"Our Gospel for today’s feast is Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, etc.” And the word “blessed” we still apply to saints today, the great exemplary ones—“the Blessed Virgin Mary,” “Blessed James Huntington.” And we get a much better sense of what Jesus was up to with this word if we look at the Aramaic that underlies the New Testament Greek. The word for “blessed” that Jesus would have used in his own language is the Aramaic tubwayhun, which literally means “ripe” or “ready for the picking”—a word from the agrarian culture Jesus grew up in. And when that word is used in reference to people, it can mean mature, integrated, whole, complete.". . .