(Matthew 5. 1-12)

When we arrived and sat at the bar a hot loud Scottish lady greeted us “Ciao”. I must have looked bemused because she muttered under her breath – “I am only trying to speak your language.”

Cambridge – tapping my number into / queried the fact that the total was not shown on the screen / he thought I was foreign and enunciated slowly YOU JUST TAP IT IN

Jesus sat down to teach

• When a Jewish Rabbi was teaching officially he sat to teach.
• We speak of a professor's chair
• The Pope still speaks ex cathedra, from his seat if claiming infaliibility
• The verb taught is not an aorist, but an imperfect and therefore it describes repeated and habitual action, and the translation should be: "This is what he used to teach them." - it is the essence of all that Jesus continuously and habitually taught his disciples.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Mt 5: 3)

• Blessed is the man who has realised his own utter helplessness, and who has put his whole trust in God.
• The beatitude is not calling actual material poverty a good thing.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted (Mt 5: 4)
There are three ways in which this beatitude can be taken.

• Learn through suffering - The Arabs have a proverb: " All sunshine makes a desert."
• Blessed are those who are desperately sorry for the sorrow and the suffering of this world.
• Blessed is the man who is desperately sorry for his own sin and his own unworthiness.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Mt 5: 5)
Nowadays it carries with it an idea of spinelessness, subservience, mean-spiritedness, submissive and ineffective creature.

• Aristotle - meekness (praotés) - the mean between two extremes. On the one hand there was the extreme of excess; on the other hand there was the extreme of defect; and in between there was the virtue itself, the happy medium - Blessed is the man who is always angry at the right time, and never angry at the wrong time (a general rule for life that it is never right to be angry for any insult or injury done to ourselves but that it is often right to be angry at injuries done to other people)
• It is the regular word for an animal which has been domesticated, which has been trained to obey the word of command, which has learned to answer to the reins. It is the word for an animal which has learned to accept control.
• Describes humility, the acceptance of the necessity to learn and of the necessity to be forgiven.

There is no one English word which will translate it, although perhaps the word gentle comes nearest to it.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied (Mt 5: 6)

• How much do you want it: Words do not exist in isolation; they exist against a background of experience and of thought; and the meaning of any word is conditioned by the background of the person who speaks it - few of us in modern conditions of life know what it is to be really hungry or really thirsty. It was not possible for the vast majority of people to turn a tap. A man might be on a journey, and in the midst of it the hot wind which brought the sand-storm might begin to blow.
• The man who is blessed is not necessarily the man who achieves this goodness, but the man who longs for it with his whole heart. If blessedness came only to him who achieved, then none would be blessed.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy (Mt 5:7)

• The Hebrew word for mercy is chesedh (suffering love); and it is an untranslatable word. It does not mean only to sympathise with a person in the popular sense of the term; it does not mean simply to feel sorry for someone in trouble. Chesedh, mercy, means the ability to get right inside the other person's skin until we can see things with his eyes, think things with his mind, and feel things with his feelings.
• Sympathy is derived from two Greek words, syn which means together with, and paschein which means to experience or to suffer. Sympathy means experiencing things together with the other person, literally going through what he is going through.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Mt 5:8)
The Greek word for pure is katharos – a question of motivesa question of motives

• Originally it simply meant clean, and would, for instance, be used of soiled clothes which have been washed clean.
• Used for corn which has been winnowed or sifted and cleansed of all chaff
• Used of milk or wine which is unadulterated with water, or of metal which has in it no tinge of alloy.

Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called sons of God (Mt 5:9)

• In Greek the word is eiréné, and in Hebrew it is shalóm. In Hebrew peace is never only a negative state; it never means only the absence of trouble; in Hebrew peace always means everything which makes for a man's highest good. In the east when one man says to another, Salaam—which is the same word—he does not mean that he wishes for the other man only the absence of evil things; he wishes for him the presence of all good things
• The blessing is on the peace-makers, not necessarily on the peace-lovers.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you (Mt 5:10-12)

ONE of the outstanding qualities of Jesus was his sheer honesty.

Christians persecuted because:

• Accused of cannibalism. The words of the Last Supper-" This is my body." " This cup is the New Testament in my blood "
• Accused of immoral practices, and their meetings were said to be orgies of lust. The Christian weekly meeting was called the Agapé, the Love Feast. Christians greeted each other with the kiss of peace; and the kiss of peace became a ground on which to build the slanderous accusations.
• The Christians refused to worship the Emperor. Once a year a man had to go and burn a pinch of incense to the godhead of Caesar and say, " Caesar is Lord." And that is precisely what the Christians refused to do.

Christians persecuted: flung to the lions or burned at the stake; but these were kindly deaths. Nero wrapped the Christians in pitch and set them alight, and used them as living torches to light his gardens. He sewed them in the skins of wild animals and set his hunting dogs upon them to tear them to death. They were tortured on the rack; they were scraped with pincers; molten lead was poured hissing upon them; red hot brass plates were affixed to the tenderest parts of their bodies; eyes were torn out; parts of their bodies were cut off and roasted before their eyes; their hands and feet were burned while cold water was poured over them to lengthen the agony

www.catholic-church.org/stfrancis-cfn/beatitudes.html