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Manila Bulletin

Opinion

Blessed

Opinion

Blessed

By Manila Bulletin

REFLECTIONS TODAY

Today we start Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the first and the most important of the five Great Discourses in the Gospel of Matthew. It begins with the Beatitudes, Jesus’ declaration of who truly are macarioi—happy or blessed—of human beings. The Beatitudes turn the usual idea of happiness upside down. Those truly blessed are not the rich, the proud, the mighty, and the self-satisfied. True happiness belongs to the poor, the humble, and the persecuted. This is truly most upsetting.

The poor and the suffering are not blessed because they are persecuted, as if God likes to see people suffer. They are blessed because they have nothing to rely on except God. They are happy because they are on the side of God, and God is with them. They are happy because they have God.

On the contrary, those who are mighty and self-satisfied are shut up within themselves and in what they have.

God alone is the guarantee of true happiness, and God is not with those who have no room for him in their hearts because these have been filled with other gods: wealth, power, and pleasure. On the other hand, those who “raise their eyes” to God is filled with the comfort of his presence.

Man, Francis Thompson writes in The Hound of Heaven, is a blind, weak creature who seeks happiness not in God but in what the world can give. And the Creator reminds him: all things betray him who betrays God, nothing contents him who does not content God, he drives away love from himself who drives away God.

Source: “366 Days with the Lord 2024,” St. Paul’s, 7708 St. Paul Rd., SAV, Makati City (Phils.); Tel.: 632-895-9701; E-mail: [email protected]; Website: http://www.stpauls.ph.

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