Pilgrims of the Cross
The Beatitude of Persecution
by Jim Forest
I used to sing with my children the black spiritual that rose out of Jacob’s vision of the angel-filled ladder linking heaven and earth:
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,
Pilgrims of the Cross.Every rung goes higher, higher,
Every rung goes higher, higher,
Every rung goes higher, higher,
Pilgrims of the Cross.
Perhaps it’s from singing that lovely song so many times that I came to understand that the Beatitudes are an eight-runged ladder to heaven that starts with poverty of spirit and rise to the Cross and finally to the joy of the Resurrection.
In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount begins with the ten verses we know as the Beatitudes, or, as the Russians call them, “the commandments of blessedness.” With only a little effort, all the Beatitudes can be memorized. Once we learn them by heart, we carry within us for the rest of our lives a short summary of the teaching of Jesus Christ: the whole gospel in a grain of salt. The Beatitudes provide an entranceway, a glimpse of where we are going, and a map of how to get there.
According to tradition, the “mountain” on which Jesus announced the Beatitudes was in fact a massive hill near Capernaum, an ideal place for a large gathering. While our family was picnicking near the top of that hill in 1985, admiring the sweeping view of the Sea of Galilee, we found ourselves listening to a spirited black minister from Chicago explaining the Sermon on the Mount to a crowd of American pilgrims. The minister must have been 50 yards away but we heard his voice easily. It wasn’t hard to imagine a much larger crowd listening to Jesus teach in the same place 20 centuries before.
The Mount of the Beatitudes is linked with Mount Sinai, a barren fortress of stone in the southern Sinai desert, on the pinnacle of which Moses, amid flashes of lightning in a dense cloud, talked with God and received the tablets of the Law. But there are contrasts more striking than the difference between a green hill and a pinnacle of rock. On Sinai, only Moses was permitted to come near, while in Galilee, anyone who was curious was welcome to listen to the Son of God explain the principles of living in the Kingdom of God. Moses had to hide in the cleft of a rock to endure proximity to the glory of God. But on the Mount of the Beatitudes, God shows himself as the Son of Man. Infinity hides itself in that which is finite. The Uncreated Light is illumined by sunlight. The Maker of matter, the Source of all being, leaves footprints on the earth.
The Meaning of Blessed
“Then he began to speak and taught them,” writes Matthew. What we hear next is Jesus’ inaugural address.
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