You ever compared yourself to someone else? See how you measure up? We all do it, it is how we get our self-esteem. You compare yourself to a coworker, another wife, another athlete, I compare myself with other priests. Some we admire, some we try to imitate, some we envy as we realize they are better than us and we do not measure up.

If the standards I have set for myself measure up to my satisfaction, I feel good about myself, might even show off a little bit. If I fail to measure up, I do not feel so good. As a solution some people lower their standards and call it a day.

But the Christian way is not to lower the standard to make yourself feel better. We are called to live by the highest standard there is, Jesus Christ. Sounds even worst! If I feel bad when I realize I cannot measure up to human ideals, much less Christ who is perfect! But that is where we have the Gospel, the good news is that yes, Jesus demands that we imitate him and measure up to his standards but does so because he also gives us the power to do actually do so.

Paul says, “You are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, as well as righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.”

• Wisdom is the teaching about the best way to live a fulfilled life.
• Righteousness is an example of what a fulfilled life looks like.
• Sanctification is the power to take on a new life and to live a fully integrated life.
• Redemption is the power to redeem negative situations in our lives, to overcome whatever might stop us from living the new life that he offers.

There have been many incredibly wise and capable people in history. Their thoughts are immortalized in stories and writings. Aristotle, Socrates, Confucius, King Solomon, Buddha, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. They have contributed a lot to the world, they can shape and influence, but the Christian claim is that only the Word of God in the Bible can really transform your thinking.

By human standards, it is best to appear like you know everything. When you prepare for a job interview, you look at the company’s mission statement, you ask ChatGPT to give you some possible interview questions to practice with, you amp up your resume, presenting the best version of yourself to get your foot in the door. But by the standard of Jesus, it is better to humbly ask the Lord to help you to know yourself.

By human standards, we create all sorts of socio-political systems to try to bring what we believe will be the most just society. We have experimented with democracy, a republic, socialism, communism, capitalism, utilitarianism, utopian models. Yet all they leave behind, when they eventually fail, is ruins. Jesus teaches us how to forgive, how to love others as he has loved us, to see each person created in the image of God as the basis of justice.

There are many ways that people tell you that you can improve yourself and redeem yourself. We engage in exercises of positive thinking, manifest the future you want, life coaching, wellness culture, personal optimization, hustle culture, mindfulness, take the latest miracle shot to finally have the body of our dreams. But by the standards of Jesus, change goes deeper, beyond the physical, beyond the personality, beyond the psychological, it reaches the level of the heart. “Take this, all of you, and eat of it. This is my body.” Jesus changes us from the inside out.

We hear today from the prophet Zephaniah, written during a time of severe decline among the people of God in the Old Testament. They were falling away from the standards set by the Law of Moses because they were too difficult. So Zephaniah speaks about the day of the Lord’s anger that was going to come upon them.

Do not get caught up when the Bible talks about God being angry, because even that is different than our standard of anger. By our standards, out of anger we punish to teach a lesson. God’s anger is expressed by allowing us to experience the consequences of our choices, it is very different. The people of God in the time of Zephaniah would end up in exile because of their choice to abandon the standards that God had given them and the mission to which they were called.

In Jesus, the power of God has come into the world, giving us a choice to accept this power or not, and that is where the Beatitudes come in.

I mentioned last time that the Gospel of Matthew is written for Jewish Christians, so in the Beatitudes he draws parallels between Moses going up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments and Jesus going up the mountain to deliver his famous sermon. But unlike Moses, Jesus does not present more laws. Jesus does not give a list of things that we should not do, a set of standards that we can never measure up to. He gives Beatitudes, blessings. God wants to bless you.

God knows well that the world is in a process of transformation by the power of God himself, meaning you and I are a work in progress. He cannot expect perfection from what is being perfected. The Beatitudes help us live a life of transformation, not a life of perfection, that is what makes them possible for us to actually live out. They are divided in two sets.

The first set of Beatitudes transforms us:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, people who want to come close to God, to pray, who are able to admit that they are weak and cry out to God to help them.

Blessed are those who mourn, those who depend on God amid all the difficulties and tragedies of life and do not become bitter or discouraged.

Blessed are the meek, those who refuse to return violence for violence, who refuse to return unfairness for unfairness, who refuse to return insult for insult.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who do not lose hope for justice in the world, even when they see so much injustice around them.

The second set of Beatitudes challenges us to use them to transform the world:

Blessed are the merciful. Blessings come when we look for the best in others. Blessings come when we are ready to stand by our friends when they are weak, not only when they are strong. Blessings come when, instead of condemning someone, we remind them that they are created in the image of God.

Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessings come from a life of committed love, when living God’s love becomes our highest priority. In a world where many people drift away from church, we witness to what it means to take our baptismal promises seriously. In a world where the majority of marriages end in divorce, we witness to the fact that committed love is still possible.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessings come when we become a bridge between people, when we overcome cultural barriers to welcome those who are different, when we share generously with the poor, when we mentor men and women of younger generations.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Blessings come when we have the courage to live a strong Christian life, even if others do not support us or understand us. “Ours is the Kingdom of heaven.” That is what Jesus tells us.

These are the standards of being and living for us who are in Christ Jesus. This is how we live in wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. We are called to live by the highest standard, to be conformed to the image of Christ, which is a reality because we are given the grace to be transformed, and we become that reality.

The power of God is operative in the world, whether people see it or not. It has brought a new order of power in which every man and woman can have the confidence to aspire to the highest standard, the image of Jesus Christ. If that is the standard I am choosing to live by, then we can boast in the Lord.