Beatitude (Part 1)

"The gateway to the Sermon on the Mount is the Beatitudes. They are God's answer to man's greatest question. Blessedness, beatitude, is what all of us are seeking all the time in and by everything we seek. Blessedness is always our end, whether our means is pleasure or power or riches or virtue or wisdom or honor or anything else. Blessedness is the summum bonum, 'the greatest good'. Everyone seeks it, but not everyone finds it, because not everyone knows where it is. Saint Augustine says, 'Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it.' Not everyone has a road map. Jesus here gives us the road map for our lives. This is the greatest of all treasure maps to the greatest of all treasures, and it is given to us absolutely free. It has to be a gift, for we would never have found life's most precious treasure on our own. Proof of this is the fact that the Beatitudes are shocking to us. They come like great jets of flame from the divine fire, solar storms on the surface of the sun of God.

The treasure they point us to is not just happiness, but blessedness. Some modern versions of the Bible translate the word makarios as 'happy'. This is a fundamental and disastrous mistake. In fact it includes three mistakes. For happy means to the modern reader (1) something subjective, a state of consciousness, a feeling. If you feel happy, you are happy. It also connotes (2) a temporary state, and (3) something dependent on fortune (hap is the Old English word for 'fortune' or 'chance'). Blessedness, on the other hand, is (1) an objective state, not a subjective feeling. So we can be mistaken about it, in fact, most of the world is. That's why Jesus has to teach us, even shock us. Blessedness is also (2) a permanent state and (3) dependent on God's grace and our choice, neither chance nor fortune."
~Peter Kreeft