It is 29th January 2017. We celebrate the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Zephaniah 2:3, 3:12-13; and the second reading is from 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; and the Gospel from Matthew 5:1-12. The first reading convinces that our honesty and integrity will pay us anyway. Our faithfulness and humility to the Lord would hide all the evils that surround us. God would be gentle with those who are humble, righteous and simple. Prioritizing God’s will over our personal will bring healing and restoration to the one who is humble and faithful to the Lord. It is an open invitation to all of us who believe to be truthful, transparent and having a crystal-clear conscience would shelter us under the protective wings of the Lord. The responsorial Psalm praises, “Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” (Mt.5:3). The second reading reminds us to rest our boasting in the Lord not on our personal glory and pride. God chooses the weak and humble to shame the wise. By this very act of choosing the weak, the foolish, the low, the despised, the reduced, God demonstrated God’s wisdom that it is the laws of faith saved us not our nobility, merit, power and authority of human origin. All good that we enjoy today is from the suffering and pain of the Lord Jesus on the Cross and therefore, Christ is the only one to be credited for our true dignity that was lost due to our attachments to sins. The Gospel presents us with the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the blueprint for authentic Christian living. New Moses, Jesus offers us the road map to holiness and the Way to God. We all need to establish a genuine and sincere relationship with God and with one another by being humble and faithful to the commandments of God. To be blessed, we need to live in humility over the seducing mindset of attachment to wealth; having gentleness, meekness, mercy and forgiveness over pride, lust, selfishness; having unrelenting quest for peace, and unquestionable loyalty to God. Our radical transformation is possible through our humility and faithfulness to God that would have a lasting remedy on the wounds and hurts created by ourselves as well as the rest of the humanity. These spiritual attitudes are to be inculcated in our daily Christian living not as commandments but as a mindset or trajectory. God has the power to reverse any human situation, when we have with hope and faith in God’s only beloved Son Jesus. The ultimate joy comes by the faith we have in Jesus and faithfulness for the values of the kingdom of God. May you have good day.