Esgetology

“The Be Happy Attitudes,” they’ve been called. The opening sayings of the Sermon on the Mount, today’s Gospel, are usually referred to as the Beatitudes. It’s from the repeating word Blessed, which in Latin is Beati. Beati pauperes spiritu. “Blessed are the spiritual paupers.” I doubt that’s what people mean when they say they’re spiritual but not religious.

Robert Schuller popularized the idea that blessed is really an attitude. In his book The Be Happy Attitudes, Schuller writes, “Blessed literally means ‘happy.’ So … you can be happy if you will discover the eight positive attitudes given to us by Jesus in the Beatitudes.”

I want you to be happy. But blessedness is something far deeper than happiness. Blessedness transcends happiness. Blessedness helps us survive all the unhappy things. Blessedness is not an attitude. It’s a condition, a state, a status…

You’ve been searching all your life for what will make you happy, but it has only led to dissipation, degradation, disappointment, dissatisfaction. Here is the Lord offering you the forgiveness of your sins without cost. Here is your Father inviting you to the true happiness, the happiness for which God made us: to be with Him, to enjoy Him, and to receive His creation as a gift.

It seems of course too good to be true. But this passage from Isaiah, chapter 55, is of course part of a larger context. In chapter 53 we have the Suffering Servant, the death of the Messiah where He pays for our ransom not with gold or silver but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.

Blessed Are the Losers

The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity