Economy of joy 6/ - With the Holy Year, we rediscover the law impressed by God in the rest from our servitude, which dominates the flow of life
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on May 20, 2025
«If God exists, today he needs someone who, if he cannot say who he is, at least says who he is not. In the sense of a destruction (or an attempt at destruction) of the metaphysical and imperial idol that we mistake for God. Faith can do without this operation, but it can also succumb to this God who does not exist».
Paolo de Benedetti, Quale Dio?
There is a profound relationship between the Jubilee and the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes are the Shabbat of the Gospel, the Jubilee of the entire Bible, the sabbatical year of history; they are that different time toward which all other times prophetically tend. They are the announcement of another joy, of the promised land that is free and not occupied by our affairs and our weapons. They are the ‘land of not yet’, which for two thousand years has judged our ‘land of already’ and will always judge it in order to try to convert it and call it to a beyond. The beatitudes are the map to reach the kingdom and are also its door, that kingdom which, as a promise, runs through the various beatitudes of Luke and Matthew. They therefore speak of this life, not of the future one, and have the taste of the fruits of our land today. All their infinite prophecy lies in their being ‘things of the earth’, and therein lies their paradox, because they speak to us of our poor, of those persecuted for the sake of justice, of our meek, of our peacemakers; and in their ‘earthiness’ lies their scandal and oblivion, together with the sarcasm that surrounds them, yesterday and today.
It is very easy to erase the prophecy of the Beatitudes: just read them as an announcement about the future life, life after death—the poor here on earth are unhappy, but in heaven they will finally be blessed. The true paradoxical and extraordinary power of the Beatitudes lies instead in thinking of them as spoken and written for our life under the sun, for here, for now, for you, for me. The kingdom is promised for this earth: “... for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” a verb conjugated in the present tense (‘is’), not in the future tense (“will be”). It is enough to transform that verb into the future tense to lose the nature of the Beatitudes—the “verb” in the Gospels is something very serious. The Beatitudes are found in the Gospel as a mechanism of self-protection against any attempt to make the Church a club of ethical, law-abiding, and complacent citizens, because for two thousand years they have continued to call ‘blessed’ all those whom we continually reject on the basis of our morals.
Christianity has followed the Gospel in many things, but very little in the Beatitudes. It has loved them, meditated on them, prayed them, sung them, but they have not become the humanism of Christians, nor, even less, of Christianitas—what could Europe and the world have been, their economy and their politics, if Christian civilization had become the civilization of the Beatitudes? Instead, they have been considered an exception within the Gospel itself, almost as if they were guests in a friend's house. Christians have not become the people of the Beatitudes. The whole Gospel has been from the beginning an unheard cry and a great unfinished work, we know this, we see it in history and every day. But the Beatitudes are the unfinished work of the unfinished work, the cry of the unheard cry. The entire Gospel has been waiting for two millennia to be taken seriously by communities and societies, but within the Gospel, the Beatitudes are those who wait and groan the most. The poor, those who mourn, those who are hungry and persecuted, the peaceful, the meek are not called “blessed” even by Christians. One cannot enter into the logic of the Beatitudes and their different heaven without inhabiting their paradox, without entering into the unprecedented logic of the kingdom, a kingdom that loses its salt and leaven when we try to explain it and live it by stepping outside its essential paradox, which begins with ‘blessed are the poor’, which is the first on the list because it is a summary of all those that follow. The kingdom is in fact the key to entering ‘blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Luke 6:20). Outside the kingdom, the beatitudes are not only misunderstood, they are perverted, as those who seek to alleviate the conditions of the destitute know very well, and who are sometimes hindered by perverse interpretations of ‘blessed are the poor’.
