A word about the Gospel beatitudes. The first bliss

Exclusive. The commandments of beatitude contained in the Gospel of Matthew (5:3-12) are a set of teachings pronounced by Jesus Christ during the Sermon on the Mount. These verses describe a series of blessings that emphasize the qualities and attitudes that are valued in the Kingdom of Heaven. "Bliss" comes from the Latin word "beatus" which means blessed or happy. Each beatitude begins with the words "Blessed," followed by a description of a specific virtue or circumstance that leads to divine favor.

The Beatitudes are often considered a profound guide for Christians, emphasizing humility, compassion, righteousness, and a deep spiritual connection with God. They encourage believers to adopt a perspective that values ​​qualities such as meekness, mercy, and peacemaking. These teachings capture the essence of Christian ethics and are a guide to a blessed and purposeful life according to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The Beatitudes offer a road map for living a life pleasing to God. They encourage humility, compassion, and a strong desire for justice. Following these teachings, Christians can strive to live a life that is not only pleasing to God, but also has a positive impact on those around them.

This expression had a powerful meaning of "divine joy and perfect happiness" for the people of Christ's day. In other words, the Lord said that "divinely happy and blessed are those who possess these inner qualities." While speaking of present "bliss," each utterance also promised a future reward.

The precepts of beatitude consist of three elements: the proclamation of the blessing, the quality of life, and the reason why the recipient should be considered blessed. The first element is found in the word beatitudes (see Ps. 1:1), which introduces each beatitude. The second element describes not different groups of people, but a complex picture of the person who will inherit the Kingdom of Christ. The third element looks ahead to some aspect of the future kingdom.

After each spiritual trait, Jesus Christ identified the result it would bring—the blessings it would bring. These blessings will reach their full fulfillment in the Kingdom of God, but these blessings also have an aspect for this life on earth.

We explore the Beatitudes as a call to character transformation, guiding Christians to embody the teachings of Christ in their daily lives amidst imperfections and trials.

When we begin to reveal the teachings of the Savior in the Beatitudes, we find ourselves at the center of the Christian ethos. It's not about ticking off a list of good things. It is about a radical transformation of the heart. It is about becoming like Christ.

The roadmap for this transformation: They show us what it means to live as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, right here, right now. They show us what it means to be blessed, not as the world understands blessing, but as God does.

Many of them may seem contradictory at first glance. How can a person who is sad or persecuted be blessed or happy? Let's take a deeper look.

The average person living in a developed country today enjoys a level of comfort and security unknown to those who lived in previous centuries. Compared to people living in poorer countries, people living in wealthier countries have access to a greater number of resources, utilities, opportunities, amenities, and a greater range of services.

But has prosperity brought lasting peace and happiness? Feelings of disappointment, emptiness and dissatisfaction dominate the world. Why do people who have so much feel so unsatisfied?

Along with the search for happiness, people long for a peaceful life. The pursuit of peace, happiness and well-being contributed to the development of the self-help movement. Many people have been helped by adding exercise, rest, etc. to their lives. Others have found temporary excitement or relief in stimulants and anti-depressants. But neither self-help nor drugs and alcohol can open the source of true happiness.

There is a spiritual component to happiness that many people overlook. Our Creator gave a guide for life, the Holy Bible. Here God explains a dimension that is lacking in human knowledge—the spiritual element.

In the Gospel of Matthew, we read the first great speech that the Lord addresses to the people gathered on the gentle hills around the Sea of ​​Galilee. "Jesus, seeing the crowd," writes St. Matvii - went upstairs. And when He sat down, His disciples came to Him. Then he opened his mouth and taught them" (5:1-2). Jesus, as the new Moses, as one of the preachers rightly noted, takes his place on the "cathedral", which is the mountain (but no longer Sinai, as it was with Saint Moses), and calls "blessed" people, poor in spirit, sad, merciful , thirsty for justice, pure in heart, persecuted (cf. Mt. 5, 3–10).

