Thursday 6 November 2025  The Healer Teaches

Perhaps all the world needs is enough of us to risk believing and putting the beatitudes into practice.
—Megan McKenna, Blessings and Woes 

Theologian Megan McKenna focuses on the way Luke’s Gospel presents Jesus and the Beatitudes, known as the “blessings and woes.” 

[In Matthew’s Gospel], Jesus, the new Moses, is the law-giver who goes up the mountain with his disciples around him, while the crowd remains. In Matthew Jesus teaches them from the mountain. In Luke [6:17–35], Jesus … comes down with [the disciples] to a level place that is crowded with hordes of people from all parts of the region and beyond to the coastal cities: believers, unbelievers, outsiders, and probably many not welcome in religious society.  

Before he teaches, he heals; or perhaps as he heals, he teaches. Those who have come to him are ill, diseased, troubled by evil spirits, despised by society. They are desperate, seeking to touch him…. The scene is one of motion, reaching, grabbing, and we are told simply that “the power which went out from him healed them all.” This power, his spirit and presence, is healing, comforting, soothing, calming, promising. But the most startling line of all is the last one: “Then lifting up his eyes to his disciples, Jesus said….”  

He lifts up his eyes: he is positioned below them, probably kneeling on the ground, tending to those in pain and suffering, attentive to the needs of those reaching for him…. He is in a position of vulnerability, of solidarity with the masses of people in need. From this position he speaks the beatitudes: the blessings and the woes…. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is more comfort-giver than teacher; more attentive than discursive; more tender than instructive; more embracing of the pain of others than distant as law-giver.  

The blessings and woes are taught from this place of vulnerable solidarity and are meant to be put into practice. 

These few lines of blessings and woes are followed by a staggering sermon that is … seemingly impossible to put into practice. There are exhortations to love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you and malign you, to turn the other cheek and go an extra mile…. 

It seems that the blessings and woes and what follows from them in practical action form the foundation of the kingdom of God in the world…. The words of Jesus empower and sustain those called to be responsible for the new public order and common good, the defense of the poor, the care of the despised and diseased…. When the words of Jesus are put into practice the kingdom comes.  

Thich Nhat Hanh has said: “The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now…. It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.” [1] We need to practice reading and hearing the beatitudes; we need to put them into practice.  

[1] Thich Nhat Hanh, Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living (Parallax Press, 1992), 1, 2. 

Megan McKenna, Blessings and Woes: The Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke (Orbis Books, 1999), 43–44, 45. 

Wednesday 5 November 2025  Not for the Proud

In 1942, Clarence Jordan established Koinonia Farm in Georgia as a pacifist, interracial “demonstration plot” for the kingdom of God. Jordan understood the gospel as something Christians must consciously choose to live out. 

The kingdom of God on earth is Jesus’ specific proposal to humanity. While the Sermon on the Mount is not a complete statement of the proposal (it takes all four Gospels for that), it does contain many of the major points. So it is quite natural at the very beginning for Jesus to deal with the question of how to enter the kingdom, or how to become a citizen of it.  

The first seven Beatitudes [Matthew 5:3–9] do just that. They are steps into the kingdom, the stairway to spiritual life…. These are not blessings pronounced upon different kinds of people—the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, and so on. Rather, they are stages in the experience of only one class of people—those who are entering the kingdom and who at each stage are blessed. The kingdom, of course, is the blessing, and each step into it partakes of its blessedness. This blessedness comes with the taking of the step, and is not postponed as a future reward. Jesus said, “Blessed are…”.  

The first step in becoming a son or daughter, or being begotten from above, or in entering the kingdom, or being saved, or finding eternal life—whatever term you wish to use—is stated by Jesus as:  

“The poor in spirit are partakers of the divine blessing, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” [Jordan’s translation]. 

What does Jesus mean by “poor in spirit”? In Luke’s account it is simply “you poor.” What kind of poverty is he talking about? If you have a lot of money, you’ll probably say spiritual poverty. If you have little or no money, you’ll probably say physical poverty. The rich will thank God for Matthew; the poor will thank God for Luke. Both will say, “He blessed me!” Well, then, who really did get the blessing? 

Chances are, neither one. For it is exactly this attitude of self-praise and self-justification and self-satisfaction that robs people of a sense of great need for the kingdom and its blessings. When one says, “I don’t need to be poor in things; I’m poor in spirit,” and another says, “I don’t need to be poor in spirit, I’m poor in things,” both are justifying themselves as they are, and are saying in unison, “I don’t need.” With that cry on their lips, no one can repent…. 

It is neither wealth nor poverty that keeps people out of the kingdom—it is pride.  

So the poor in spirit are not the proud in spirit. They know that in themselves—in all people—there are few, if any, spiritual resources. They must have help from above. They desperately need the kingdom of heaven. And feeling their great need for the kingdom, they get it.  

Tuesday 4 November 2025  What Does It Mean to Be Blessed?

Heaven begins now, for any saints willing to sign up. 
—Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest 

Spiritual writer Barbara Brown Taylor considers the promise of “blessing” that is central to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:  

We don’t have to wonder what a blessed life looks like. Jesus laid that out right at the beginning of his most famous sermon, though his description is so far from what some of us had hoped that we would rather discuss the teaching than act on it…. In this life, most of us pedal pretty hard to avoid going in the direction of Jesus’ Beatitudes. We read books that promise to enrich our spirits. We find all kinds of ways to sedate our mournfulness.  