We are outside the different land of the kingdom. If we are honest, we know this well, and perhaps sometimes we suffer when we are seized by a deep and subtle pain, by a longing for another home. But we can at least glimpse it from afar if we do not stop desiring it, while we feed ourselves on acorns, perhaps in Michelin-starred restaurants. We can thus intuit that the Beatitudes are understood in the light of the Sabbath and that the Christian meaning of the Sabbath is revealed in the light of the Beatitudes, in a wonderful reciprocity. If, in fact, the God of the Bible and of Jesus wanted every seventh day to be different, if on that day he imposed a law that overturns the law of the other six days, then the poor, the afflicted, the mourning, those who are the most unhappy according to common categories and in ordinary days of life, can be happy, and are happy, in the world that is the opposite of the Sabbath. There is a day when the rejected, the defeated, and the losers can feel themselves called blessed: it is the seventh day, and it is a true name, not a consolatory one. The historical Jesus criticized and challenged the letter of the Sabbath—one need only read the Gospels to see this—not to deny one of the pearls of the Torah and the prophets, but to affirm a radical and eschatological vision of the seventh day. His Sabbath, the truly and radically different day, is that of his Beatitudes. It is not a matter of worship, rules, or norms, nor is it a day that, once passed, is forgotten in the practice of the other six, but a day of judgment on all the days of history. Another world, another society, another economy, a new terrain, outside the walls, where we can set up our lookout post and from there observe our time, judge it on the basis of our non-beatitudes, and then call it to transform itself in anticipation of that kingdom where the poor are called blessed because they truly are. Shabbat is not the exception that proves the rule, but the exception that has the power to explode the rule-Law, if taken seriously in all its scope.
From the vantage point of the Shabbat, we can intuit that ‘Blessed are the poor’ is also the beatitude of children and of the dying, which therefore reminds us that the good life must never forget the terrible and wonderful truth of the beginning and the end, and then live all the others in the light of these alpha and omega. On our last Shabbat, we will hear the voice of the angel of death resound once again: ‘Blessed are the poor’ – and those who have managed to preserve true poverty until the end will feel blessed with this beautiful name.
If, then, the Beatitudes are the unveiling of the kingdom of heaven, then they are truly essential, if it is true that the heart of Jesus' proclamation lies in the continuous expectation of the imminent coming of his kingdom. The Christian is someone who goes to bed at night with the hope that tomorrow the kingdom will finally come, that the Risen One will return, and as soon as he wakes up, he is saddened if it has not yet come. And then they continue to hope, to work in expectation, and then the next day they fall asleep again with the same hope-dream: this is Christian hope.
The whole kingdom of heaven is contained within the short time of the seventh day, because the logic of the shabbat changes the nature of time and links it to space. Just as entering the day of the Sabbath—an act marked on the axis of time—breaks the linear rhythm of time and makes it become something else, so too does crossing the threshold of the temple—an act marked on the axis of space—bring the faithful into another time no longer governed by the ruthless law of Kronos. The Shabbat is the temple of time. This is why it saved the people of Israel in exile: expatriated and with their temple destroyed, every week those deportees entered the temple by entering the Shabbat - ‘Shabbat shalom’.
Francis' prophecy, with its different oeconomia, can only be understood if we look at it by placing ourselves within that first beatitude, placing our soul between ‘blessed are the poor ...’ and ‘... for theirs is the kingdom’. Francis wanted to become an inhabitant of that kingdom of the Gospel, and for this reason he embraced extreme poverty, which he saw as the right way to find it and enter it. This is the miracle of Francis, this is his paradox and his generative scandal. If we do not read it in the light of the kingdom and the beatitudes, we distort its mystery and end up saying that Francis was poor but not ‘pauperistic’, that he loved poverty but not ‘misery’, that he was someone who went to the poor ‘to help them’ - the splendid parable of the Good Samaritan does not help us to understand Francis. The Gospel dies every time we try to bring it back into the logic of common sense, prudence, balance, and moderation. We do this every day, and in fact every day the Gospel dies, and rarely rises again.
The Jubilee is truly the time of the beatitudes. This day could, should be truly different. It is a time given to us to understand our non-beatitudes of debts not forgiven, slaves not freed, a land increasingly suffocated by our wrong desires. And then, every night, to continue dreaming of the coming of a different kingdom. And never stop.
