early in the morning just after the setting of the moon and before
sunrise. Often Jesus was waiting for them on the strand and was the
first to greet them. But the fishing was not always good, sometimes they
came back empty-handed, tired and depressed. Jesus greeted them with
words which cheered them, and the disappointed men, although they had
not slept, listened to Him willingly. One morning two boats came back
towards Capernaum while Jesus standing by the lake was talking to the
people who had gathered around Him. The fishermen disembarked and began
to arrange the nets; then Jesus entered into one of the boats and asked
them to put it out a little from the land so that He might not be
pressed upon by the crowd. Upright near the rudder He taught those who
had remained on the land, and when He had left speaking He said to
Simon, “Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.”
And Simon, son of Jona, owner of the boat, answered, “Master, we have
toiled all the night and have taken nothing, nevertheless at thy word, I
will let down the net.”
When they were only a short distance from the bank, Simon and Andrew,
his brother, threw out into the water a large net. And when they drew it
back it was so full of fish that the meshes were almost breaking. Then
the two brothers called their partners in the other boat, that they
should come to help them, and they threw out the net again and drew it
up again full. Simon, Andrew and the others cried out “a miracle!” and
thanked Jesus, who had brought them this good luck. Simon, impulsive by
nature, threw himself at the knees of their guest crying, “Depart from
me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”
But Jesus, smiling, said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of
men.”
When they went back to the shore they pulled the boat up on the land,
and leaving their nets, the two brothers followed Him. And a few days
after this, Jesus saw the other two brothers, James and John, sons of
Zebedee, who were partners of Simon and Andrew, and he called them,
while they were mending the broken nets; and they too said farewell to
their father, who was in the boat with the sailors, and leaving the
broken nets half-mended, followed Him. Jesus was no longer alone: four
men, two pairs of brothers more deeply brothers in this common faith,
were ready to accompany Him wherever He wished to go, to break bread
with Him, to repeat His words, to obey Him as a father, and more than a
father. Four poor fishermen, four plain men of the lake, men who did not
know how to read, nor indeed how to speak correctly, four humble men
whom no one else would have been able to distinguish from others, were
called by Jesus to found with Him a kingdom which was to occupy all the
earth. For Him they left their faithful boats which they had put out
into the water so many times, and so many times tied up to the wharf;
they left the old fish nets which had drawn from the water thousands of
fish; they left their father, their family, their home. They left all
that to follow this man who did not promise money or lands and spoke
only of love, of poverty and perfection. Thus if their spirit always
remained too low to understand their master, always a little rustic and
common, and if sometimes they doubted and were uncertain and did not
understand His truths and His parables, and at the end abandoned Him,
all will be pardoned to them for the candid, unquestioning promptness
with which they followed Him at the first call.
Who among us to-day, among all those now living, would be capable of
imitating those four poor men of Capernaum? If a prophet should come and
say to the merchant, “Leave your bank and your counter”; and to the
Professor, “Come down from your chair and throw away your books”; and to
the statesman, “Give up your portfolios and your lies which are only
nets for catching men”; and to the working man, “Put away your tools for
I will give you other work”; and to the farmer, “Stop in the middle of
the furrow and leave your plow among the clods, for I promise you a more
wonderful harvest”; and to the factory hand, “Stop your machine and come
with me, for spirit is more precious than metal”; and to the rich, “Give
away all your goods, for you will acquire with me an inestimable
treasure”; ... if a prophet should speak thus to us, men of the present
day, how many would follow him with the simple-hearted spontaneity of
those fishermen of old? But Jesus made no sign to the merchants who
stood trafficking in the open places, and in the shops, nor to those who
observed the tiniest commands of the law and could recite by heart
verses from the Bible, nor to the farmers rooted to their land and their
live-stock, and certainly not to the affluent, surfeited, satisfied, who
care nothing about any other kingdoms because their kingdom has long
since been realized.
Not by chance did Jesus select His first companions from among
fishermen. The fisherman who lives a great part of his days in the pure
solitude of the water is the man who knows how to wait. He is the
patient, unhurried man who lets down his nets and leaves the rest to
God. The water has its caprices, the lake its fantasies, no day is like
another day; he does not know when he goes away if he will come back
with his boat full or without a single fish to cook for his dinner. He
commends himself into the hands of God, who sends abundance and famine.
