The Beatitudes, Luke 6

I dislike "checking the box" with regard to the Bible these days; instead, I'd rather wade through the commentaries and gather fragments that inspire me to think more deeply about Jesus and his words.

Here are some bits of commentary on Luke 6 and the Beatitudes:

"Blessedness, rather than happiness, the want of man 

It is not merely happiness, whatever our shallow moralists may say, that is “the aim and end of our being.

” Happiness implies merely the undisturbed enjoyment of the man. It may belong to the child, or to the selfish votary of the world. It may be spoken of the miser’s gold, or of the successful prizes of ambition, or o! the gilded baubles of social folly. There is no moral meaning in it. But it is blessedness that alone can satisfy the mind and heart, which are living for another end than self; blessedness, which has no hap in it, no chance, no merely outward success." -E. A. Washburn, D. D.

Worthwhile---I do think it's different to be blessed than to be happy.  I like Washburn's definition of happy, "the undisturbed enjoyment of the man," and I see this selfish desire in myself. In my mind, "undisturbed enjoyment" sounds blissful, even though I know it's a mirage.

"In relation to the context of Jesus, I am always surprised when the possibility is not more often entertained that Jesus taught on a subject more than once, and that he might have adapted his teaching and varied it depending on the situation and the audience. This is a possibility worth considering simply based on the amount of material that we have in the gospels (which, after all, only takes a few hours to read) compared with the length of Jesus’ ministry."-Psephizo, Ian Paul