Luke 6:17, 20-26
Most of us are familiar with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus gives us the eight beatitudes. You remember, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” These are recorded in teh gospel of Matthew, where the writer has Jesus go up on a mountain and sit down. He wants us to see that Jesus is like Moses, bringing us a new set of guidelines by which to live. And sitting to give a speech was a sign of authority to the Jewish people; We still do this when the Pope delivers a serious message -- He speaks from a chair, “ex cathedra”. And so when we hear Luke’s version, as we just did, we probably think of these statements in the same way -- in fact, people call this discourse Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. But perhaps that’s an indication that Jesus is doing something very different here. At the beginning of the gospel, it tells us that Jesus stood on a stretch of level ground, with his disciples in the middle of a great crowd, including gentiles, because Tyre and Sidon were both regions inhabited by them. Luke, who is probably a gentile and is writing to gentiles, portrays Jesus as a teacher in the Greek world. These teachers would gather their disciples in an agora, which is Greek for field, or flat place, and teach standing up. But these differences aside, Jesus’ gives us only four blesseds and four woes.
“Blessed are you poor”, he says, not “poor in spirit”. Saint Augustine said that he is not holding up physical poverty as an ideal, although certainly Saint Francis did. Augustine said that Jesus meant us to have a humble attitude towards God, to be faithful, and to do good with what has been given to us. Similarly, blessed are you who are now hungry” speaks to our awareness of the need for God in our lives. Blessed are you who weep does not mean being depressed or sad; it means you are aware of injustice to the point where it hurts to think about it. Blessed are you when people hate you on account of the Son of Man. I think about people who day after day are there praying in front of the abortion clinic. These attitudes that Jesus lays out need to be cultivated; they aren’t automatic. But they are important, because Jesus promises that the day will come when these longings in us will be satisfied, and we will see that having gone through the work of putting God first, of longing for God above everything else, of being hurt by the injustice around us, of accepting the subtle and sometimes obvious hostility toward us when we act for Christ -- there will be a great reward.
Jesus goes on to warn us of the four sources of sin; the pursuit of material goods, the pursuit of comfort, pleasure, good things to eat and drink; the pursuit of amusement and distraction; and taking delight in the honors the world gives. Jesus knows that all of these are sources of distraction from what we should be doing, and they blunt those spiritual impulses that lead us to union with God. And we forget that we are mortal, that someday we will die, and none of these things will matter. Jesus points out that any and all these sources of sin will be seen as empty and worthless someday; We will suffer the fate of the false prophets in the Old Testament.
So when we think about these beatitudes, we can see that life is a sort of balancing act. We have four things that seem to push us away and four that seem to attract us. And our job as Christians is to see in the woes the things that our dangerous to our spiritual lives; and in the blesseds, those things that bring us closer to God, which of necessity means cultivating a true poverty, a true hunger, a true sense of the evil around us and indeed, in us; and the willingness to put yourselves out for Christ.
Lent, of course, is for these things. We deny ourselves something, so we are in solidarity with the poor; we fast, so we can see beyond the good things we give our bodies; we remember Christ’s suffering in the Stations of the Cross, in the Passion narratives we will hear, and we recall the injustice all around us; and we are marked with ashes for all to see, which is a tiny step but does mark each of us as as one of Jesus Christ’s disciples. In these beatitudes and woes, Jesus invites us to measure ourselves and see what we are lacking; and holding out to us the promise that if we step out with courage even when it’s hard, we have his rock solid promise that we will be rewarded in heaven.
