Peace be with you.
If Today’s gospel sounds similar to but not the same as the Beatitudes you are used to hear, there’s a reason for that. It’s because these beatitudes come from the Sermon on the Plain from the Gospel of Luke and not the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. The difference is that St. Matthew’s version contains eight Beatitudes (statements that begin with “Blessed are the…”) while St. Luke has four Beatitudes and four woes. I appreciated the explanation offered by St. Bonaventure as to the difference. He said that possibly the Lord offered the fuller eight beatitudes earlier on the top of the mountain and then, later, offered the four as a kind of summary/reminder to a congregation mixed with those present for the earlier sermon and some new people who needed to be caught up. Yet, I think the summary is even more challenging because it not only focuses on the positive side of who is blessed but makes explicit four contrasting “woes” that a Christian is to avoid.
Still, let’s be honest. How many of us would say that we have, as a goal, to be poor? Don’t raise your hands but think about how absurd of a question that is. How many plan on starving in order to be holy? How many want to weep, not just shed a tear but have a full out, uncontrollably mournful experience of weeping? And how many people want to be persecuted? The answer to these question is, of course, no one. And we can probably all think of people who are poor or hungry, or weeping or persecuted who are far from holy. So, why does Jesus seem to set these up as the ideal of Christian life?
Each of these beatitudes describes what ancient philosophers would have called and “evil”. An evil in the ancient world was a place where there should be something good but, instead, there is nothing. Think of a hole in the ground that needs to be filled. Someone who is poor needs money. Someone who is starving needs food. Someone who is mourning needs to be comforted. Someone who is being persecuted needs to have rights. Yet, Jesus says that people who have filled the holes these are the ones to be pitied. Is he off his rocker? Or, as some scripture scholars suggest whenever we have a passage of scripture that seems to hard to fulfill, is he exaggerating in order to make a point? I don’t think so.
The passage that immediately precedes this one is the calling of the twelve apostles. Jesus looked at his growing number of followers and chose 12 men who had been with him since his baptism to be leaders in this community. They wouldn’t have known at the time that Jesus was really beginning the first diocese with himself as the bishop, the 12 as priests, the 120 disciples as his deacons, and the people as...well...the people. What they did know, however was that there was danger in following Jesus. Not only did you have to neglect your family and your job in your commitment to follow Jesus but you, in effect, became an enemy of the state and synagogue. Romans would view you as being an insurrectionist and the Jewish leadership would see you as following a rogue rabbi. So, these men, now filled with fear and trepidation, are being told what to expect. Don’t expect to be rich, well fed, happy, or esteemed. In fact, if you do expect that treatment, you aren’t following Christ. Instead, expect to be poor, hungry, mournful, and hated because of the fidelity you feel to Christ.
Jesus ultimate message, then, is not that there is an innate value to these characteristics, otherwise anorexia and anarchy would be the pinnacle of holiness. Intead, he is saying that those who are satisfied with what they ave are where they are already have what they need. There is no hole inside them that needs to be filled. But we who do feel the hole inside of us have, basically, two choices. We can fill it with the stuff of this world or we can let God fill it in his time with his grace. After all, our world loves to try and offer things that fill the holes in our life. These four blesseds and woes are pretty good for our time. The world wants us always to have the newest technology, clothing, home furnishings, and other things. They want to fill us up with junk food or drugs and alcohol to make us happy. They have given us social media that addicts us to having our every be liked and esteemed as though we are all St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas.
At our core, as Christians, we know that culture can only fill these holes in our life with trash that ultimately leaves us feeling even more empty. We recognize that emptiness we feel are an opportunity to connect with the biggest hole in history, the cross: This evil torture device on which hung the savior of the world is the ultimately filled by the Word Made Flesh, Jesus Christ, who alone satisfies our hungers and leads us out of mourning to the comfort of eternal life. Then the hole in our heart becomes a grace that drives us to be like Christ, an emptiness that we treasure because it points us to where our true hearts will one day be filled.
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