Over the last few weeks we have heard “The Beatitudes” of Jesus once again. It is his great message to us: “Blessed are you who are poor because yours is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you who cry now because you will laugh … but woe to you the rich because you have already received comfort”… I wonder what effect his words made on that multitude of poor and undesirable people who had gathered to listen to him and I wonder what effect his message has on us today. He has turned our values upside down like tossing a pancake and given his blessing to those who are considered worthless in the world of today. It is the epiphany of God in the poor.
While visiting the sick this week I approached a woman who was bedridden to give her communion. She had had a stroke caused by diabetes, I saw the suffering face of Christ in her suffering. Her tears were precious pearls like the drops of water we put in the chalice. “This is my blood shed for you, and this is the value of your suffering that together with mine is a garment of salvation for the entire world.”
The value of human life
We live in a time when the value of human life has been deformed and eclipsed. The value of being is replaced by the ambition of having and the search for ephemeral pleasure. We are swopping the transcendent and eternal for the temporal and ephemeral. When we lose the sense of God and this transcendent dimension, we end up blurring the most authentic value of human life – we belong to God. We cannot believe we have the right to dominate life to, possess it or manipulate it.
God in Jesus Christ has manifested the truth and beauty which is within every person. It is an epiphany of the good that there is in human beings – an epiphany of God in the poor. God the Father, through the incarnation of his Son, has joined every person on this earth to Christ and to each other, no matter how precarious their situation is. The kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor and shows how valuable every person is. Every person is God´s creation and receives his love constantly. And I try to be an instrument of that love for the poor, when I pay my weekly visit to the sick.
Darío Marote