Archbishop of Sydney

Catechist Sunday - 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Zeph 2:3, 3:12-13; Cor 1:26-31; Mt 5:1-12

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
3/2/2008

This morning we have heard again Jesus’ beatitudes, the centre of his moral teaching.  St. Augustine from North Africa, who died in 430 AD, wrote of the two cities – the city of God, and the city of Man.  The City of God is the community that has God at its centre, and which worships Him above all things.  The City of God is where the people of the beatitudes live.  The City of Man is the community that has something other than God as its ultimate aim and object of worship i.e. money, power, possessions or pleasure.  There is always tension, often hostility between these two ways of living.

 These two cities and their inhabitants are presented to us in today’s readings.  The members of the city of God, those who are most loved and chosen by Christ will be considered foolish, weak, low, and despised by the “world”, i.e. those who choose pagan values.  They can even expect on occasions to be persecuted, reviled, and falsely accused.  We must be very clear about this – we cannot measure our success in the spiritual life by our popularity with those outside or opposed to the city of God.  It is a false yardstick.  Approval by the enemies of the Church can be a sign we are on the wrong track!

 Why then would we choose to be citizens of the city of God? First, because it is precisely these people – the poor, the gentle, the searchers for justice, the merciful, the peace-makers, those who mourn and are persecuted – who are chosen by God to accomplish His Will in this world.  The members of His city have something better than education and wealth – they have faith, integrity and are committed to God and goodness.

The greatness of this mission is due to the fact that it comes not from our own whim or the fashions of the world, but from God himself.  We can boast, not of our family, wealth, or popularity, but of Jesus Christ, who is better than these things, being wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

As always when I read this section of Scripture I change the word “happy” to “blessed” because it is a more accurate translation and also makes the teaching somewhat easier to understand.  Incidentally we have no right to change Our Lord’s teaching just because it is strange or difficult, but in this case a better translation does make it easier for us.

We should remember that Jesus spoke regularly in Aramaic (this is the usual hypothesis), while the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, a different but related language.  Matthew’s gospel, as we have it, was written in Greek and of course we hear it in English.  Sometimes, indeed regularly, one language does not have an exact equivalent for a word in another language.  Therefore one good reason why there are different versions of the beatitudes in Matthew and Luke could be that each gospel writer in his own way was trying to explain more clearly to his audience in Greek what Jesus was saying in Aramaic.  As a further extension of this process I substitute “blessed” for “happy” because I believe the word “happy” takes us further away from what Our Lord was saying.

When we delve below the surface life often is more complicated than it first seems to be.

We have all these questions at work in the first beatitude which Matthew translates as blessed are “the poor in spirit”, while Luke has Jesus saying “blessed are the poor”.  An easy explanation is to claim that Matthew was more sensitive to his richer readers and wanted to include them, even if they were no longer poor in a financial sense, I suspect this is much too simple and does not explain the differences.

One good suggestion is that we do not have to choose between a right attitude “poor in spirit” and a condition of poverty to understand what Jesus was saying, because the word from the Old Testament that Jesus was invoking “anawin” cannot be translated by any one word in English (or in Greek), because we do not have such an exact equivalent.

The theory, which seems plausible to me, is that while Jesus wanted to insist on a spiritual or religious dimension to poverty, he did not want to ignore or exclude those who were materially poor i.e. the hungry and dispossessed.

There are also different kinds of poverty.  Sometimes rich people are very miserable, and sometimes they have no religious understanding at all, being hard hearted and insensitive.  To be poor, as the beatitudes are explaining, requires us to recognize our situation of need (whatever it might be) and then turn to God and recognize our dependence on him.

Jesus was also doing something else because he realised that words are not enough and that sometimes even an accurate understanding of a word does not contain what the speaker is meaning.  Therefore Jesus used symbols, parables and actions to further explain what he was about.  The new Christian concept of humility was better understood when he washed the feet of his disciples.

So too we better understand how the poor in spirit are blessed by considering Jesus’ surprising teaching, reversing the understanding of the time, that the kingdom of God is made up of children, little children.

Children were different in Our Lord’s time, because they were seen and not heard.  It is a wonderful development today that children can have their say at home, at school and socially.  Children then were marginalised, non participants.

The poor in spirit might also be marginalised, but they are still blessed by God in a special way.

To sum up.  Whether we are rich or poor, we can be poor in spirit, recognizing our dependence on God, not being proud and self-sufficient.  But if we are rich and comfortable, we are disadvantaged on this count, because Jesus has a soft spot, a special liking for the materially poor.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.