He consoles himself for bad days by thinking of the good days which have
been and which will come. He does not desire sudden riches, and is glad
if he can exchange the results of his fishing for a little bread and
wine. He is pure in soul and body. He washes his hands in water and his
spirit in solitude.
Of these fishermen who would have died in the obscurity of Capernaum
without any one except their neighbors being aware of them, Jesus made
saints whom men even to-day remember and invoke. A great man creates
great men; from a somnolent people he raises up prophets; from a
debilitated people, warriors; from an ignorant race, teachers. In any
weather fires are lighted if there is a hand capable of kindling them.
When David appears he finds at once his gibborim; an Agamemnon finds his
heroes, an Arthur his knights, Charlemagne his paladins, Napoleon his
Marshals. Jesus found among the men of the people of Galilee, His
apostles.
Jesus did not seek armed warriors, men who would lay their enemies low,
conquerors of provinces. His apostles were to fight, but the good fight
of perfection against corruption, holiness against sin, health against
sickness, spirit against matter, the happy future against the past,
henceforth sterile. They were to aid Him in bringing His joyous message
to the heavy-hearted. They were to speak in His name in places where He
could not go, and in His name to carry on His work after His death.
THE MOUNT
The Sermon on the Mount is the greatest proof of the right of men to
exist in the infinite universe. It is our sufficient justification, the
patent of our soul’s worthiness, the pledge that we can lift ourselves
above ourselves to be more than men, the promise of that supreme
possibility, the hope of our rising above the beast.
If an angel come down to us from the world above should ask us what our
most precious possession is, the master-work of the Spirit at the height
of its power, we would not show him the great wonderful oiled machines
of which we foolishly boast, although they are but matter in the service
of material and superfluous needs; but we would offer him the Sermon on
the Mount, and afterwards, only afterwards, a few hundred pages taken
from the poets of all the peoples. But the Sermon would be always the
one refulgent diamond dimming with the clear splendor of its pure light
the colored poverty of emeralds and sapphires.
And if men were called before a superhuman tribunal and had to give an
account to the judges of all the inexplicable mistakes and of the
ancient infamies every day renewed, and of the massacres which last for
a thousand years, and of all the bloodshed between brothers, and of all
the tears shed by the children of men, and of our hardness of heart and
of our perfidy only equaled perhaps by our stupidity; we should not
bring before this tribunal the reasonings of the philosophers, however
learned and fine-spun; not the sciences, ephemeral systems of symbols
and recipes; nor our laws, short-sighted compromises between ferocity
and fear. The only thing we should have to show as restitution for so
much evil, as atonement for our stubborn tardiness in paying our debts,
as apology for sixty centuries of hideous history, as the one and
supreme attenuation of all those accusations, is the Sermon on the
Mount. Who has read it, even once, and has not felt at least in that
brief moment while he read, a thrill of grateful tenderness, and an ache
in his throat, a passion of love and remorse, a confused but urgent
longing to act—so that those words shall not be words alone, nor this
sermon mere sounds and signs, but so that they shall be imminent hope,
life, alive in all those who live, present truth for always and for
every one? He who has read it, if only once, and has not felt all this,
he deserves our love beyond all other men, because all the love of men
can never make up to him for what he has lost.
The Mount on which Jesus sat the day of the sermon was certainly not so
high as that from which Satan had shown Him the Kingdoms of the earth.
From it you could see only the plain, calm under the loving sunset
light; on one side the silver-green oval of the lake, and on the other
the long crest of Carmel where Elijah overcame the scullions of Baal.
But from this humble mount which only the hyperbole of the chroniclers
called mountain, from this little rocky hill scarcely rising above the
level earth, Jesus disclosed that Kingdom which has no confines or
boundaries, and wrote not on tablets of stone like Jehovah, but on
flesh-and-blood hearts, the song of the new man, the hymn of
glorification.
