“Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.”

When was the last time you leaped for joy? Not just when was the last time you were really happy, but when was the last time you actually were so thrilled, so elated, that you were jumping up and down? Maybe it was because of a Christmas present as a child, or a great surprise, like finding out you were pregnant for the first time – or being told by your adult children that you were going to be a grandparent for the first time. Whatever the reason, it almost certainly wasn’t one of the ones given by Christ today as reasons to leap for joy.

Christ tells us that we should leap for joy because of being poor; because of being hungry; because we weep; because people hate, exclude, and insult us; and because they denounce our names as evil. I at least have never leaped for joy for any of those reasons!

He is teaching us that the greatest joy possible is not to be found in this life, but in the next, when we can experience the truest joy of being in God’s presence for all of eternity. Today we see how and why it is that Heaven is our real goal, and what the path is to get there.

I asked a kindergarten class one time, “How can we get to Heaven?” I thought they would be the typical answers about being a good boy or girl. One particularly astute boy told me, though, “You have to die!” He was right, more right even than he knew. I love to tell the children stories about the saints, about those great men and women who both lived and died in such a way as to be able to spend eternity with God in Heaven. One such saint who comes to mind is St. Ignatius of Antioch. He was the first martyr (saint who is killed for his or her faith in Christ) after the writing of the New Testament. On his way to Rome to be executed for his faith in Christ, he wrote a letter to the Christians there in Rome making it clear that they were not to stand in his way.

          “Allow me to become food for the wild beasts,” he wrote, “through which it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.” He tells them that if the wild beasts will not devour him right away, he will egg them on until they tear the flesh from his limbs. Here indeed was a man who was not afraid of hate, exclusion, insult, and much worse yet!

          Many people today say that they would like the Church to find some more relatable saints, saints whom they could more easily imitate in their daily lives – saints who were more ordinary. Which of us, after all, runs the danger of being fed by Roman soldiers to the wild beasts in the Coliseum? As understandable as this desire is, it misses the point of the saints. The Church holds them up for us not only so that we might imitate their lives, but so that we might be inspired by their heroic example. (Although we might face the ferocity of different kinds of wild beasts in places like social media.)

          Too often, I fear, the desire for more “relatable” models of holiness comes from despair over the possibility of holiness. It is easy for us to think that true holiness – the kind attained by men and women like St. Ignatius of Antioch and called for by Christ in the Gospel – is not really possible any more (if it ever was in the first place). We want a religion that is easy, a religion that does not make demands, a religion that affirms everyone just as they are rather than calling them to greatness. The whole point of the saints is that they did not lead ordinary lives, but rather lives of heroic virtue. They went to great extremes to live the Gospel, like what our Lord describes today. They were precisely the sort of people who would jump up and down at the possibility of tears, hunger, and persecution.

           Our Lord tells us in the Gospel of Matthew: “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

Contrary to the very words of our Lord, though, many churches preach a universal doctrine of salvation in which salvation is meaningless because it is cheap, because it requires no changes to our lives and only exists to make us feel better about the choices that we have made.

The beatitudes that we here in the Gospel today are a strong challenge to that way of thinking. They are not the “You’re okay, I’m okay” attitude that conveys the relativism so common in our world (the idea that you need to live “your truth”). Rather, the beatitudes say that this life is tough, and that’s okay, because living the Gospel in its fullness, in all the ways that it challenges our lives, brings joy.

The beatitudes also make it clear that “it’s okay” because the Cross is not the end of the story. This, after all, is why St. Ignatius was so eager to face those wild beasts. St. Paul tells us today, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.” Because the Cross is never the end of the story, and because Christ rose from the dead after three days, neither are poverty, hunger, tears, hate, exclusion, and insult the end of the story. They are the path to eternal happiness and eternal life. Those who have died in a state of grace (and thus have truly “fallen asleep in Christ”), then, have not perished, but have endured a necessary step on the way to eternal salvation.

Again, Paul tells us, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.” If we have hoped in Christ for this life only, that means that we have expected faith in Him to make everything fine here and now – “you’re okay, I’m okay.” But if our hope in Christ is for this life only, then we are even more to be pitied than those who have never believed in Him in the first place. Why? Because we came so close and yet missed the point. Christ came not to make everything “okay” – to take away all suffering and pain in the world. No, He came, suffered, died, and rose from the dead to transform the experience of suffering in this life, into something that has the power to make us blessed like Him.

          We all know that the poverty, hunger, tears, insults, and exclusions that our Lord speaks about are real. You have experienced them in your own life, and seen them in the lives of those around you in a world tragically broken by sin. But the good news of the Gospel is that the power of evil, which held the world captive from the first sin of Adam until the Resurrection of Christ, has been broken. What we see around us, while heartbreaking at times, is the last gasp of a dying foe. We are in the last act of the play of the history of salvation, the dramatic climax having past, and merely waiting for the last ends to be tied up – the final resolution.

          However, there is a danger here. We could think that we just need to suffer through this valley of tears, to grit our teeth and bear the sufferings until it is all over. But this is clearly not what Christ is telling us. He urges us to rejoice and leap for joy even now over the greatness of the reward promised to those who are faithful until the end. Longing and yearning for the life of the blessed to come transforms our whole existence even now. It gives us eyes to see the trials of this life in a new light.

          I said that the boy who recognized that to get to Heaven you have to die was more right than he realized. He meant the death that awaits us all at the end of our earthly lives, the one by which life is “changed, not ended,” in the beautiful words of the funeral Mass. But to die well at the end of your earthly life, you have to practice dying here and now, by dying to yourself every day in imitation of the martyrs, and rejoicing over the chances to suffer with and for Christ.

          This, then, is the challenge of the Beatitudes: to look upon the poverty, hunger, tears, insults, and exclusions of your life in a new way. This week, find one of those causes of suffering, and ask God to enable you to see it in a new way, as the place where He wants to meet you, as the place where He wants to transform your life, as the place where He wants you to long and yearn for the joy of His Son’s Resurrection. Blessed will you be then indeed, and your reward will be great in Heaven.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope

VI Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXV

Further reading on Heaven: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-heaven