When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him. He began to teach them, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you false because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.” (Matthew 5.1-12)
In the English writer Graham Greene’s 1940 book, “The Power and the Glory,” considered by most people to be his greatest work, a masterpiece in their minds, Greene tells the somewhat fictional story of a fugitive priest in the Mexican state of Tabasco who is the last remaining cleric in the harshly repressive anti-clerical region where priests were forced to either renounce their faith or be hunted down and shot like animals.
In preparation for his book, Greene had visited Mexico for five months in 1938 and walked away with the conviction that the persecution of the Catholic Church was the “fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth.” Many details in the book were taken directly from his own trip and experiences in Mexico, especially in the region of Tabasco.
The plot of the book is simple. The unnamed fugitive priest, called “the whiskey priest” because of his penchant for alcohol, is being hunted down by authorities, especially by a police lieutenant who was willing to take hostages from villages and have them shot if he found that the priest had stayed in the village. Eventually, the priest is caught, a result of returning to a place to anoint a dying man although the priest suspected he was being asked to return by a Judas-like figure. Nevertheless, he takes seriously his duty to provide the last rites and goes, resulting in his arrest and imprisonment.
On the morning of his execution as the priest sits in his jail cell, he contemplates his life, particularly how he has wasted much of it. Greene painfully describes the self-examination, writing, “What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived. . . Tears poured down his face: he was not at the moment afraid of damnation–even of the fear of pain was in the background.”
Graham continues, “He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted–to be a saint.”
The book ends with the appearance of another priest, also hidden and on the run, who finds refuge in the home of a pious woman who now includes the so-called whiskey priest in her collection of Christian martyrs that she reads to her young children each evening. In the end, the lieutenant has not been able to clear the province of priests, as he had bragged that he had done with the execution of the whiskey priest, and the deceased priest was remembered, not for a wasted life, but for his courage, seen as a martyr, earning him the sainthood he felt he had thought he had missed out on.
Today, as we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, an annual event on the Roman calendar that calls to mind all the men and women of the ages who have had the courage to live good and decent lives, we may want to take a moment to reflect on the whiskey priest’s words that “it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage.”
Truth be told, most of us would disagree with the whiskey priest’s words, insisting on the contrary, that it is difficult to be a saint. As a rule, we are the first to argue that living a Christ-like life is near-to- impossible, lamenting its challenges and its call for holiness. We counter with innumerable examples of the herculean tasks that come with being a faithful follower of the Galilean teacher Jesus.
Whether our arguments are verifiably true or simply self-serving excuses is open to discussion, but the bottom line remains. Jesus calls us to live a life that is exceptional, at least when contrasted with the lives of those who do not espouse his views and do not wish to imitate his ways. He habitually called his believers not to follow the crowd, but instead to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
Of course, it is right there that we find the difficulty, in the call to be different from others in the ways of truth, goodness, and kindness, finding it much easier to blend into the crowd rather than to stand at odds with the crowd, not wanting to risk exclusion or persecution because doing what Jesus calls us to do flies in the face of what the world wants us to do.
Hence, our lament about the difficulty of being a faithful disciple, or a saint, the word that Paul used multiple times in his letters, regularly calling fellow Christians holy ones, those set apart, or saints, in this way reminding them of their call to holiness and to imitating the life of Jesus the Christ. He apparently found being a saint less of a chore than we do.
As we have seen, for the whiskey priest, being a saint “would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage.” In many ways, he was absolutely correct, our lack of self-restraint and lack of courage being the fault lines in our faithfulness to the gospel. Whenever we fail, it is generally a result of one or the other or both.
Having said that, I also would suggest that the Beatitudes that we have heard today in the gospel provide a precise blueprint to achieving saintliness, a roadmap for holiness. It surely is intentional, I believe, that the Beatitudes that we find in the Gospel of Matthew should be put before us on this Feast of All Saints. It is no accident that they are front and center as we recall the lives of the countless men and women who have shown self-restraint and who have exhibited courage as they walked the way of Jesus rather than traveling the well-trod pathway of this world where self-restraint and true courage are not the coin of the realm.
The Beatitudes that we find in the Gospel of Matthew appear early in the book, found in the Sermon on the Mount which, all things considered, was Jesus’ inaugural teaching as he began his mission and his ministry. It is for good cause that these Eight Beatitudes are often called the gospel in short, concretizing and summarizing the entirety of Jesus’ message as he taught the crowds in Galilee.
