Today’s gospel, the Beatitudes, launches the Sermon on the Mount.  Over the next 4 Sundays we will hear from key parts of this ‘Sermon’, where Matthew outlines the appropriate lived response to the proclamation of the kingdom and its arrival in the ministry of Jesus.  The Sermon is the charter of the kingdom, the law of discipleship, and authoritative interpretation of the Torah for Christians and a compendium of the essential teaching of Jesus.  

The demands of The Sermon on the Mount cannot be lived on their own, they are designed to make us depend on God and depend on each other.  The Beatitudes are the lens from which we interpret the whole of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel.

The Beatitudes are a summons to live in the present in the way that will make sense in God’s promised future.  They seem to be upside down, but we are called to dare to believe that it is actually the right way up.  The Beatitudes are about an upside-down world, in human terms.  Jesus is announcing the Gospel, Good News.  He is saying that God is working in a fresh, new and different way and this is what it looks like.   

Let us as a parish Community be a community where among us there are those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who hunger and thirst for what is right, who are peacemakers.