Dear Friend, 

Reflection by Rev. Robert K. Suszko

An Unobstructed View

Although it has been many years since I last traveled to the Holy Land, I still vividly remember the many holy sites I visited there.  Each of the many sites I visited holds a special memory for me, but the site which I would identify as the one that stands out above all the others would be the hilltop in Northern Israel where Jesus is believed to have delivered His Sermon on the Mount. That site stands out in my memory because the surrounding area remains much as it may have been almost 2000 years ago.  From the top of the hill where the beautiful Church of the Beatitudes now stands, one has an unobstructed view of the sloping terrain that leads down to the shore of the Sea of Galilee. And from that vantage point, it is so easy to visualize Jesus sitting in the midst of a crowd of His disciples, instructing them in His message of love and forgiveness. 

It was on that hilltop with sweeping views of the Sea of Galilee below, that Jesus spoke what are without a doubt some of His most instantly recognizable and most frequently quoted words.  For Christian believers, the words of the Beatitudes are ingrained in our hearts and fixed in our minds because they remind us of the values that each one of us must embrace and live out if we are truly to be Jesus’ followers.   

The values of the Beatitudes are not the values of the world and living out those values will not, by themselves, provide us with worldly comfort, or popularity, or even the respect of others.  But they are the values upon which the Kingdom of God will be built, and Jesus asks us to embrace them and to carry them with us into the world in which He sends us, because it is only by living out the values of the Beatitudes that anyone can make a total commitment to God, and to God’s will for us. 

In these closing days of Lent, we should be mindful that the Beatitudes are Christian values and that the struggle to embrace and live out the values of the Beatitudes is what it means to be a Christian.  So let us each be open to embracing and living out those values in our daily lives, because it is in the process of doing so, that we will not only bring about change in our own lives, but we will also help to bring about change in the lives of others as well.  And may we each find in the values of the Beatitudes the unobstructed view of the follower of Jesus we are called to be and desire to become. 

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Reverend Robert K. Suszko, M.B.A., M.Div.
Reverend Robert K. Suszko, is the Vice Rector/Business Manager/Director of Formation at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology.