Happiness

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time A
February 2-3, 2008
Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13
Psalm 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10
1 Corinthians1:26-31
Matthew 5:1-12a

What is happiness? What makes you happy? Happiness is a feeling of contentment and satisfaction. A simple definition of happiness can be described as a pleasurable feeling, joy and contentment. An outward sign of being happy is a big beautiful smile.

A student will say, “I am happy to go to school when homework was done.”
A mother will say, “I am happy to see my children eating well and healthy.”
A grandmother will say, “I always feel fulfilled and happy after hearing Mass on Sunday. I am incomplete not going to church.”
A lover will say to his beloved, “I am happy only if she is are happy.”

Happiness… Isn’t it happiness our goal in life? Anne Frank writes on her diary, "We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same."

People look for happiness in family life, in ones career, etc. We sometimes believe that a change of circumstances will make us happy: restoration of our health, winning a tattslotto, an improved financial situation, a better job or perhaps a new romance.

It is natural for us to spend a lifetime search for happiness, hoping to fill the emptiness, incompleteness or sadness we have deep within. The problem is sometimes we do not know where to find real happiness.

Searching for happiness story
The story is told about a man who searched for gold all his life. His one preoccupation, devotion and obsession in life was to accumulate more and more gold believing this would make him happy. He was spending so much time of his life, sacrificing his health, his family, his friends, his values, his faith and even his very soul for precious, precious gold. When he died, St. Peter showed him the road to heaven. To his surprise the road to heaven was all paved with gold with the words: “That which you considered valuable and precious on earth is just asphalt here.

Gospel
There are two ways to achieve happiness: one is the way of the World, and the second way is the way of Jesus. The way of the World to achieve happiness is the accumulation of the 4 P’s namely, power, prestige, possessions and popularity. The way of the World promises us that these 4 P’s are keys to be happy. But in reality they are not based on tragic experience of many people we’ve know who had achieved power, prestige, possessions and popularity.

The second way to achieve happiness is the way of Jesus. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us a rather different road to happiness. Contrary to the way of the World, Jesus gives us a prescription for real and genuine happiness in a number of short sayings which we call the Beatitudes.

The word beatitude comes from the Latin root word beati (beatitude, happiness) means blessed but a more literal translation of beatitude into contemporary English is “happy.” The Beatitudes imply that people not normally considered blessed (happy) on Earth are in fact blessed by God and will experience the Kingdom of Heaven, where there is eternal and real happiness.

Jesus' way of happiness, contrary to the way of the World, do not require accumulation of material things, however, demands a transformation from within — a conversion of heart and mind – the search for happiness is begins from within.

First Four Beatitudes:
The first set of four beatitudes: Happiness of the poor in spirit, the gentle, the mourners and the righteous.

Humility, being poor in spirit, is the fundamental condition of a relationship with God. Poverty in spirit is the first condition for real happiness. Being poor in spirit is not trusting in ourselves but trusting in God instead. We are poor in spirit when we surrender our plans to God asking for his help. Poverty in spirit makes us free to seek God alone not on material things or prestigious titles that we have.

If we are to be happy we are to be gentle, to be gentle means to self controlled and God controlled. To be gentle does not mean being soft or quiet, rather it also has the ability to be angry with the right people about the right things at the right time to the right degree.

Jesus says that we will be happy when we mourn for our sins and the sins of others.

We will be happy when we are hunger and thirst for what is right. A righteous person is someone who only desires the will of God and one who has a profound respect for others and wants to treat others with equal dignity. So when we see other people abused in one way or another, we hunger and thirst that their dignity will be respected.

The Second Set of Beatitudes
The second set of beatitudes: The happiness of the merciful, pure of heart, peace makers and the persecuted. All the second set of four beatitudes is best interpreted as the ability to give unconditional forgiveness and the generosity to ask pardon for our offences against others.
Jesus gave the example of the forgiving love of a merciful heart from the cross by praying for his executioners. As long as we hold something in our hearts against somebody we are not free, we are not happy.

Purity of heart makes one happy. The pure in heart are morally pure, in body, speech and in mind.

Balance
What way of happiness are we following: the way of the World, or the way of Jesus? Jesus is telling us today, that a happy person is the person for whom God is the most important thing in life – whether one is poor or rich, popular or not, powerful or weak. If our first thought in the morning and the last thought in the evening are of how to desire God, then we are happy.


"Lord, increase my hunger for you and show me the way that leads to everlasting happiness and peace. May I desire you above all else and find perfect joy in doing your will."