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good
tidings, that publisheth peace!” Isaiah was never more a prophet than at
the moment when these words poured from his soul.
BLESSED ARE THE POOR
Jesus sat on a little hill in the midst of the first apostles surrounded
by hundreds of eyes that were watching His eyes; and some one asked Him
to whom would be allotted this Kingdom of Heaven, of which He so often
spoke. Jesus answered with the nine beatitudes.
The beatitudes, so often spelled out even nowadays by people who have
lost their meaning, are almost always misunderstood, mutilated,
deformed, cheapened, distorted. And yet they epitomize the first day of
Christ’s teaching, that glorious day!
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Luke leaves out the words “in spirit,” seeming to mean the “poor” and
nothing else; and many people after him (some modern and malicious) have
understood him to mean the simple-minded, the silly. They see in the
words only a choice between the bankrupt and the imbecile.
When He spoke, Jesus was not thinking either of the first or the second.
Jesus had no friendship for the rich and detested with all His soul the
greedy desire for riches, the greatest obstacle to the true enrichment
of the soul; Jesus was friendly to the poor and comforted them because
they had less comfort than other people; He kept them near Him because
of their greater need to be fed by loving words. But He was not so
foolish as to think that to be poor, materially poor in the worldly
sense of the word, is a sufficient title to enjoy the Kingdom, without
any other qualifications.
Jesus never gave any sign of admiring that intelligence which is solely
the intelligence of abstraction and the memory for phrases. Purely
systematic philosophers, and metaphysical sophists, gropers in nature,
devourers of books, would never have found grace in His eyes. But
intelligence, the power of understanding the signs of the future and the
meaning of symbols—enlightened and prophetic intelligence, the loving
mastery of the truth—was a gift in His eyes also, and many times He
grieved that His listeners and His disciples showed so little of it. For
Him supreme intelligence consisted in realizing that the intelligence
alone is not enough, that all the soul must be changed to obtain
happiness, since happiness is not an absurd dream but eternally possible
and within reach. But he fully understood that intelligence ought to aid
us in this total transmutation. He could not therefore call to the
fullness of the Kingdom of God the dull and the imbecile. Poor in spirit
are those who are fully and painfully aware of their own spiritual
poverty, of the faultiness of their own souls, of the smallness of the
good that is in us all, of the moral indigence of most men. Only the
poor who realize that they are really poor suffer from their poverty,
and because they suffer from it try to escape from it. Very different
these from men apparently rich, from those blind arrogant self-satisfied
people who believe themselves fulfilled and perfected, in good standing
with God and man, who feel no eagerness to climb upward because they
delude themselves with thinking they are already on high, who will never
enrich themselves because they do not realize their own fathomless
poverty.
Those therefore who confess themselves poor and undergo suffering to
acquire that veritable wealth named perfection, will become holy as God
is holy, and theirs shall be the Kingdom of Heaven; those complacent
people on the other hand who drape themselves in self-satisfaction,
taking no heed of the foulness accumulated and hidden under their
vainglory, will not enter into the Kingdom.
BLESSED ARE THE MEEK: FOR THEY SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH
The earth here promised is not the literal field of clods, nor
monarchies with built-up cities. In the language of the Messiah, “to
inherit the earth” means to partake of the New Kingdom. The soldier who
fights for the earthly earth needs to be fierce; but he who fights
within himself for the conquest of the new earth and the new heaven must
not abandon himself to anger, the counselor of evil, nor to cruelty, the
negation of love. The meek are those who endure close contact with evil
men and with themselves—often harder to bear—who do not break out into
brutish rage when things go badly, but conquer their inner enemies with
that quiet perseverance which more than sudden sterile furies shows the
force of the soul. They are like water which is not hard to the touch,
which seems to give way before other substances, but slowly rises,
silently attacks, and calmly consumes, with the patience of the years,
the hardest granites.
BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. The afflicted,
the weeping, those who feel disgust for themselves and pity for the
world, who do not live in the supine stupidity of everyday life, who
mourn over their own unhappiness and that of their brothers, who grieve
over failures, over the blindness which delays the victory of
light—because light for men cannot come from the sky if their own eyes
do not reflect it—who grieve over the remoteness of that righteousness
dreamed-of again and again, promised a thousand times, and yet always
further away through our fault and every one’s fault; those who mourn
over an offense received instead of increasing the wrong by revenge, and
who weep over the wrong they have done and over the good they might have
done and did not; those who care little about the loss of a visible
treasure but strain after the invisible treasure; those who mourn,
hasten with their tears the day of grace, and it is right that they
shall some day be comforted.
BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HUNGER AND THIRST AFTER JUSTICE: FOR THEY SHALL BE
FILLED
The justice which Jesus means is not the justice of men, obedience to
human law, conformity to codes, respect for usage and for the
established transactions of men. In the language of the psalmists, the
prophets, the saints, the just man is he who lives according to the will
of God, because God is the supreme type of all perfection. Not according
to the law written by the Scribes set down in the Bible, diluted by
Talmudic casuistries, obscured by the subtleties of the Pharisees; but
according to the one simple Law which Jesus reduces to one commandment,
“Love all men near and far, your fellow countrymen and foreigners,
strangers and enemies.” Those who hunger and thirst after this justice
shall be filled in the Kingdom of Heaven. Even if they do not succeed in
being perfect in all things, much will be pardoned for their endurance
of the long vigil.
BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL: FOR THEY SHALL OBTAIN MERCY
He who loves shall be loved, he who gives help shall find help. The law
of retaliation is nullified for evil but remains valid for good. We
constantly commit sins against the spirit and those sins will be
forgiven us only as we forgive those committed against us. Christ is in
all men and what we do to others will be done to us. “Inasmuch as ye
have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it
unto me.” If we have pity on others we may have pity for ourselves; God
can pardon the evil which we do to ourselves only if we pardon the evil
which others do to us.
BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART: FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD
The Pure of Heart are those who have no other wish than for perfection,
no other joy than victory over the evil which hunts us down on every
side. He who has his heart crammed with furious desires, with earthly
ambitions, with carnal pride and with all the lusts which convulse this
ant-heap of the earth, can never see God face to face, will never know
the sweetness of His magnificent felicity.
BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS: FOR THEY SHALL BE CALLED THE SONS OF GOD
These peacemakers are not the meek of the second beatitude. The meek
refrain from answering evil with evil; the peacemakers do more, they
return good for evil, they bring peace where wars are flaring up. When
Jesus said He had come to bring war and not peace, He meant war to evil,
to Satan, to the world, to evil which is wrong, to Satan who is Death,
to the world which is an eternal battle. He means, in short, war against
war. The peacemakers are those who wage war upon war, those who placate,
those who bring about concord. The origin of every war is self-love,
love which becomes love of riches, pride of possession, envy of those
more wealthy, hatred for rivals; and the new law comes to teach hatred
for oneself, contempt for measurable goods, love for all creatures, even
for those who hate us. The peacemakers who teach and practice this love
cut at the root of all war. When every man loves his brothers more than
himself there will be no more wars, neither great nor small, neither
civil nor imperial, neither of words nor of blows, between man and man,
between class and class, between people and people. The peacemakers will
have conquered the earth and they will be called the true sons of God,
and they will enter among the first into His Kingdom.
BLESSED ARE THEY WHO HAVE BEEN PERSECUTED FOR JUSTICE’ SAKE: FOR THEIRS
IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
I send you out to found this Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, of that
higher justice which is love, of that fatherly goodness whose name is
God; I send you out therefore to fight against those who uphold
injustice, the servants of materialism, the proselytes of the Adversary.
They will defend themselves when attacked, and to defend themselves they
will attack you. You will be tortured in body, crucified in soul,
deprived of liberty and perhaps of life; but if you accept this
suffering cheerfully to carry to others that justice which makes you
suffer, this persecution will be for you an incontestable title to enter
into the Kingdom which you have founded as far as was in your power.
