital ways of bringing peace to the world. But for every Christian, a Christlike life is the first step to building peace in the heart, the family, and the world.
Note that Christ’s peace isn’t what we might expect. On the one hand, Jesus tells those he heals to “Go in peace.” On the other, he warns that he hasn’t come to bring peace, but rather division and a sword (Lk 12:51). Jesus’ peace makes no compromise with the sin in our hearts and in our world. He gives us his peace—but not as the world gives it (Jn 14:27).
It’s helpful to keep in mind a distinction Father Pinckaers makes between cowardly and noble peace.43 Cowardly peace is filled with fear. It avoids conflict by evasion and compromise. Cowardly peace is a great temptation for all of us today. We feel “established” and settled in American life, and we like it. We’d rather not lose our privileges or change the way things are, so we’re ready to follow Christ less zealously in order to hang on to our comforts. But this kind of peace never lasts. It’s a lie. And as our culture grows more hostile to the forms of serious Catholic faith, it will be impossible to maintain.
In contrast, noble peace joyfully takes on commitments and boldly proclaims the truth. It’s full of justice and love. It comes from knowing that we’re beloved sons and daughters of God because we’ve been united to the Son of God by faith, hope, and love. And no power on earth can separate us from God’s love (Rom 8:38–39).
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.
This Beatitude drives home a truth easily forgotten: If we try to live the Christian life, we’ll be persecuted. At first, that may seem implausible. Today, many Catholics live in the suburbs like other Americans. Their children attend good schools. They’ve largely fit in. So when our culture turns against us or when people revile what we believe, we’re shocked.
We’ve forgotten that Jesus promised that if we’re faithful to him, even in a kind and loving way, other people will hate us. That means that if we’re true to the Catholic faith, people will try to silence us. They’ll work to force us out of the public square. They’ll press us to compromise on our moral convictions. As we’ve seen, this is already happening in the United States in today’s increasing attacks on religious liberty and efforts to coerce Catholic ministries and organizations to collaborate with destructive policies and disordered behaviors, and to violate their religious identities. And it will get worse before it gets better.
Yet as much as we encounter disdain for our faith in our own nation, the situation is far worse for Christians in other parts of the world.44 Several years ago, Archbishop Amel Shamon Nona wrote a letter to Christians in the West. Nona is the head of the Church in Mosul, Iraq. In 2010 he was appointed archbishop when his predecessor was murdered gruesomely. The day after he came to the city, Christians began to be murdered, including the father of a young man who was praying with him in church. Many Christians in the city fled. The brutal violence of Muslim extremists made him wonder how he could strengthen the faithful members of his Church who remained in Mosul. How do you live the faith in a time of savage persecution? Archbishop Nona came to this conclusion:
I realized that, above all—in the face of suffering and persecution—a true knowledge of our own faith and the cause of our persecution is of fundamental importance. By deepening our sense of what it means to be Christians, we discover ways to give meaning to this life of persecution and find the necessary strength to endure it … From the moment when we are waiting for death, under threat from someone who may shoot us at any time, we need to know how to live well. The greatest challenge in facing death because of our faith is to continue to know this faith in such a way as to live it constantly and fully—even in that very brief moment that separates us from death.
My goal in all this is to reinforce the fact that the Christian faith is not an abstract, rational theory, remote from actual, everyday life, but a means of discovering its deepest meaning, its highest expression as revealed by the Incarnation. When the individual discovers this possibility, he or she will be willing to endure absolutely anything and will do everything to safeguard this discovery—even if this means having to die in its cause.
In China, India, North Korea, and many Muslim nations, harassment and bloody persecution of Christians are now common. As free members of the body of Christ, we need to live our faith all the more zealously for those who cannot. The witness of the early martyrs reminds us that as much as a passionately Christian life is difficult, it’s also a life of joy.45
The Beatitudes are not an easy road to follow. But they’re the path to extraordinary and infectious joy. They show us how to live and share the faith in bitter times. They teach us that true happiness is union with God, and that the path to happiness is one of poverty of spirit, meekness, hunger, mercy, purity, peace, and courageous witness. They offer us a grand adventure. It’s ours to accept or refuse.