This week we hear Jesus offer a stinging warning. Be vigilant! Live your life like servants awaiting the return of their master! But do not be afraid, he says, for your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom.

In the midst of it, Jesus repeats a word three times. Did you catch it? It is also in the responsorial psalm. The word is blessed. You could say blessed is one of Jesus’ favourite words. In his great charter for the definitive way to be human, the Sermon on the Mount, he awards the status of blessed to those who don’t appear very blessed at all (the persecuted, the peacemakers, the meek, the mourning, the poor in spirit…).

In Catholic life blessed is probably most often repeated in the Hail Mary: ‘blessed art thou among women…’ Priests bless the people with the sign of the cross. Parents bless their child when she is sick or when dropping her off at school. When someone sneezes, people say, ‘God bless you!’ or just ‘Bless you!’ What are we saying when we say blessed? More importantly, what was Jesus saying when he did?

We’ve established that blessed is everywhere in our spiritual and ordinary lives and that the same was true for Jesus himself. The word, quite literally, goes back to the very beginning. On the first pages of Scripture, in Genesis, God creates the world by separating light from darkness, water from land, and so on. You are probably not surprised that our word is there.

It appears precisely three times. (God loves that number; He also likes seven, which is three doubled + one, with the one signifying abundance, surplus, blessing, just as three is two + one, surplus, blessing…) God blesses the birds and fish on day five and humanity on day six: so creatures of the sky, the sea, and the land are blessed. But what are they blessed with?

The story is plain: fruitfulness, abundance, the capacity to fill the creation with life. Humans, who are a kind of a unifying bridge joining the sky and sea on the land, are given a special blessing on top of abundance and life: they are blessed with rule or dominion. On day six, humans are themselves presented as a +, a more, a teeming abundance beyond what God has already created.

Sky, sea, and finally, those peculiar land creatures are blessed with the energies of abundance, life, and then rule. The final act of blessing occurs on the seventh day, when God rests from his work. The creation tale establishes the meaning of our word for the entire story to follow that culminates in Jesus. Blessed means to be given a share in God’s power of abundance, life, and ultimately rule.

And that is what Jesus offers us. It is what rest signifies in Genesis and what Kingdom means in the gospel. Blessed means to be truly, fully and definitively human, in accord with God’s original and final purpose.

W Chris Hackett

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