Blessedness in Permanence!

Sunday, February 1, 2026

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Zeph 2:3, 3:12-13; 1 Cor 1:26-31; Mt 5:1-12

The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time invites us to reflect on the blessedness of Christian life. 

The three readings of the day orient us toward leading a blessed Christian life.  

The first reading from the Book of Zephaniah reflects the prophet’s earnest call for the people of Israel to straighten their relationship with God. Prophet Zephaniah prophesied before the time of Babylonian exile, and his message sent out a warning regarding the moral corruption in Judah with the hope that people would amend their ways and return to the Lord. What invites our special attention is the focus on the ‘remnant of YHWH.’ The word ‘remnant’ refers to a humble, faithful, and righteous group of people who remain true to God amid widespread moral corruption and idolatry. In other words, the remnant of YHWH was spiritually poor, whose sole refuge was the Lord.

The second reading is an invitation to a blessed life in Christ. Paul gives us two reasons to retain our blessedness. At first, our Christian vocation mandates a right conduct. Paul wants the Corinthian community to set aside its obsession for status or power. In other words, Paul exposes their illusion of self-sufficiency and insists that our salvation is the gift of God’s grace. Secondly, Paul reminds the Corinthian community of its indebtedness because of God’s generous invitation to choose the foolish, weak, lowly, and despised. While all these words point to human unworthiness, by becoming the community of difference that God wants us to be, Paul believes that we can pay back the debt we owe to God. Hence, we have the task of being change agents by becoming the salt and light of the earth.

The Gospel text, the Beatitudes, is known for its universal fame. Biblicists believe that the eight macarisms, which denote the eightfold blessedness of the Beatitudes, are not just individual affirmations. Rather, the eight blessings build on each other in a ladder-like formation – all helping us to qualify for God’s Kingdom. Thus, if we roughly rephrase them, we may draw virtues like the spirit of renunciation, solidarity, humility, radicality for God’s love, compassion, love, reconciliation, and altruism. The special nature of the call is that we are called to be/live all of them. To put it differently, Christians have no luxury of compromising even one in the list of eight macarisms, as it leads to a life of blessedness that Jesus himself exemplified.

Christians must be proud to find that many secular thinkers and world leaders developed an appreciation for Christianity through the Sermon on the Mount. One of the towering figures who was inspired much by the Sermon on the Mount was Gandhi, the Father of India, whose death anniversary India observed on January 30. I believe that a secular thinker’s appreciation for the Sermon on the Mount deepens our own understanding of it while inviting us to embrace it as a moral guide for our lives. 

Gandhi hailed the Sermon on the Mount for its practical approach. He believed, or was rather convinced, that the Sermon was not given merely to Jesus’ disciples but for the entire world to practice and live by. When Gandhi wanted to teach the Sermon on the Mount, he said, ‘Although I am myself not a Christian, as a humble student of the Bible, who approaches it with faith and reverence, I wish respectfully to place before you the essence of the Sermon on the Mount.’ Hence, for Gandhi, the Sermon on the Mount represented the whole of Christianity. 

Gandhi looked at the Sermon on the Mount as a great source of his philosophy of Satyagraha and non-violent resistance, which later inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to adopt non-violent activism during the American Civil Rights Movement. For this reason, Gandhi saw the New Testament as a book of peace, as it exhorts us to ‘look forward to an age when no sword would be needed and the material used for making them could be diverted to make other useful things.’ Thus, Gandhi saw Jesus as the ‘sower of the seed of non-violent philosophy’ and called Christ a ‘Heroic Satyagrahi’ since he represented the principle of non-violence, the purest form of soul force. It is with this spiritual force that Jesus conquered evil with good and hatred with love. 

Gandhi was edified by Jesus’ example of non-violent suffering. He said, ‘The example of Jesus’ suffering is a factor in the composition of my undying faith in non-violence which rules all my actions, worldly and temporal.’ To this end, he found in Jesus’ message of ‘resist not evil’ the ethic of non-violence, the power of soul-force, and the infinite possibilities of universal love. This is why he said, ‘When I read in the Sermon on the Mount such passages as ‘Resist not him that is evil, but whosoever smiteth thee on the right cheek turn to him the other also,’ I was simply overjoyed, and found my own opinion confirmed where I least expected it.’ Hence, Gandhi decided to apply Christ’s attitude of overcoming evil with good as a principle to public affairs. The result was revolutionary, as Gandhi was able to lead the world’s largest nonviolent movement during India’s freedom struggle against the brute weapons of the British. 

Thus, Gandhi’s transformation contains a lesson for Christians to look at the Bible as a book that helps us for moral excellence.  

The three readings of the day inspire us with key insights.

1. We are called to be the remnant of God so that others will understand Christians through the justice, love, and righteousness that characterize our lives. In this sense, the call to be a Christian is simultaneously an invitation to be a counter-witness as well.

2. Paul invites us to fall in love with Christ’s cross when he says, ‘Whoever boasts should boast in the Lord,’ because our Lord expressed his power in self-giving love. Thus, ‘Christ crucified’ should become the center of Christian life to define our lives in love and humility.

3. The secular world embraces Christ with an earnestness that is sometimes absent in Christians. Christ is the light of the world. Christ’s universal appeal demands that Christians become the bearers of God’s presence in us just as Christ turned himself into a model of it. 

Let us pray that our reflection on blessedness may shape our thoughts and actions. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar