homily [C]OT6 : Luke 6.20-26
Our readings today start with the Prophet Jeremiah, telling us ‘Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord’. In other words, choose the good, do the good and you will be blessed. The Prophet’s words are challenging but at least they are understandable.
And then we come to today’s Gospel. Jesus teaching the crowd what we call the Beatitudes. We find this event twice in the Gospels. It is in Matthew, and in Luke.
In Matthew, it is called the Sermon on the Mount. And since Matthew is writing to a predominantly Jewish audience, they will understand all about teachings from a mountain. For a mountain is where God was made present to the people of Israel….. where God’s teachings were given to the people of Israel. And Matthew in his description of the beatitudes, takes the people from a more literal understanding of the words, to a more symbolic understanding ….. a Spiritual understanding. As in “Blessed are the poor in Spirit” ….. and since everyone can identify with that perspective, the teachings can become a spiritual guide. It’s a very Jewish way of interacting with scripture….. and one that we Catholics among others have incorporated into the many ways we pray with scripture.
But there is a risk in all of this. Matthews spiritualized beatitudes, along with other phrases from Matthew’s Gospel, like “The poor you will always have with you” – have been taken as permission for us to do nothing about poverty.
And we then take the same approach with those who are grieving, and the millions in our world who are hungry, and all of our fellow humans who are facing persecution. By spiritualizing the teaching, it becomes more comfortable for us not to DO anything.
But that is NOT the approach that Luke takes.
At the time of Jesus, the local dwellers of the Galilean villages suffered from the exploitation of civil and religious power, resulting in hunger, misery and diseases, imprisonment of the citizens. At the squares, beaches, synagogues, there were lepers, blind, sick, possessed, excluded. Yet the people in their misery continued to trust and wait on the Lord for their liberation, while those at the helms of affairs continued to shut their ears to the message of the Kingdom, marginalizing the poor and getting richer, living as though all depended on them without relying on God. Sound familiar? Maybe closer to home?
For this reason, the care of the poor, the weak and the marginalized was at the heart of Jesus’ concern, of Jesus’ ministry. And for Luke, the Kingdom of God is not a euphemism for a place or state called heaven. Something we enter into after our life is over. For Luke, the Kingdom of God is about the way we are living right here, right now. Incorporating the teachings of Jesus into the very fabric of our everyday life. Because, for Luke, the Gospel can only be good news for the poor if we’re willing to live by it ourselves, so that there are no poor among us. It can only be good news to the hungry, the oppressed, the marginalized, when there are no more of us who are hungry, oppressed, marginalized.
There is something else about Luke’s description that is important. It is that Jesus didn’t proclaim this teaching from on high. It is not the Sermon on the Mount. Rather, he stood with the people on level ground. The Sermon on the Plain. As so Luke paints a picture of Jesus standing at the same level as the crowd, standing with the people who are poor, are hungry, are mourning, and are persecuted. In the broken state of the world at that moment, Jesus stands in solidarity with the ones who suffer, the marginalized, the ignored, the exploited. For Luke speaks about poverty and hunger, suffering and condemnation literally. And rather than spiritualize the teaching, as we see in Matthew, Luke unabashedly passes on Jesus’ revolutionary challenge to the social order.
At the risk of blasphemy, allow me to add one more Beatitude: “Blessed are you if you find the Beatitudes challenging and disconcerting, because you get their point.” You are supposed to return home disturbed by them, not comforted. And if you think that is a tough teaching, wait until you hear next week’s Gospel!
Jesus’s Beatitudes provide a dizzying new vision of the world, a perspective designed to turn upside down the political and social world of the Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus and of the Jewish religious elite of Judea and Jerusalem. Likewise it calls you and I to a drastic and fundamental reassessment of our own political and social affairs, a reassessment that will not be realized without recognising our dependence on God.
Jesus presents to us a vision of the reign of God — a reign organized not from the top down, but from the bottom up. In the Beatitudes, Jesus offers a description of the community of goodwill His teachings will build in this world – if we follow them.
Which leaves me with just one question ..……. Will you?