The Eighth Beatitude
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| (Sermon on the Mount, Scenes from the Life of Christ (mosaic) by Byzantine School, (6th century); Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy) |
“The persecution of the blessed is a natural consequence of resisting evil in the world. Benedict [XVI] links persecution directly to the beatitude about mourning. Those who sorrow over the corruption of the world may not seem to bring about any change, but by holding firm to the truth they ‘set bounds to the power of evil’ and let light into the world. Whoever refuses to appease evil will undoubtedly be persecuted because the world will correctly see his resistance as an indictment against it. The Book of
Wisdom puts into the mouths of the wicked the reason they hate the good. The dialogue foreshadows what will happen to Jesus in his Passion, but it also lets us look into the psychology of why the evil
always hates the good.
Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
Because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
He reproaches us for sins against the law,
And accuses us of sins against our training.
He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a
child of the Lord.
He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
The very sight of him is a burden to us.
Because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
And his ways are strange.
We are considered by him as something base,
And he avoids our ways as unclean;
He calls the last end of the righteous happy.
. . . . Let us test him with insult and torture,
. . . . Let us condemn him to a shameful death
(Ws. 2: 12-30)”
~Connie Woods
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