THE BEATITUDES
Around the Year with Emmet Fox
March 22
The Sermon on the Mount
opens with the eight Beatitudes.
They are actually a prose poem in eight verses
and constitute a general summary
of the Christian teaching.
A general summing up,
such as this is highly characteristic
of the old Oriental mode of approach
to a religious and philosophical teaching,
and it naturally recalls the Eightfold Path of Buddhism,
the Ten Commandments of Moses,
and other such compact groupings of ideas.
Jesus concerned himself exclusively
with the teaching of general principles,
and these general principles
always had to do with mental states,
for he knew that if one's mental states are right,
everything else might be right too.
Unlike the other great religious teachers,
he gives us no derailed instructions
about what we are to do or are not to do.
“. . . the hour cometh,
when ye shalt neither in this mountain,
nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.”
“. . . the hour cometh, and now is,
when the true worshippers
shall worship the Father
in spirit and in truth:
for the Father seeketh such to worship him.”
“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth”
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