Readings of the day: Jeremiah 17:5-8; Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6; 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20; Luke 6:17, 20-26
The message of our Gospel today is, I think (or maybe I hope) a familiar one to us: The beatitudes. Jesus pronounces certain groups of people “blessed”: The poor; those who “are hungry now”; those “who weep now”; those who are hated, excluded, reviled, defamed “on account of the Son of Man”; because of their belief in Jesus and imitation of how he lived.
But our Gospel message today might be just different enough from the beatitudes we are familiar with, so as to be, to say the least, a sharp challenge for us to hear and put into practice. We hear today Luke’s version of the beatitudes: Four blessings, toward the poor; the hungry; those who weep; those who are hated and excluded “on account of the Son of Man,” and four corresponding woes, toward those who are rich; those who are full; whose hunger has been satisfied; toward those who laugh; and toward those of whom “all speak well.”
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke each include versions of the beatitudes. Matthew’s beatitudes are often numbered as eight, without any corresponding woes, unlike Luke. Bible experts say that Matthew’s beatitudes may have been intended primarily to encourage an audience of Jews—Jesus’ own people—who had come to believe in Jesus as God; as the Messiah. If we are trying to encourage people, reminding them of the woes they will experience if they behave badly does not often work. God looks with special blessing upon the poor; those who mourn; those who are hated for the sake of their belief in Jesus as the Messiah and living as he has lived. And, Matthew says, if we are not poor, or mourning, or hated, all is not lost. The key is to attune ourselves to the experience and concerns of the less-advantaged, the poor, the mourning, those who are mistreated for their belief in and emulation of our Lord: To be as they are “in spirit” if we cannot be so in our actual experience. This is called solidarity with the poor, those who mourn, the mistreated and rejected.
I think we are much more familiar with Matthew’s version of the beatitudes than Luke’s version we hear today. Matthew’s beatitudes are far more frequently commented than Luke’s. We hear many more church hymns, at least in my experience, based on Matthew’s than Luke’s beatitudes. Besides, I cannot imagine the St. Louis Jesuits singing, “Cursed are your rich, for the kingdom shall not be theirs”… It simply does not have the same ring to it as, “Blessed be your poor”… Maybe we could compose a church hymn with Luke’s woes, in some dreadful minor key… On second thought, this is probably not a good idea. I would not want us all to get up and walk out of Mass!
Whatever the reason(s), Luke’s beatitudes and accompanying woes are much more direct and immediately challenging than Matthew’s. Matthew has Jesus proclaim the beatitudes at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount. Again, I think we are maybe more familiar with this setting of the beatitudes, thanks to religious art and music. Matthew presents Jesus as the great teacher; the one to fulfill and uphold the authority of the Law of Moses and the prophets, but who exceeds even Moses and the prophets in authority. In Matthew, Jesus goes up a mountain with his disciples, but preaches his Sermon on the Mount toward the crowds below. We might imagine a kind of natural amphitheatre created by the hilly landscape of Galilee, where Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount. I can attest to this: As a teacher, I want people to be able to hear me well. The hills surrounding where the crowds gathered to hear Jesus would have helped Jesus’ voice to carry more powerfully.
But Luke sets Jesus’ Sermon differently than Matthew. In Luke, it is not an extended discourse but a brief collection of sayings. Luke begins with the crowds, but has Jesus direct his preaching toward a smaller group of his disciples, already more committed to him and his message than the crowds would have been. Luke features not the Sermon on the Mount but the Sermon on the Plain: Jesus stands on his disciples’ level; on our level.
There is something to be said here for what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, for the disciples in Jesus’ time, in our Gospel, and for us. In Jesus’ time and place, a person who was wealthy enough could (usually for a handsome fee) study under a mentor or master teacher. The student, or disciple, of the teacher was expected to learn enough from the teacher’s instruction to be able to put it into practice. But the disciple was not usually expected to become the teacher; the teacher was one-of-a kind, irreplaceable.
Yet discipleship of Jesus worked a bit differently than discipleship of just any expert teacher in most or all of the ancient world. A person became (and becomes) a disciple of Jesus, not by that person’s choice of a master teacher or by paying a fee, but by Jesus’ choice. Jesus would take the initiative to call people to be his disciples. And Jesus’ disciples—we as Jesus’ disciples—are expected in some way to imitate the teacher, Jesus, so well as to be able to be his presence to our world forever, until he returns in glory.
So how are we to imitate the teacher, Jesus, so well that we almost become the teacher? Clearly, Jesus mission to his disciples, to us, to imitate his example and to become like him is urgent as Luke puts it in his Gospel. There are not only blessings in store for Jesus’ disciples if we should be successful in being like him, but there are woes or curses toward those who should fail. And the mission Jesus gives us to imitate him—to be the teacher’s presence in our world; a presence of justice, kindness, compassion—and the consequences of living this mission well or not are immediate: “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh… Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”
Now, please let me be clear that Jesus does not say that to be wealthy is a sin, or that, if we are not hungry or miserable then, woe to us, we must be doing something wrong. But Jesus is saying, I think, that if we have wealth that we could use to alleviate the suffering of others who struggle to make ends meet; if we have the resources to help ensure that nobody has need of basic necessities of life—food, water, shelter; if we have the gift of joy or laughter that could brighten the experience of somebody who is sad or despairing, then use these gifts for the benefit of the less well-off… now! The call is urgent; this is how we imitate Jesus Christ, the teacher. This is how we become like him, now, in our present world; our present experience; our present relationships.
But when our concern for worldly priorities becomes an obstacle to the mission of justice, kindness, and compassion to which Jesus calls us, then the woes apply. When our concern for ourselves and our own individual well-being inhibits us from striving for the common good, Jesus challenges us: “Woe to you who are rich… Woe to you who are full now… Woe to you who are laughing now… Woe to you when all speak well of you.”
Jesus’ message is without doubt challenging, especially in our culture that prioritizes (as it should, but perhaps even frequently does to excess, over the common good and social justice) values like wealth, individual comfort and freedom, everybody speaking well of us.
Luke’s beatitudes hearken to a longstanding biblical motif of blessings and curses (or blessings and woes). We hear this not only in Luke’s Gospel today but from the prophet Jeremiah, although Jeremiah lists the curses or woes first, and then the blessings. But Jeremiah’s core message is similar to Luke’s today: On the one hand, “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals”; in passing things like wealth, comfort, and individual freedom at the expense of common, social well-being, and ultimately at the expense of trusting God above all else. On the other hand, “blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD.”
Our Psalm today, the first of the biblical Psalms, carries on this message of Jeremiah and Luke: “Blessed is the [one] who does not follow the advice of the wicked… but whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law meditates day and night.”
My hope, sisters and brothers, is that this message of the word of God has not lost its edge; its ability to be somewhat discomforting and controversial in our time, as it was in the times of Jeremiah, of the Psalmist, of Luke the Gospel writer, of Jesus. How do we “delight” in the law of the LORD? How do we put it into practice, for the common good and salvation of everybody, now? How do we become like the teacher; the Christ?
I return to a word I used just a few minutes ago: Solidarity. When we enter into solidarity; into something of a relationship of care and of justice for the least of our sisters and brothers, so that all are blessed by the bounty of the Lord together, we will have imitated the teacher. We imitate a teacher, Jesus, who died and rose again to save us. His death was utter failure; utter woe to the world’s eyes, yet Jesus overcame this, so that we may follow Christ into the resurrection from the dead, as St. Paul says today, “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
Jesus gave us his Sermon on the Plain. He stood on our level, so that we could be raised one day to his in heaven. But he stood on the level ground with us, his disciples, so that we could begin to imitate him now; to be blessed now in our care, our compassion, our kindness especially for the least among us; so that we could be like the teacher who stands with us on the level ground.
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