Today’s readings: Apocalypse 7, 2-4. 9-14; 1 John 3,1-3; Matthew 5, 1-12.

In our common imagination, we have always been brought up to think of saints as heroes, people of heroic faith who have lived out fully and impeccably their commitment to Christian life. In all honesty, this is not what transpires from the Scriptures, from the great spiritual texts, and from the demands of the gospel on daily life.

The feast of all saints is the celebration of common folk like us who have crossed over to the other side of history, many of whom have sweated their way through. In celebrating them, what we celebrate is strictly speaking not their heroic or extraordinary faith, but our own conviction, we who still journey in life, that what we hold on to as our belief is not illusory.

John’s vision in the Apocalypse is of countless crowds of people with no distinction whatsoever between them who lived honestly to God and to themselves and whose lives “have been through the great persecution” and also who “have washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb”. Perhaps we need to ‘secularise’ a little bit our ideas of holiness, in the sense of rendering it more down to earth.

Honestly enough, and standing by certain biographies of saints, many a time we were led to imagine and speak of holiness as unreachable, if not to the very chosen few. The Second Vatican Council itself dedicates an entire chapter to the universal call to holiness. Holiness has to do with the ordinary, not with the extraordinary.

The gospel of the Beatitudes speaks of the criteria that make people blessed, or happy: being poor in spirit, gentle, thirsty for what is right, merciful, pure in heart, and peacemakers. These criteria constitute the ordinariness of life, the golden rule of healthy relationships and of our peaceful coexistence. They shouldn’t be taken as the exceptions to the rule, but as the rule of what is basically demanded of us humans.

Perhaps that is the reason why the Sermon on the Mount goes beyond the boundaries of different religions and has always gathered consensus even among atheists, agnostics and humanists. Yet it seems so difficult to follow, and we all, one time or other, fail to uphold its values.

There are versions of the Bible that translate the Beatitudes in terms of happiness. But Jesus is speaking of something deeper, because blessedness and happiness are not the same thing. We are all made for happiness, and most probably in whatever we do we always keep happiness in focus. But it may not be the same with holiness.

The Beatitudes are God’s answer to some of our greatest questions. ‘Beatitude’ means blessedness, and blessedness is always our end, whether our means is pleasure or power or riches or virtue or wisdom. Everyone seeks blessedness, but not everyone finds it, because not everyone knows where it is. St Augustine says: “Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it.”

The values preached in the Sermon on the Mount are not man-made. Jesus is not proposing some form of exalted ethical teaching in this sermon. He is speaking of something much deeper than the Decalogue, and hence the demands of the Beatitudes are of a higher standard. As Peter Kreeft writes in his book Back to Virtue, the Sermon on the Mount not only comes from Jesus but also leads us to Jesus.

At the end of the day the sermon can sound like a list of the nicest of ideals, if it were not for the concluding beatitude, which breaks radically with the rest and which in contrast to the rest is shocking: “Blessed are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account.”

Without this, the rest may even sound idyllic. With such an ending, the Beatitudes become part of the gospel, good news, acceptable to some, uncomfortable for others. This is the double-edged character of this sermon.