God Sister Teresa
A bishop, young at heart but now verging on elderly, said recently that he has for years been confronted by indignant grandparents. Total strangers, they are vexed at the poor quality of their grandchildren’s religious instruction, which leaves them unable to recite the Ten Commandments by heart.
Over time, he has perfected his reply: to ask these grandparents if they can recite the Beatitudes (the eight blessings given by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount) from memory; they can’t.
The bishop also stressed that the Beatitudes are far more important than the Commandments – because the latter are mostly negative and can have the undesired and possibly Pharisaic effect of giving individuals an inflated sense of their own virtue: ‘I never make unto myself any graven image, nor do I kill, steal or bear false witness, and these days I don’t even commit adultery.’
Whereas the Beatitudes, all of them, are positive. In Matthew’s Gospel, they are far more than a simple code of conduct, in that they take us to what should be the heart of our Christian way of life: love of God, love of neighbour, and our vital participation in the coming of God’s kingdom.
We all know the beatitude ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ Meekness is engraved in our memories because it is such a difficult word and yet we are all too likely to despise it.
After 2,000 years of Christianity, we should know better than to join the ancient Greeks in their underestimation of meekness. They were happy to accept it as meaning mild and gently friendly, so long as there was some compensating strength: it was fine for judges to be lenient, providing the laws were severe. And meekness is never mentioned as a quality possessed by any of their gods.
The OED’S entry for meek starts off with ‘soft, pliant, gentle, free from self-will…’ Few of us would dream of boasting that we have such attributes, for fear of being thought absurdly selfrighteous. The list continues with ‘piously humble and submissive’, and we stand back in panic and join the ancient Greeks.
I think that this is because human nature automatically shies away from lowliness and poverty. None of us wants to be in the position of a servant and therefore someone who is easily put upon and who has no rights. Jesus never hesitated to refer to himself as meek and humble of heart – so there is nothing shameful about it; on the contrary.
And because it is such an important part of his personality, we are introduced to the startling truth of the meekness – and indeed the humility – of God the Father. The theologian John Macquarrie wrote a book entitled The Humility of God (1978); it is well worth reading.