Explication
Every day
Biblical commentaries
This text, so often meditated on, always reaches us with the same existential relevance. Because humans, faced with the trials of life, injustices and the enigma of evil, constantly seek what can provide or guarantee them happiness.
The words spoken on the mountain by Jesus respond to this quest in an astonishing, even paradoxical, way. Indeed, they promise happiness in the very heart of unhappiness. They do not make, from the suffering endured, a meritorious path towards some future happiness, as dolorism may have conveyed. They do not call for a blissful attitude of resignation or submission.
They carry the promise that God hears our suffering and gives the strength to resist it. They thus outline the face of hope, not first of another world, but already of another world, here and now. In these verses, as in the entire Bible, this hope is not of the order of an easy and calm evidence, a sort of spiritual Coué method which would mask the harshness of the world, the fragility of our lives, the reality of our finitude. It is a lucid and creative hope which mobilizes against all the denials inflicted on happiness. A hope which “puts things into motion”, which puts us “on our feet”, as indicated by certain translations of the word “happy”, in fidelity to its Hebrew root. It is fundamentally the hope of a resurrection which crosses and pierces the shadows of the cross.
Other readings: 1 Kings 17, 1-6; PS: 120 (121)
