Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (2026) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

In today’s opening prayer, we ask that we may “honour God with all our mind, and love everyone in truth of heart.” This sounds routine, living the two great commandments of Jesus, loving God above all, and our neighbour as ourselves. Yet it is hard to do, because to do it involves dragging our mind away from ourselves. Likewise, we ask in our prayer that we may love everyone in truth of heart. The truth of heart that the prayer is talking about comes from a genuine attention to the other person, which in turn is connected to a genuine estimation of ourselves. But to the extent that we are obsessed with ourselves, it is hard also to get a genuine estimation of ourselves or of the people around us.

But on the other hand, how do we get out of being so focussed on ourselves? Today’s readings offer us the answer: by cultivating humility. We often think of humility as deliberately downplaying our achievements, as if the key to happiness is lying about ourselves. But we don’t get closer to the truth about ourselves by lying to others. Indeed, just as Zephaniah urges his audience to seek humility, he also urges them to seek integrity, and freedom from lies. Humility is not lying but recognising and living the full truth about ourselves. The word, humility comes from the Latin for soil, the earth from which we are taken, and to which we shall return. But the full truth about ourselves is not merely this reminder about how frail and transitory we are, but also that we are created by God in his own image and likeness, and as Paul reminds us, made members of the body of Jesus Christ his Son. The Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, became our wisdom, our virtue, our freedom, our holiness. But in order to become all of this for us, he who, as God created the earth and us in it, he who is not frail and transitory and has no need of humility, freely lowered himself to taking earthy flesh and modelling for us the humility to which we are called. If we are to truly live the greatness to which we are called, we can only do so by humbling ourselves to the level of the God who humbled himself.

This is where the beatitudes point us. In preaching the beatitudes, Jesus is painting a picture of who he is as well as what the Christian is called to be: poor in spirit, meek, and mourning, and hungering and thirsting for what is right, merciful, pure in heart, persecuted for what is right, and abused and calumniated. If the key to loving God and other people appropriately is to get out of our obsession with ourselves, them Jesus gives us in the beatitudes someone else to focus our attention on: himself.

Madonna of Humility by Fra Angelico (c. 1430)

But the beatitudes mostly seem to concern what happens to us rather than what we do: the losses we mourn, living in a world marked by the absence of the righteousness for which we hunger and thirst, the wrongs and needs of others towards which we are called to be merciful, the absence of the peace we are called to make, the persecution and abuse we suffer, all of these things are not what we do or invite. They happen to us contrary to our will.

But on the other hand, they happen to us, and to the people around us, as a normal part of living in an unjust world. The beatitudes offer us a way of reacting to them. When loss and injustice and war and persecution and abuse happen to us, we can either commit injustices in order to avoid being victims of them, or we can live them with Christ. And when they happen to people around us, we can either ignore them or even see them as deserved, or we can help them live it with the gentleness and mercy of Christ, mourning and suffering alongside them. At Christmas we have just been reminded of how Christ entered our world to suffer and weep and live alongside us. And very soon, we are going to enter Lent when through our practices of fasting, prayer, and practical generosity, we will be called to take our places alongside Christ as he suffered the injustices of the world and died for our sake on the Cross, and overcame that injustice in rising from the dead. In putting before us the beatitudes this Sunday, the Church asks us to look at our own lives and how we put our comfort before Christ and what we can give up in fasting, how we can spend more time with Christ in prayer, how we can reach out practically to Christ in our neighbours to mourn and suffer with and alongside them, and perhaps even overcoming their sorrow and suffering. Then indeed, we will be able to “honour God with all our mind, and love everyone in truth of heart.”

Fr Robert Krishna, OP is undertaking postgraduate studies in Sacred Scripture and currently living in Adelaide, South Australia.