We’ve just heard the Beatitudes. It’s a big moment.

“Jesus went up on the mountain.” If any of you have been to Galilee, you’ll know that what’s identified the Mount of the Beatitudes above the Lake of Galilee is not a mountain at all. It’s a gentle hill. But St Matthew calls it a mountain, because he’s presenting Jesus as the new Moses. Moses, we know, did go up a real mountain, Mt Sinai, and there for the people at the foot of the mountain “downloaded” from God the 10 commandments. Jesus, who is the Son of the Father, one with him, goes up the mountain to bring to his disciples the 8 beatitudes. They don’t annul the 10 commandments, but they are different. They are not “shalls” and “shall nots”. In the beatitudes Jesus is downloading for us the beatitude, the happiness, the joy of his Father of the Holy Trinity, bringing it so close to us that it can flower in our hearts and spread its fragrance around us.  It’s ancient wisdom and simple observation that everyone of us wants to be happy. The big debate is, what really makes us happy, really happy? This, dare we say is Jesus’ contribution to the debate.

The Beatitudes are of course a shock, a paradox, a revolution. If we were honest, we’d say the Lord got happiness wrong.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit”. Come on! “Blessed are those who have a constant WiFi connection, the latest smartphone, or a 4×4 and enough to their account that they can pop overseas whenever they want.

“Blessed are those who mourn”. Wrong again: blessed, rather, are those who know how to have a fun time and be constantly entertained. Blessed are those who don’t let the distress of others complicate their lives.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. No, no: blessed are those put number one first.

“Blessed are the pure in heart”. Well, I’ll stop there…

Imagine you’re a catechist – if you’re a parent of course you already are – and had to give a class on the beatitudes.

Could you ask the children to draw or paint the beatitudes? Why not? Enterprising people have. The beatitudes are sometimes called Jesus’ self-portrait and they tell us what we will look like once Christ has been reproduced in us.

Could you make a song of the beatitudes? Yes, why not? People have. It’s a good way of getting them by heart.

Again, could we think of people in the Bible in whom Christ has grown and matured and come to full flower? Beatitudes with faces and legs. Today’s readings are about the people whose company God likes, the people in whom the Father sees his Son. According to Zephaniah, they’re the hidden, the humble, the lowly, those who research the Lord’s will every day and don’t tell lies.. According to the Psalm, they’re the oppressed, the hungry, prisoners, the bowed down, the stranger, the orphan and the widow. According to St Paul looking at the Christian community in the city of Corinth, he saw, not the well-off, or the well-bred, or the well-groomed, not the movers and shakers, but the non-worldly-wise, the powerless, the needy. According to the Gospel – well, we know – God’s darlings are the poor in spirit and all the rest, the Marys and Josephs, the Zechariahs and Elizabeths, the Simeons and Annas, the shepherds and the God-seeking magi, the Mary Magdalenes, the Zacchaeus’ and Bartimaeus, the widows of Nain and so forth.

In our catechising, we could just tell stories: tell of the poor in spirit, the peacemakers and so on who we’ve come across.

Did you see from 2021 in Myanmar the footage of the religious sister, Sr Ann Rose, kneeling before the armed police and the young people, begging them not to kill and saying, if you must kill, kill me? That went viral.

Blessed are the peacemakers. An elderly French priest once told me his story. At 18 he was a seminarian, living in a French village. World War II was on. The French Resistance had killed some of the occupying power, and in revenge the enemy were going to shoot 10 villagers. He was one of them. They were lined up. He thought, what a pity to die so young. Then suddenly a German-speaking nun appeared. She went up to the German officer. She said to him, “If you do this, you’ll have a bad conscience for the rest of your life”. He listened and countermanded the planned executions.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. In Shetland once, I visited an elderly parishioner. He had never married. He had been a merchant seaman and sailed all over the world, but always came back. Now he lived in a small cottage – the door was never locked. He sat by his peat fire, with a cat for company. He was a man at peace with life and God. He had known every priest in Shetland since the early 1950s and spoke well and kindly of each of them, even of the difficult ones. Then he reached up to the mantlepiece and took down a small book. It was the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. I read this, he said. He lived it, I’d say. He was a beatitude sitting in an armchair, poor in spirit and pure in heart.

Last story: a now deceased monk of my community. He had not had an easy life, he had a humiliating medical condition. No wonder he was grumpy and prickly and aggrieved. But at the end something shifted in him. Jesus broke through in his heart, we could say. I went to see him one evening. His monastic cell was very small. He was sitting on the bed with a smile on his face. I said, You look very cheerful. Yes, he said, what else is there to be? Heavenly trumpets must have been blowing when he said that. It was a huge victory. There he was, a gently smiling beatitude sitting on a bed: the joy of God downloaded in him.

Yes, let’s look out for the beatitudes around us.

St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 1 February 2026