In Religious Education this week, we have been learning about the Beatitudes as part of our new topic, from Galilee to Jerusalem.
We began by exploring how Jesus teaching in the Beatitudes helps us to understand what it truly means to live a blessed life, one that is close to God. We compared the Beatitudes with the Ten Commandments and recognised that the commandments are laws given by God that focus on actions and behaviours. In contrast, Jesus taught the Beatitudes to help people go deeper, focusing on attitudes of the heart and how we choose to live.
We read Matthew 5:1-12 and began to understand the meaning of each Beatitude. In our first lesson, we used a Venn diagram to compare the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, identifying similarities and differences and understanding how Jesus fulfils the Law by teaching his followers how to live God’s way from the inside out.
We then linked the Beatitudes to our understanding of virtues, which we know are positive habits that help us to live in God’s way. We have previously learned about inspiring individuals and considered the virtues we would like to grow in. In this lesson, however, we focused particularly on the virtues of hope and charity.
We learned that hope means relying on God, not just ourselves. We explored the Beatitude, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ and understood that this teaches us to recognise our need for God. We discussed how the virtue of hope is closely linked to our relationship with God, helping us to trust in him, believe that he is always with us and remain resilient when things are difficult.
We also explored the virtue of charity, which we understood to be about our relationships with others. Charity means choosing to love, even when it is hard. We learned that Jesus lived charity through forgiveness, mercy and peace, and we linked this to the Beatitude Blessed are the peacemakers. We discussed how Christians are called to put others first and show love through their actions and choices.
In our work, we created our own stained glass windows to reflect a chosen Beatitude and the virtue it links to. We carefully selected symbols to represent our ideas, such as a bridge for charity to show building and repairing relationships, and a heart to represent hope and growing closer to God. We then wrote reflections explaining our choices and what our Beatitude teaches Christians about how to live.
Which Beatitude helps you understand how Jesus wants us to live, and why?