This is not a new ideology, but a teaching that comes from above and concerns the human condition, exactly the one that the Lord, incarnating, wanted to accept in order to save man. Therefore, Christ addresses His Sermon on the Mount to the whole world, to the present and the future; it can be understood and lived only by imitating the Savior of the world.

The Beatitudes are a new life program that helps you free yourself from the false values ​​of the world and open yourself up to true blessings, present and future. When God comforts, satisfies the thirst for justice, wipes away the tears of sadness, it means that, in addition to a tangible reward, He opens the Kingdom of Heaven for everyone. The precepts of beatitude are the realization of the Cross and Resurrection in the lives of students. They reflect the life of the Son of God, who allowed himself to be persecuted and despised, even to the point of death, so that people could be saved.

An ancient hermit writes: "Blessings are a gift of God, and we should be very grateful to Him for them and for the benefits that flow from them, that is, the kingdom of heaven in the next age, consolation here, the fullness of all good things and God's mercy (...) in a word, that we may become the image of Christ on earth" (Peter of Damascus).

The very history of the Church, the history of Christian holiness, is a commentary on the Gospel of the Beatitudes, because, as St. Paul: “God chose… the weak to overthrow the strong; "God has separated the things that are not noble in the world, and the things that are despised, and the things that are not, to destroy the things that are" (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). Therefore, the Church is not afraid of poverty, contempt, persecution in society, which is often attracted by material well-being and worldly power. St. Augustine reminds us that "it is not enough to endure evil, but it is necessary to endure it for the name of Jesus, not only with a peaceful soul, but also with joy."

Christianity includes emotions such as love, joy and concern for others; and it includes rules—the law of God as explained by Christ and the apostles. In the Bible we find that the ultimate goal of Christianity is not temporary happiness. This is something more!

The goal of an individual Christian is the transformation (conversion, or in Greek - metanoia, which can also be understood as renewal through the action of grace) of the mind - to become a new creation that thinks and lives in the same way as Jesus Christ. It was He who explained the spiritual traits of character that cause a state of joy that persists regardless of circumstances and in spite of them.

There are also situations in our lives when we are forced to suffer, either when we experience injustice or when we suffer because we recognize our belonging to Christ. Then it is especially difficult for us to hear him say: "Blessed are the persecuted for the truth, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven," and also: "Blessed are you when they reproach you, and persecute you, and speak falsely." And the words with which the Savior of the world ends the eight beatitudes seem completely unacceptable: "Rejoice and rejoice, for great is your reward in heaven."

In this situation, many of us may be tempted to say that the Beatitudes and the entire Sermon on the Mount are for us an unattainable ideal to which we can only "jump higher or lower." Others may think that only a select few can fulfill them, and we should be content with keeping only God's ten commandments from the prophet Moses.

However, in reality, such thoughts are not true. The God-man, being on the mountain, spoke his words not only to the disciples, but to all Christians of the following centuries.

After the Beatitudes, while continuing the Sermon on the Mount, Christ said: "Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt. 5, 48). This means that everyone, without exception, is called to fulfill these Beatitudes and the entire Sermon on the Mount, and in each of the Beatitudes spoken by Jesus Christ, the personal name of each of us is hidden. The God-man wants to assure each of us that we can be happy in the midst of our poverty when we stand by His side and look to Him. He is a realist and does not promise us that all material and spiritual poverty will disappear from our lives. He wants to save us in the midst of these difficult experiences. We must come to believe that our only and greatest happiness is Jesus Christ himself, not that we have everything and will not fail.

It is also worth noting that when we begin to realize one blessing, we suddenly notice that it is connected to the next. And they all form one whole.

The blessings that open the public activity of the Lord Jesus Christ have an interesting property: each of the blessings has its symmetrical counterpart. However, the symmetry here is not that for every positive blessing there is a corresponding "negative" blessing: it is that for every blessing that describes a person's good inner disposition, there is a corresponding external attitude that is worthy of praise as well. It can be represented as follows:

Consider the first Beatitude.

1. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

The poor in spirit feel deep spiritual poverty and understand their worthlessness before God. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them because they seek it, and therefore find it and abide in it. This virtue is opposed to the pride of the Pharisee, which led him to thank God that he was not like other people, and to despise and reject the Kingdom of Heaven. There must be emptiness before fullness appears, so poverty of spirit precedes wealth and grace in the Kingdom of God.

A sense of personal relevance and self-worth is not necessary to experience the happiness that Jesus Christ described. He said that the "poor in spirit" are blessed, for "theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 5:3).

Why do those who are humble find happiness that often eludes the self-confident?

Those who are poor in spirit have no illusions of pride. They admit to God their personal inadequacy and human weakness. They look to Him as the Source of everything. They rely on God, not themselves or others.

This trust will be blessed, and they will find ultimate satisfaction in serving with Christ in His Kingdom.

The "poor in spirit" are those who rely on God's grace. We personally acknowledge our spiritual bankruptcy before God. This is the tax collector in the temple, who beats his chest and says: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner" (Lk. 18:9-14).

None of us can truly fill the emptiness and dissatisfaction that manifests as unhappiness in this world. Ultimately, that void is a place that God has to fill, and we cannot fill it with anything else, at least not for any length of time. We cannot create lasting spiritual joy, and we cannot find it in any external circumstances. We must recognize that the Creator is the source of all good things and go to Him.

Those who turn to God with humility and repentance begin the path to the Kingdom of God and eternal life. Having the spiritual character traits described in the Commandments of Bliss will allow us to experience bliss and happiness now and forever.

The man of God expressed the first of his beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." You could say that this would be enough in itself. Many people believe that their life depends on an abundance of goods. Therefore, they try to accumulate as much of this product as possible.

If someone is "poor in spirit", then it can be seen from life that he thinks completely differently. He does not hope to have abundant wealth, but he hopes to believe that God surrounds him with His love. He does not collect treasures on earth, because they can easily be lost. However, by giving alms to the poor and doing other works of mercy, he accumulates treasures in heaven, where they are safe and truly the "Kingdom of Heaven" belongs to him. He does not necessarily have to be materially poor. He is free in relation to money and is not its slave. It is clearly visible in his life that he does not rely on himself, on his strength and intelligence, but expects everything from God with faith. If one has this conviction in his heart, he is able to realize all other Bliss and then feel happy.

We must also remember that Jesus Christ preaches not only the Beatitudes. He lives by these Beatitudes. Looking at Him, we can understand what it means to be poor in spirit, meek and merciful, one who cries, one who hungers and thirsts for justice, one who is pure in heart, one who makes peace or one who is persecuted, and find blessings in all of this. When the God-man pronounces the precepts of beatitude, he does not preach a theory, but speaks of his life experience and also tells us: "Follow Me and follow Me!"

The Gospel commandments of bliss reveal to us the true meaning of life, a new dimension of happiness and security. These blessings, which can sometimes seem too lofty, even superhuman, are actually tailored to our earthly dimension.

Jesus Christ wants to assure us today that we can be blessed, that is, happy in the midst of our poverty, when we stand on his side and look at his happiness. Look at the poverty of His birth, at the fullness of His mercy to sinners and those in need, at His rejection and persecution even to the cross. It was He who became for each of us an example of how to become blessed in the midst of all experimental human miseries.

When we are filled with doubts as to whether it is really possible to be happy in the situations mentioned in the Precepts of Bliss, we must realize that the true cause of contentment, our happiness or unhappiness, is not outside, but in our hearts. Maybe we know someone who won a lot of money and was not happy at all and even tried to commit suicide. Maybe we know someone who is really poor but feels happy. The real reason for our happiness or unhappiness lies in our heart.

The Savior of the world clearly speaks about this: "All evil proceeds from within and defiles a person" (Mark 7:23). Only Christ knows what is broken in our hearts, and only He has the power to fix it. So let us consider the Eight Beatitudes and the entire Sermon on the Mount as a promise of the Savior and believe that it will be fulfilled by the power of Christ. Now we need to look to Christ and ask Him to help us understand all this and change our hearts.

Hieromonk Feofan (Skorobagatov) of Polotsk,

doctor of theological sciences.