The Beatitudes

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Hello Friends!

Welcome to the first episode of Season Two: With Jesus in Ordinary Time.

This season we will consider the ordinary dynamics of Jesus’ life, the ordinary objects things he used to point people to the truth, and how he encountered ordinary people.

My family recently had the opportunity to visit Israel and in the midst of all that land holds we were struck by the ordinary realness of the place.

We especially had this sense went we went north to the Galilee. It is beautiful in a simple, gentle way and still relatively undeveloped.

From our guesthouse, we could just see the top of the church of the beatitudes. In this place, so tradition says, Jesus sat and spoke the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount.

Outside one morning I took in the landscape, considering the possibility that Jesus had been just here, living, walking, praying, listening, thinking, teaching.

And while I sat there, I recorded this episode, reading the words from Matthew 5 that Jesus first spoke somewhere very close to that very place.

You will hear the wind and the birds in this recording, and I hope that as you hear the wind you can feel it blowing across your body, and imagine that same wind dancing around the first listeners to these words.

Jesus spoke these challenging words to ordinary people, in an ordinary place, surrounded by ordinary things: clouds, breeze, birds, children, friends. This remarkable truth is for those in an ordinary context.

How does it speak to you?