In this section you can find a daily commentary on the Gospel of the Day.

Sunday 29 January 2023

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year A

Word for today
The Gospel of Matthew 5:1-12a

The Way

All men and women on earth desire peace, but they do not know how to achieve it. All men and women on earth desire happiness, love, health and well-being, but they do not know how to achieve it. Knowing where to go does not mean knowing how to get there.
When humanity revolted against God, the Lord offered them life on this planet to give them the possibility of recognizing the satanic deception they had fallen into and choosing to return with love and gratitude to God's embrace. Now why would our Heavenly Father give us life on this beautiful and immense world without giving us the knowledge, procedures, spiritual, psychic and physical skills to live happy, peaceful, healthy and serene lives? Why would the Father hide from his children, who are trying to find their way home to His embrace, the knowledge that is necessary to live this life according to the light and splendor of His love?
But where did our Father write the procedures to achieve love, peace, happiness, well-being? He wrote them in the safest place, in man's spirit, where they can never be lost. Indeed, man has not lost the procedures, he cannot lose them; but, deceived by Satan, he has stopped listening to them and following them. He did not stop listening to them because he was unable to, but because he voluntarily chose not to listen to them any longer and not to follow them so that he would not feel left on the outskirts of the world's training system. But not listening to and no longer following the procedures written in his heart and spirit led man to a place of fear and ignorance, to a desert of poverty, slavery, violence and death. From that moment on, man has been confusing that which is vital with that which is deadly and no longer knows the way of life, and, while desiring love, beauty, health, weel-being, freedom, peace, happiness, he does not know how to reach them.
In the fullness of time, Jesus came to visit the earth to awaken in man the knowledge of God, the divine procedures of love, and to help him to put them into practice in order to live a happy life, full of beauty. Jesus himself declared that this was the purpose of his earthly incarnation: I told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full (John 15:11). And so he gave us his happy message, his joyful announcement which he summarized in the Beatitudes. But then the Beatitudes of Jesus, the procedures to be happy on this earth, were transformed into a religious apparatus, into a system of beliefs and devotional traditions, into a cold hierarchical system, into moralistic laws, impracticable for man and far from people's lives.  But the Beatitudes are still there, written in man's spirit and heart and then in the book of joy, the gospel. They are still there, but not just to be read, but to be listened to with love and intelligence, with gratitude and wisdom, and to be realized for the welfare and happiness of all mankind.
When  man walks on the path of the Beatitudes: there will no more battlefields, concentration camps will be closed, prisons, hospitals, asylums, parliaments that serve the ruling powers will fall into disuse, banks that crush the peoples  will be emptied. When humanity welcomes with love the spiritual technology inscribed in the Beatitudes, science, medicine, technology will rapidly take great strides and they will be to promote the true good of all mankind.
Serving the Beatitudes,  man will never be a slave to another man, he will never feel the insatiable jaws of the ravenous wolves of power. The Beatitudes are the indispensable way because knowing where to go does not mean knowing how to get there. The Beatitudes know how to achieve happiness because they are the Way of happiness. We can be certain that they work perfectly; Jesus gave us his word, but he also gave his life.