Wednesday 9 September 2026
St Peter Claver
1 Corinthians 7:25-31. Listen to me, daughter; see and bend your ear – Ps 44(45):11-12, 14-17. Luke 6:20-26.
God’s blessed peoples
Read the Beatitudes and it’s clear Jesus is looking into the faces of people who are doing it tough. Roman occupation had left many poor, and some sitting before him had already paid a price for following him. His words didn’t deny their pain but placed it inside a larger story. If the Beatitudes could be summed up in a sentence, it might be something like: your suffering is real, but it won’t have the final word.
As Jesus looks into those faces, he calls the poor, the hungry, the grieving and the rejected ‘blessed’. The Greek word, makarios, carries the sense of fortunate, happy or deeply favoured. Jesus’ own Aramaic was likely ṭūḇayhōn, a word suggesting goodness, flourishing, being fully alive and thriving, living in harmony with God’s purposes. In other words, these are the people whom God declares to be truly flourishing, despite every outward appearance. With a single word, Jesus overturns the world’s hierarchy of success.
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