people praise you or condemn you, they do so ignorantly and unjustly. Therefore, when Jesus stood before Pilate, before the human judge, and was commanded to defend himself, he owed it to himself to remain silent [see John 18:33—19:16]. No matter what he would have said, men could not have understood him justly, any more than a jury can know the heart and truth of the men whom they must judge. Because only God knows us, only He can render us justice; without God, your existence and mine would be immersed in the injustice of what other people think of us, and the injustice of our opinion of ourselves. We would be helpless victims of the ignorant flattery and ignorant condemnation from others and from ourselves without truth or hope.
But there is something in God for my loneliness greater even than His knowledge or His justice. For in God I know not only that I am truly known, and by this knowledge truly judged, but that I am understood. Even though God condemns me, I know that he understands me. For the person of the Son Himself became flesh like us, suffering in Himself every agony the human soul can encounter. Therefore He who knows every hypocrisy and evil in our thoughts, knows these from our point of view. And He also knows the secret beauty of the nature He gave us. He knows the deep recesses of goodness in us of which we ourselves have not the slightest knowledge.
Also God’s knowledge of us is a loving knowledge—a knowledge which does not judge us from a distance but which also understands our inner struggles from our own viewpoint, and which creates in us the goodness we do not have alone. God’s knowledge saves and redeems us, so that if once you know that you are truly known to God, you not only experience justice, but you also experience mercy and redemption. You see that our loneliness from one another is not an evil to be overcome or a despair from which we try to escape, but is rather the sign within us which turns us to our true Lord, to Him who truly knows and judges and redeems.
1 Punctuation is altered, and a phrase is omitted.
Sermon 2: Beatitudes1
Seeing the crowds, he [Jesus] went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
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. . . .” [Matthew 5:1–12]
Blessed are the poor, the sorrowful, the hungry and the persecuted.
These statements attributed to Jesus seem confused, if not nonsensical, when we look at them by themselves. How can poverty or sorrow or hunger or persecution be the condition for blessedness, for beatitude, for perfect happiness?
The meaning of these beatitudes becomes a bit clearer when we remember the New Testament emphasis on love as giving and receiving. When churches address affluent people like us, they tend to talk about the importance of giving, of attending to the poor, the sick and the oppressed. The assumption always is that these teachings refer to other people whom we are called to help.
What churches have not made clear is that the primary human relation to love does not consist in giving but in receiving. In fact the New Testament is wholly preoccupied with God’s loving the world that people may receive. Beatitude is to receive the fullness of life.
What Jesus’s beatitudes do is to make clear the indispensable condition for receiving. We cannot receive unless we lack, unless we are in need. The need does not have to be excruciating, though it may be. But if we are to know the kind of love emphasized in the New Testament, the love that constantly gives nourishment and strength and order for a true life, we can only receive that gifted nourishment to the extent that we need it. Otherwise the gift will not touch us deeply, and receiving the gift will not arouse in us much gratitude or much life.
What Jesus’s beatitudes say is simply this: Blessed are those who receive into the depths and center of themselves. And only those can receive into the depths and center of themselves who are impoverished there, or who are sorrowful there, or who are hungry there, or who are persecuted there.
In other words, if you are not willing to be one with your neediness, you cannot be blessed.
Now this opens a very deep problem in human nature: the problem of concealing and hiding our own suffering and neediness from ourselves. That is a fundamental human capacity, but it is fatal for those relationships and for that creativity which nourish need. In other words, it is fatal for the love that involves the communication of energy or strength or nourishment into need.
Let me give you an example. The poor of Brazil exist in a condition of such poverty and so much sickness that life for them should be an intolerable nightmare. As you may know, great efforts are are being made, not very successfully, to teach them literacy and to arouse them into revolutionary cadres.
What is so extraordinary among these people is the way in which they do not address their suffering. According to many accounts, what they do is to see their suffering as one of the given necessities in the nature of things. But for them that means that their suffering belongs to the cosmos. That is the character of external reality. It stands for them like a vast Himalayan immensity which tends to swallow them up.
As you can realize such a way of construing their situation means that their suffering does not really belong to their level of reality. There is suffering in them, but that which produces their suffering has, as it were, the fixed immensity of God. Not only does this make it absurd for them to do anything about their incredible suffering. This interpretation also has the effect of taking their suffering out of their own hands. They are not responsible for it. They themselves, as persons, have no creative role in relation to it. In exactly this way they deaden some of the outrage, some of the exasperation, some of the degradation involved in their suffering.
Let me turn from this realm of the world to our own lives for another example. American middle-class youth are taught to look for themselves, ahead of themselves, away from themselves. They are taught to locate their real being in what they will become, and they learn to lose themselves in this or that “interest,” in this or that ambition, in this or that distraction. In fact, for many college students, if you deprive them of “interests” and diversions and at the same time if for a moment they stop projecting themselves into the future, they become very distressed.
How are these people trained to live in this way? How can people live out of touch with their specific present? I have come to the conclusion that there does not operate here simply the positive attraction of the future, or of this or that object of interest. There is also working in them a negative feeling of dislike for what they are now.
