Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Some say that this is the ninth Beatitude. Does it really matter if there are eight or nine, surely what matters is how the words speak to us and assist us in our personal growth. This eleventh verse of Matthew 5 tells us that if we listen to what Jesus taught and put it to work in our lives we will be reviled, persecuted and wrongly accused through lies pseudomeno. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? This is exactly what happened to Jesus before he was crucified. 

If we accept that the word ‘blessed’ means expanded, indicating that we have expanded the limits of our being out into our environment so that whatever is in our environment is now ‘within’ us, and if we are implementing what Jesus taught, then anyone in our vicinity who is not doing the same will become very uncomfortable.  It is as if we shine a light into the darkness to reveal what lurks there. Take for example how uncomfortable it is if we are discovered to be lying. Every child knows this experience. It is hard to understand that after the discovery of the first lie we ever told that anymore would ever be told. Here lies a mystery which we could explore in later bLogs.

The fact is, the more we work with spiritual truth the less we will be able to lie. And this is exactly what this beatitude is saying, when we are able to be totally truthful about all our characteristics without wanting to disguise them, our honesty will cause discomfort in others. This inherently means that we must be strong enough to be this honest. One of the hardest things to bear in this world is criticism, yet we must be able to critique our every feeling, thought and deed. In fact, if we have been able to criticise ourselves first, the criticism of others will lose its sting.

To be honest is a very hard thing today because the media constantly encourage us to lie. This means that we lie without realising it and these lies imprison us. Our freedom from this disease of lying can only come when we are consciously aware of who we really are through being honest with ourselves first of all. This way of being can be called ‘I’ beingness, expressing our higher self and within that we come to the mystery of the I AM. (Try saying the words I AM, it can give you sense of being genuine.)