The Beatitudes Define What a True Christian Is

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

CHRIST himself made such description and definition of a true Christian. They strike us as something strange from a purely human point of view. But given our wounded condition and our ideal status as children of God whose essence is pure love, the Beatitudes give us the proper frame of mind as to how to handle our life here on earth which will always be marked with all sorts of contradictions and negative things.

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 even hated.

But, my friends, at these times, these situations are hardly unavoidable. In fact, they are inescapable, what with all the growing differences and conflicts we are having among ourselves nowadays. If we have to be realistic about our life here, we better take the beatitudes seriously.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are they who mourn, blessed are the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or justice, those who are merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, those who are insulted…There can hardly be any worse predicament than all these!

Yet Christ reassures us that it would just be fine, and in fact he promises us a great reward, if not now then certainly in the life hereafter. And he is not bluffing because he himself underwent all those disasters and yet he conquered everything with his resurrection. In short, he has proven the veracity of this teaching with his own experience.

The beatitudes are so articulated by Christ in order to serve as a profound and most effective antidote to our strong, almost invincibly strong tendency to self-love, to self-indulgence.

They are meant to extricate us from our own prison, our own world which is the antithesis of what true love is. They are meant to expand our heart to save it from being trapped by our own worldly and bodily desires. They are meant to teach us how to give ourselves to God and to everybody else, irrespective of how they are, which is what true love is.

Love is always a matter of total self-giving, be it in good times or bad times, in favorable conditions or not. Love has a universal scope. It is supposed to be given without measure, without counting the cost nor expecting any reward. It can be very discriminating without ever being discriminatory.

In short, the beatitudes detach us from our own selves so that we can truly identify ourselves with Christ who is the very pattern of our humanity and the savior of our sin-damaged humanity. They are actually a way to our liberation from our own self-inflicted bondage to merely earthly and bodily urges. They purify us from any stain caused by our worldly attachments.

The great task we have at hand with respect to the Beatitudes is how to incarnate them in our life. We all know that we have a natural aversion to any kind of suffering, and that we hardly go beyond the natural or the infranatural aspects of our sufferings. We fail to see their purifying and redemptive potentials.

That is why we really need to discipline our mind and heart, our understanding and feelings, so as to align them to the saving ways of Christ. And one way of doing this is to develop in a proactive way a spirit of sacrifice, a spirit of self-denial and mortification. And this done and lived on a daily basis.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com