If looked at from this perspective, as a summation of his teachings and as a full expression of his own life, we can easily see how those who truly want to achieve something close to saintliness need only make these eight attributes part and parcel of their own lives, using them as the guideposts on the way to holiness and to unity with the holy one sent by God to show us the way back to him.
As the whiskey priest came to see that self-restraint and courage were needed to become a saint, much the same can be said of these Eight Beatitudes, the composite offering a clear and precise checklist for anyone who wants to know what is required of them if they also are to become holy ones or saints. If we regularly clothe ourselves with these qualities, to use another of Paul’s favorite analogies, then we will find ourselves looking very much like Jesus the Christ.
The key words in each beatitude are stepping stones on the pathway to becoming more and more Christ-like, each one giving us a direction in life that we take in our efforts to become Jesus to others in this world. We should take a moment to look at these key words or phrases, breaking through the wall of familiarity that would have us give little or no thought to the truly significant impact of these Beatitudes.
First, we are called to be poor in spirit, a phrase that means we are always aware of our dependency upon God. Unlike those invested in the world who believe they are their own gods or follow the gods of their own making, the saintly understand that they are impoverished if they do not have God in their lives. Unlike those in the world who build their strength and their sustenance upon wealth and self-reliance, forgetting the need for God, the poor in spirit understand that they are empty-handed, completely dependent upon the mercy and the grace of the Most High God.
LIkewise, those who seek saintliness are they who mourn, meaning those who see the world in all its wickedness and who weep at the sight of injustice, prejudice, and hatred that are so rampant in a world wrongly oriented towards selfishness, greed, and hard-heartedness. Those who mourn feel in their hearts the wages of wickedness and they stand in solidarity with all who suffer in their struggle for justice.
Next, if we strive for holiness, then we must exemplify meekness. Perhaps the best understanding of the word comes from a combination of humility and gentleness. In a world where egos are as bloated as lawn inflatables, the meek offer a different display, not needing to be on the stage, not wanting to win the argument, not having a desire to show off attributes or accumulations. They always see themselves before the greatness of God and are humbled by their own smallness.
Then, there is the hunger and thirst for righteousness if one hopes to gain holiness. This hunger is not so much for personal righteousness, which always falls short, but for the righteousness of God, praying that his righteousness gain a foothold in this world, that his ways become the goal of a well-lived life, not the self-aggrandizing or the pulverizing of the norms for right living that seem to hold the highest places of honor in our world.
Next, there is the need for mercy, without which no one can expect to achieve any degree of holiness. It is necessary because it is one of the chief attributes of God himself, his mercy towards us seen as everlasting. It is one of the foremost attributes of God, expressed beautifully in the Book of Exodus, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” As beneficiaries of his mercy, we are to show the same mercy to others. If we fail, then we fail not only in mercy, but in holiness.
The sixth beatitude draws our attention to the clean of heart, probably best understood by another translation “pure of heart.” The phrase would have the seeker of holiness be pure in his or her search, never deviating, never distracted, never divided. In other words, nothing dilutes or diverts the singular quest for saintliness. Those clean of heart remain steadfast and unswayed by the wants of the world, singularly focused on the ways of God.
Next are the peacemakers, a term that needs little explanation, especially in a world where peace is rare and where division is commonplace. It is important to see that the word used is peacemaker, meaning that the blessing comes more to the person who makes peace than to the person who happens to live peacefully. These saintly people are the ones who build bridges instead of walls, return good for evil, and welcome one and all, not only those of the same clan or clique.
Lastly, there are those persecuted for the sake of righteousness, a recognition that those who choose to walk the way of Christ will never be free from persecution in a world that is so contrary to the mission of the Galilean Teacher. Instead, those faithful to Jesus in their words and in their ways can expect exclusion, ridicule, and disdain, if for no other reason than they expose by their lives the waywardness of the wicked.
We see, then, that the Eight Beatitudes are steps on the ladder to saintliness. Yes, the climb is steep, but it is the only way to ascend to the ranks of the saints. As we honor those who have ascended because they have stayed on the way, we are reminded that it is not impossible. On the contrary, as the whiskey priest realized on his way to execution, it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. “It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage.”
–Jeremy Myers
