People talk to their dogs, sometimes like they are human. Sometimes when our dog looks up dolefully at Anne she will ask her, “What do you want?” Long ago, I started responding for the dog, and I would answer, “Love, joy, peace, happiness, and a dog bone.” It has become just a sort of phrase for us. One day when our Bishop was talking to several of the clergy about a problem, he asked, “What does he want from me?” Not thinking and responding quickly, I said, “Love joy, peace, happiness and a dog bone.” You can imagine the look that I got from the Bishop. The Beatitudes revolve around our needs and wants.

The Beatitudes illustrate the essential core of Jesus’ teaching. Jesus speaks about potent issues: poverty that is both physical and spiritual, the mournful and desolate, the powerless, the hungry, those in need of mercy and peace, and the persecuted. At least one of these situations, if not two or more have touched each of us. Our hungers, our loneliness, our mourning, our times of powerlessness, and our poverties shape our lives. All are situations that need to be touched by healing.

The power of the Beatitudes is that they contrast our troubles with our dreams of fulfilled happiness. The Beatitudes also confront our ordinary vision and understanding of happiness. Perhaps life is not supposed to be this rat race that we’ve made it into. Fulfillment may not be the extrinsic rewards of money, power, and glamour. Perhaps true happiness invades our lives when we stop running from our suffering and pains, and embrace them, because there we can meet God.

The Beatitudes are radical because they turn everything upside down and inside out. In that sense they are also irritating. They are not really calm and logical, but outrageous. Jesus is teaching us to live in a way that contradicts our ordinary way. Technically the beatitudes are paradoxes that teach truth. With the beatitudes Jesus exposes a sharp foolishness and offers another way to live. As Paul says, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are...”

The beatitudes are a list of all our ambitions and needs. It is a poignant grouping of things everyone wants and no one fully possesses. They are a list of our common hopes and our common humiliations. Jesus suggests that what we need is to turn everything upside down and start again.

For most of us, it is easier to think about how to get what we want then to know exactly what we need. If we could thing about what we need we might have ears to hear Jesus. If we can listen to Jesus’ teachings in the beatitudes we will hear him speaking to our most basic needs. What is needed is community where there is love so that enemies, injustice, hunger and a lack of basic living needs do not enslave us and destroy us, but our relations in community bless us. Our most basic need is each other. If we need each other that teaches us to love each other.

The beatitudes have their foundation in a particular attitude about holiness that is essential to healthy community. The prophet Micah reduced that attitude to a simple statement: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” What makes Jesus’ statements about poverty, mourning, meekness, hunger, mercy, purity, peace, persecution, and faithfulness to him blessings is that woven through each of them is justice, kindness and humility. The long tradition of all the Law and the Prophets is summed up in an attitude of justice, kindness, and Godly humility. People who are just, kind and humble find themselves blessed in the extreme conditions of their lives. The beatitudes may be summed up with this beatitude: blessed are those who are just and kind, and who humbly trust God for they shall know the peace that passes understanding. Amen.