This week’s Christian living Beatitude is “Blessed are the meek.”
I picture Jesus, himself having been born in a manger to peasant parents, and who is later known as a carpenter from the rural town of Nazareth, preaching the Sermon on the Mount to a crowd of fellow Galilean Jews, who themselves likely were from a more working class part of society, and one of his messages that day was “Blessed are the meek”
I can only imagine what it must have felt like to hear that message that day when the people to whom he was speaking may have felt humiliated by their societal circumstances- their land was occupied by a foreign power, the Romans, which maintained the subservience of the Jewish people and their religious practices, even while the Jewish religion of the day was built around worship at an opulent temple with a high class of priests who would have been believed as being closer to God due to their privileges.
But Jesus’ message that day was that God’s love was for the meek, the people who don’t “hold the cards”, who don’t have the privilege of wealth or with all of the priestly trappings that would allegedly make them closer to God.
And then I think about how throughout history, how Jesus’ message has spread around the world, providing inspiration and comfort, but especially to oppressed peoples because of the hope that his message about God’s love brings to all, but especially to the “meek”.
And, as to Christian living, of course we know from other Gospel stories that Jesus did not lead his people solely by providing words of comfort but that he was also a servant of God who showed what righteous action in God’s name would look like when he flips over the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple. And, so holding those gospel stories together provides me with a great deal of inspiration and hope in a world filled with injustice.
