The Beatitudes constitute the heart of the Gospel and the most faithful portrait of Jesus. In this commentary on the Sunday Gospel, Friar Luciano Audisio invites us to contemplate them not as an unattainable ideal, but as the revelation of Christ’s way of life and as a promise addressed to those who experience poverty, weeping, and fragility. Where the world sees a limit, God begins His Kingdom.
The gaze of Jesus that recreates dignity
Today the Word places us before one of the best-known and, at the same time, most demanding texts of the Gospel: the Beatitudes. We often hear them as if they were a beautiful spiritual poem or a lofty ideal, but Jesus proclaims them not as an unreal dream, but as a concrete description of His own life and as an invitation to enter into His way of existence.
The Gospel tells us that Jesus sees the multitude. He does not look at them from afar or with indifference. He looks at them with a gaze that recreates, that discovers in each person a dignity greater than their wounds. Jesus sees not only what we are today, but what we can become in the love of God. And from that gaze, He goes up the mountain, sits down as a Teacher, and begins to teach us not only with words, but with His own life.
Blessed are the poor: when God becomes our strength
When Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” He is not praising misery or suffering in themselves. He is showing us His own path. He is the truly poor one, the one who empties Himself to the extreme, the one who even gives up His last breath on the cross.
Therefore, this beatitude is a word especially directed to all who feel they can no longer go on, to those who live tired, exhausted, without strength, as if they lack the air to continue. To them Jesus says: you are not alone, the Kingdom of Heaven is yours. When there is no strength left, God Himself becomes our strength.
Jesus also calls Himself blessed in weeping. He wept for Jerusalem, He wept for His people, He wept for the rejection of God’s love. There are tears that are not a sign of weakness, but of a heart that truly loves. And to those who weep, Jesus does not promise a superficial consolation, but the greatest gift: the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who does not magically take away the pain, but inhabits it and transforms it from within.
Jesus also presents Himself as meek. Not as someone weak, but as one who renounces defending Himself with violence, as one who accepts being stripped without responding with hatred. In His passion, Jesus is the meek one who does not return evil for evil. And to these meek ones, something surprising is promised: they will inherit the earth. That is, what seems lost, God returns as a gift. What is given for love, God transforms into inheritance.
The Kingdom that acts in weakness and fidelity
And so we could go through each of the Beatitudes: in all of them appears the face of Jesus. He hungers and thirsts for the will of the Father. He is merciful. He is pure of heart. He is the one who builds peace by giving His own life. The Beatitudes are not first a list of what we have to do, but a revelation of who He is and of who we can become united to Him.
The last words are especially strong: “Blessed are those who are persecuted.” Jesus knows that following Him does not free us from conflict, rejection, or incomprehension. He Himself was persecuted, rejected, condemned. But He tells us that even there, when we are wounded for being faithful to the Gospel, the Kingdom is already acting. Where the world sees failure, God sees fidelity. Where the world sees loss, God sees the seed of new life.
The Beatitudes do not promise us a life without a cross, but they do promise us a life with meaning, a life inhabited by God. They tell us that the Kingdom begins not when we are strong, but when we let God sustain us in our weakness. Not when we have everything clear, but when we trust even in the midst of darkness.
Let us ask the Lord today to grant us to look at our own life in the light of the Beatitudes. May we recognize in our poverty, in our tears, in our struggles, not only limits, but places where He wants to make Himself present. And that, walking with Jesus, we may learn that true happiness is not in having more, but in letting ourselves be loved more. Because, ultimately, blessed is he who lets Christ live in him.