BLESSED ARE YE WHEN MEN SHALL REPROACH YOU AND PERSECUTE YOU AND SAY ALL
MANNER OF EVIL AGAINST YOU FALSELY FOR MY SAKE. REJOICE AND BE EXCEEDING
GLAD: FOR GREAT IS YOUR REWARD IN HEAVEN: FOR SO PERSECUTED THEY THE
PROPHETS WHICH WERE BEFORE YOU
Persecution is a material attack through physical, legal and political
means. The persecutors can take away your bread, and the clear light of
the sun, and divine liberty; they may break your bones, but you must
endure more than mere persecution. You must expect insult and calumny.
They will condemn you because you wish to change bestial men into
saints. Wallowing in the foulness of their bestiality, they detest the
idea of leaving their filth. But they will not be satisfied to strike
only at your body, they will strike also at your soul. They will accuse
you of all crimes, they will stone you with slander and contumely. Hogs
will say that you are filthy, asses will swear that you are ignorant,
ravens will accuse you of eating carrion, rams will drive you away as
ill-smelling, the dissolute will cry out upon the scandal of your
corruptness and thieves will denounce you for theft. But you must always
rejoice because the insult of evil men is the consecration of your own
goodness, and the mud thrown at you by the impure is the pledge of your
purity. This is, as St. Francis says, “the perfect joy.” Beyond all the
graces which Christ gives to His friends is the grace of conquering
oneself and willingly enduring injury, opprobrium, pains, discomforts.
All the other gifts of God are not ours to glory in, because they come
not from us, but from God; but in tribulation and in affliction we can
glory because that is ours. All the prophets who have ever spoken upon
the earth were insulted by men, and men will insult those who are to
come. We can recognize prophets by this, that smeared with mud and
covered with shame, they pass among men, bright-faced, speaking out what
is in their hearts. No mud can close the lips of those who must speak.
Even if the obstinate prophet is killed, they cannot silence him. His
voice multiplied by the echoes of his death will be heard in all
languages and through all the centuries.
This promise brings the beatitudes to their end.
By means of the beatitudes, Christ fully explains who are fit to be the
citizens of His new Kingdom. Those citizens are henceforth found and
sealed; every one can recognize them. The unwilling are warned, the
uncertain are reassured. The rich, the proud, the satisfied, the
violent, the unjust, the warlike, those who mock, those who do not
hunger after perfection, those who persecute and outrage, can never
enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. They cannot enter there until they are
altogether conquered and changed, and have become the opposite of what
they are now. Those who live happily according to the world, those whom
the world envies, imitates and admires, are infinitely further from true
happiness than those others whom the world scorns and hates. In this
exulting beginning Jesus has turned upside down the human hierarchy; now
as He goes on He will turn upside down the values of life, and no other
revaluation will ever be so divinely paradoxical as His.
THE DIVINE PARADOX
Emasculated Gymnosophists and the cowardly sect of the Saturnists,—these
are serious-minded men who can understand plain facts but cannot
interpret those facts but merely repeat and spoil them—have always
looked with unfriendly eyes on what is called the paradoxical. To save
themselves the trouble of distinguishing between sacred paradoxes and
those which are only a fatuous amusement, they make haste to pass
judgment on all paradox as nothing else than the overturning of
recognized old truths; hence, false and—they add, to clip the wings of
vanity—as easy as possible to invent. One would suppose it seems to them
more difficult to walk along the road already laid out, and to spell
over line by line what was written before they were born by men who
certainly had not their cowardly temperament.
But if these priests of the already-said would consider the few master
ideas on which modern thought is living, or rather on which it is dying,
they would discover that they are almost all overturnings, that is to
say, paradoxes. When Rousseau says that men are born good but that
society makes them bad, he turns inside out the accepted doctrine of
original sin; when the disciples of progress affirm that from the worse
comes the better; when the evolutionist affirms that the complex springs
out of the simple; and the monist that all diversities are but
manifestations of the One; and the Marxist that economic history is the
basis of spiritual development; when the modern mathematical
philosophers affirm that man is not as he has always been believed, the
center of the universe, but a minute animal species on one of an
infinite number of spheres scattered in the infinite; when the
Protestants cry, “The Pope is of no account but only the Scriptures”;
when the French Revolutionists say, “The Third Estate is nothing and
should be everything”—what are all these people doing except overturning
old and commonly held opinions?