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The Sermon on the Mount never took place in actuality, but is a collection of Jesus’ teachings compiled by Matthew. According to Luke, in his shorter collection, the “sermon” was given on a plain.

And large crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and beyond the Jordan. And seeing the crowds, he went up onto a hill, and when he had sat down, his disciples gathered around him. And he began to teach them, and said,

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

poor in spirit: For the most profound clarification of this verse, see Meister Eckhart’s sermon on it, in which he defines a person who is poor in spirit as “one who wants nothing and knows nothing and has nothing.” (A translation of the complete sermon appears in The Enlightened Mind.)

Blessed are those who grieve: Ramakrishna said, “People weep rivers of tears because they don’t have a child or can’t get money. But who sheds even one teardrop because he has not seen God?”

That is the most fruitful grief. But all grief, if experienced attentively enough, can be fruitful. Rilke, talking about a moment of ultimate, jubilant affirmation, says:

How dear you will be to me then, you nights

of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,

inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself

in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end. Though they are really

seasons of us, our winter-

enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,

where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

(“Original Version of the Tenth Elegy,” The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, Random House, 1982, p.217)

This beatitude and the next one concern people who are still searching for the kingdom of God, not people who have already found it.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: The exemplar of this spiritual state is Job. The greater the hunger, the greater the fulfillment.

When the righteous man searches for the nature of all things, he makes his own admirable discovery: that everything is God’s grace. Every being in the world, and the world itself, manifests the blessings and generosity of God.

Blessed are the merciful: “Whoever has mercy on others will obtain mercy from God” (Talmud). Here, as everywhere, God is a mirror of the soul, and we receive what we give.

Blessed are the pure in heart: Synonymous with the “poor in spirit.” As in the first beatitude, it would be more accurate to use the present tense here: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they already see God. “Seeing God means that they have died to self, since “no one can see God and live” (Exodus 33:20). Not that selfish concerns don’t arise for them; but they aren’t attached to these concerns; they have no self for selfishness to stick to; hence they can be carried along in the clear current of what is.

see God: Paul, in his hope and desperation, confused the death of the body with the death of self, and mistook his own spiritual unclarity for the human condition. “For now we see dim images in a mirror, but then”—the great “then”—“we will see face to face” (I Corinthians 13:12). Those who have entered the kingdom of God don’t need to leave their bodies in order to see God face to face.

Blessed are the peacemakers: Shalom, the word for “peace” in Hebrew, comes from a root that means “wholeness.” When we make peace in our own heart, we make peace for the whole world.

The wisdom from above is in the first place pure, then peace-loving, considerate, openhearted, filled with compassion and acts of kindness, impartial, and sincere. Peace is the soil in which righteousness is sown, and the peacemakers will reap its harvest. (James 3:17f.)