Transcript

Speaker 1: Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Welcome to Scripture for your inner outcasts. It's August 7th, 2026, Friday of the 18th Week in Ordinary Time. I'll be joining you today. I'm Elizabeth and I'm the producer of this show. Happy Friday. It's good to be with you again. For today's episode, I'd like to speak a little bit about the Alleluia verse from today's mass, which comes from the Beatitudes, Matthew chapter five, verse ten. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'd like to ask two questions as a framework for this episode today. The first is, what is righteousness? And the second is, are you persecuted for the sake of righteousness. So to the manager parts who are listening, if it feels safe, I'd like to speak to your exiled parts. And if it doesn't feel safe, that's okay. They don't have to listen. You can filter down the message to them in whatever way feels safe for you. So speaking to those exiled parts, I'd like to talk about what Jesus means when he says this. What does the word righteousness mean? He says, blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Righteousness means just living. Or more simply put, righteousness means being good, making good decisions. And sometimes people are persecuted for making good decisions. Sometimes other people will see a person making good decision and choose to be mean to them or punish them for one reason or another. And so in this verse, Jesus says that if that happens to you, if you are living a good life but you seem to be punished for it, then you are blessed, and the kingdom of heaven belongs to you.

Speaker 1: And that's a great hope that we can live in. But are you persecuted for the sake of righteousness? Are you punished when you do good things? It's possible that you've been misunderstood. It's possible that you've tried to reach out and say something or do something. And the adults in your life or the authority figures around you completely misunderstood what you were doing. Maybe you even got punished for doing something that you thought was good. Maybe you were very misunderstood despite your good intentions. And so yes, your manager parts might see the word persecution as a big deal, such as being held captive, going to war, being imprisoned, big grand gestures of sacrifice. But you exiles probably experience persecution in a much smaller, much more intimate way. It's the little things like if mom or Dad spoke to you harshly when you were just trying to do something good. Or if a brother or sister was mean to you when you were not mean to them. Jesus says, blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's very possible that you exiled parts were and have been persecuted or punished for the sake of righteousness. And so we know that the kingdom of heaven is yours. Thanks for tuning in today. To find similar content, go to Souls and hearts.com/content. Let's end with our invocations. Our Lady, our mother, Untier of knots. Pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist pray for us.