16 February, 3rd Sunday before Lent
Readings: Jer. 17. 5-10; 1 Cor. 15. 12-20; Lk. 6. 17-26
Theme: Blessed are the Poor
Being a so-called ‘Jeremiah’ is often associated with looking on the bleak side of things. And, there is definitely some of that in our first reading today from the prophet Jeremiah. Those who trust in mere mortals and make flesh their strength will be cursed, says Jeremiah. At the time of Jeremiah, the people of the Southern Kingdom of Judah had been invaded by the powerful empire of Babylon and they were deported to Babylon to live under the yoke of foreign rulers. So, the message of a bleak future and being cursed is one which the prophet uses to communicate to the people that even though they are in exile it is necessary to be faithful to the Lord. That is why as well as curses, Jeremiah speaks of blessings. Those who trust in the Lord will prosper and bear fruit. In a word, they will be blessed by the Lord.
Our Gospel today picks up this theme of blessings and curses in the famous sermon on the mount (Matthew 5. 1-12), or as we have it in the Lukan version we are reading, this sermon takes place on a level place. The structure of the sermon, or the address by Jesus to the people, has strong echoes of our first reading from Jeremiah. This should not surprise us, because as I have been mentioning over the previous weeks, we should read the Gospels as using the Old Testament motifs and stories as the framework for the setting out of the life and events of Jesus, as we have them portrayed in the New Testament.
Today, Jesus’s sermon on the beatitudes picks up this Old Testament structure and places it within the context of the reconstruction of Israel in terms of a new Israel that will be built upon the shoulders of the twelve apostles, and the many disciples who like the crowds listening to Jesus’s words will be inspired to live evangelical lives by the words and events of Jesus’s life.
The Gospel passage starts out by telling us that a great multitude of people had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases and cured of unclean spirits. This connection between needing to be healed and cured and listening to God’s Word should not to be passed over without realizing its true import. The healing that we need, our salvation in Gospel terms, is brought to us by the Word of God, Jesus. Jesus is the one to whom we should go in order to be made whole again; to be saved from all the powers of darkness, sin and decay which injure the body and the soul. He is literally our salvation and in him we are restored to health, both physically and spiritually.
In order for this salvation to be effective in us, in order for us to be blessed, certain things need to be in place so that we are able to receive the freely given gift of our salvation and so play our part in the newly constituted Israel. Poverty is central to this. In Matthew’s version of this sermon in Mt. 5.3 this is phrased as ‘poverty in spirit’ and much ink has been spilled over interpreting whether Jesus meant actual material poverty or spiritual poverty or both. Clearly, the message from Jesus is meant to indicate that only when we trust in God and not in mere mortals and flesh, will we be able to taste and see the true goodness of the Lord. So, the (be)attitude which Jesus is exhorting us to aspire to here is that of complete trust in the Lord and not in our material possessions or lack of. However, if we are blessed by much, then we should not sanitize this passage in order to make ourselves feel inoculated from its challenge. All material things are to be seen as gifts which we should use to reverence, praise and serve the Lord. This is why poverty should characterize servants of the Lord because this beatitude expresses the evangelical motif of the Gospels which preach our absolute dependence on God and not on ourselves. So, ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God….but woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation’.
This combination of blessings and curses indicated in the text by ‘blessed are you and woe to you’ is meant to address us here and now in our church today. It is not simply an historical set of words which once meant something and no longer have contemporary force. But what does it mean for us to be poor? What does it mean for us to be blessed by the Lord? Fundamentally, this means that we should be aware of our need of salvation; that without God we can do nothing and indeed that we are nothing. A wonderful sermon on Matthew’s version of the beatitudes by the fourteenth century German mystic and theologian, Meister Eckhart makes this point very powerfully. Eckhart speaks of the experience of the ‘poor in spirit’ as of those who know in a profound sense their own dependency on God. They know their own nothingness. This awareness leads to a deep joy, a blessedness, because it allows the disciple to find the true ground of their own being in God. God is our being and paradoxically, perhaps, it is the very nothingness which we are that allows us to participate in the fullness which is the Being of God.
So, when we realize our absolute dependency on God, on our need for salvation, we are truly blessed and we can say with the crowds listening to Jesus as he delivered his sermon on the beatitudes, that we are truly blessed to be the poor of the Lord.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.