According to Jesus, the blessings of the kingdom are available here and now—and later: 

The first words out of Jesus’ mouth are not “Blessed shall be” but “Blessed are.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—not because of something that will happen to them later but because of what their poverty opens up in them right now. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”—not because God is going to fill them up later but because their appetites are so fine-tuned right now….  

When people who can’t stop crying hear Jesus call them blessed right in the basement of their grief, they realize this isn’t something they are supposed to get over soon. This is what it looks like to have a blessed and broken heart….  

When people who are getting beat up for doing the right thing hear Jesus call them blessed while the blows are still coming, they are freed to feel the pain in a different way. The bruises won’t hurt any less, but the new meaning in them can make them easier to bear. Who knows? They may even change the hearts of those landing the blows, while they bring the black-and-blue into communion with each other like almost nothing else can.  

This is what the Beatitudes have to do with real life. They describe a view of reality in which the least likely candidates are revealed to be extremely fortunate in the divine economy of things, not only later but right now. They are Jesus’ truth claims for all time, the basis of everything that follows, which everyone who hears them is free to accept, reject, or neglect. Whatever you believe about him, believe this about you: the things that seem to be going most wrong for you may in fact be the things that are going most right. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix them. It just means they may need blessing as much as they need fixing, since the blessing is already right there.  

If you can breathe into it—well, that’s when heaven comes to earth, because earth is where heaven starts, for all who are willing to live into it right now.   

Monday 3 November 2025  A Teaching to Be Lived Out

Father Richard considers how challenging it is to live out Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount:  

I am told that the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—is the least quoted Scripture in official Catholic Church documents. We must be honest and admit that most of Christianity has focused very little on what Jesus himself taught and spent most of his time doing: healing people, doing acts of justice and inclusion, embodying compassionate and nonviolent ways of living.  

I’m grateful that my spiritual father, St. Francis of Assisi, took the Sermon on the Mount seriously and spent his life trying to imitate Jesus. Likewise, Francis’ followers, especially in the beginning, tried to imitate Francis. At its best, Franciscanism offers a simple return to the gospel as an alternative lifestyle more than an orthodox belief system. That example continues to be lived out by the Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, the Catholic Worker Movement, and others. For these groups, the Sermon on the Mount is not just words! At their best, they include the outsider, prefer the margins to the center, are committed to nonviolence, and choose social poverty and divine union over any private perfection or sense of moral superiority.  

At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us this short but effective image so we will know that we are to act on his words and live the teachings, instead of only believing things about God:  

Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built a house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock. And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built a house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. And it collapsed and was completely ruined (Matthew 7:24–27; Richard’s emphasis).   

Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, understood the Sermon on the Mount as the foundational plan for following Jesus: “Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers.” [1] She observed that “we are trying to lead a good life. We are trying to talk about and write about the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the social principles of the church, and it is most astounding, the things that happen when you start trying to live this way. To perform the works of mercy becomes a dangerous practice.” [2]  

Jesus taught an alternative wisdom that shakes the social order instead of upholding the conventional wisdom that maintains it. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is not about preserving the status quo! It’s about living here on earth as if the reign of God has already begun (see Luke 17:21). In this reign, the Sermon tells us, the poor are blessed, the hungry are filled, the grieving are filled with joy, and enemies are loved.  

Father Richard Rohr writes about the radical message of the Sermon on the Mount.  

In his teachings, and in the Sermon on the Mount in particular, Jesus critiques and reorders the values of his culture from the bottom up. He “betrays” the prevailing institutions of family, religion, power, and resource control by his loyalty to another world vision, which he calls the reign of God. Such loyalty costs him general popularity, the support of the authorities, immense inner agony, and finally his own life. By putting the picture in the largest possible frame, he calls into question all smaller frames and invites his hearers into a radical transformation of consciousness. Many were not ready for it—nor are many of us today. 

To understand the Sermon on the Mount, we need to clarify where Jesus is leading us.  

It’s not to the old self on the old path, which would be non-conversion and non-enlightenment.  

It’s not to the old self on a new path, which is where most religion begins and ends. It involves new behavior, new language, and practices that are sincere, but the underlying myth/worldview/motivation and goals are never really changed. My anger, fear, and ego are merely transferred to now defend my idea of God or religion.  

Jesus is leading us to the new self on a new path, which is the total transformation of consciousness, worldview, motivation, goals, and rewards that characterize one who loves and is loved by God.  

Matthew sets the stage for the Sermon with three simple sentences: “Seeing the crowds, he went onto the mountain. And when he was seated his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak” (Matthew 5:1–2). Remember, Moses came down from the mountaintop with the Ten Commandments. For Matthew’s Jewish audience, the message is clear: This is the new Moses going back to the mountaintop, reproclaiming the truth, bringing down the new law. That is a very important context: In a certain sense, the Sermon is Jesus’ revisioning of the Ten Commandments.  

The Beatitudes (sometimes translated as “happy attitudes,” or even congratulations in a secular sense) are addressed not to the crowds but to Jesus’ disciples. Later in the Gospel, the most demanding teaching— “take up your cross”—is reserved for an even smaller group, the twelve apostles. The Sermon is addressed to the larger second circle of disciples, those who are still being initiated. That’s us!  

It seems there is a very real plan in Jesus’ initiation. He is aware of timing, readiness, and maturation. At the early stages, we are not ready for the hard words of the gospel; we are unable to hear the message of the cross. It is only in the second half of life that we come to understand that dying is not opposed to life. Dying is a part of a greater mystery—and we are a part of that mystery. In my experience, it is usually the older psyche that is ready to hear such sober truth.