Obviously, if we are to use our human reason alone, without the guidance of faith, we would consider the Beatitudes a crazy idea. I’ve heard some supposedly intellectual commentators describe the Beatitudes as silly. It’s a reasoning that is trapped in its own web of ideas.
But if we would just try to fathom the divine wisdom contained in them, we would soon realize that the Beatitudes indeed articulate a most pure brand of love that continues to burn and even to burn more strongly when faced with all sorts of contradictions in life. We need to realize that love becomes purer when it is challenged, rejected.
Christ lived these Beatitudes to the hilt and, by so doing, defined for us what true love is, which is the very essence of God and the essence that is also meant for us, since we are God’s image and likeness, sharers of his divine life and nature. How God is should also be how we should be.
Let us remember that Christ left us with the new commandment before he ascended into heaven. And that new commandment says that we should love one another as he himself as loved us.
And how did Christ love us? And continues to do so? By offering his life for us! By so doing, he assumed all our sins and offered forgiveness even before we ask for forgiveness. That’s how Christ loves us and how we should also love one another which is actually our way of showing our love for Christ, for God, since to love God is concretized by loving our neighbor, i.e., everybody else, including our enemies.
It’s a supernatural kind of love that definitely transcends our human and natural way of loving and that definitely requires God’s grace, our identification with the very spirit of God as shown and shared with us through Christ in the Holy Spirit. Forget it when we think that we can have this kind of love by simply relying on our human powers alone.
Again, we are reminded that we are meant to live not only a natural life. We are meant to live a supernatural life with God. Thus, as early possible we should make ourselves, mainly with our spiritual powers of intelligence and will, to be as receptive and responsive to the grace God abundantly gives us.
To be sure, we cannot have this supernatural kind of love meant for us if we do not pray, if we do not avail of the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist, which are the normal channels of grace for us, if we do not keep our relation with God alive through the development of virtues and rejection of sin and temptations, if we fail to actively participate in the continuing redemptive work of Christ by doing apostolate, etc.
If we would be faithful to the means made available for us to be with Christ, all those contradictions and challenges we can meet in life would be viewed as privileged occasions to grow in the true love meant for us. These contradictions and challenges are the concrete ways we can identify ourselves more and more with Christ.
The Beatitudes convert what we usually consider as human disasters or clear disadvantages and inconveniences according to worldly standards into a source of joy, a means of our redemption, a path to heaven, narrow and difficult though it may be.
They expand our understanding of what would comprise as our true happiness by including those situations which we normally regard as unsavory and therefore to be avoided as much as possible and hated.
They articulate divine wisdom for us!