Sunday 13th February 2022
6th Sunday – Year C
Jer 17:5-8
1 Cor 5:12.16-20
Lk 6:17.20-26
Jesus has ascended the mountain where he spent the night in prayer before choosing the twelve apostles. Now he comes down. The apostles and other close disciples are with him. They are met by a crowd coming from a vast area all around. These people want to listen to him, to touch him, to be healed in their bodies and in their souls.
Luke is a keen observer of this double movement: the movement from above, Jesus coming down, reaching out to our humanity; and the movement from afar, the crowd drawn to Jesus as to a source of life. This is, we could say, the twofold movement of mercy. Mercy going out from God is Jesus, the Son, who was made flesh and dwelt among us. Mercy drawing us to God is the Holy Spirit, dwelling in our hearts and leading us to our Saviour. These are the two Hands of the Father’s mercy, the Son and the Spirit, through which He is taking hold of us with paternal strength and maternal kindness. They effect the encounter between Mercy and misery, divine grace and human need, which is at the heart of the Gospel.
The Beatitudes give to this encounter its highest expression. In St Luke’s account, they seem to indicate to us two directions: the direction of poverty and the direction of humility.
“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” The poor, those who are hungry and those who weep are put under the spotlight of God’s love. The Psalm of old already marvelled at the mysterious attraction which draws God to the poor:
Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down upon heavens and the earth?
He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people. (Ps 113:5-8)
Wherever God sees poverty in any form – lack of money, lack of bread, lack of dignity and consideration, lack of love – He is so mysteriously drawn that, already, the kingdom of God is present. God’s answer to poverty is the gift of His own presence. He is present where everything is lacking. “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). In Jesus’ poverty, God meets us in our essentially poor condition. He stays more especially with the poor. He fills them with his presence and with the inner gift of his Spirit. The Spirit is Pater pauperum, Father of the poor, just like Jesus is brother of the poor. The poor are placed for ever in the two hands of the Father of mercies.
The saints, especially the great saints of charity, people like St Francis, St Vincent de Paul, St Mother Teresa, were highly sensitive to the intense presence of God in the poor. ‘The poor are our lords’, said St Vincent de Paul to the ladies of the 17th Century Parisian aristocracy whom he sent to serve the poor. We can say we are making some sort of progress in our faith whenever we feel the need to adore the Lord in the Eucharist and to serve the Lord in the poor. Do you want to go a bit further, to make your Christian life more real? Do something for the poor. Think of the poor. Serve the poor. They are never far from any of us.
Linked with poverty, there is what we call humility. The paradox of the last beatitude is an expression of the mystery of humility:
Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man. Rejoice, leap for joy, your reward is great in heaven.
Persecuted disciples enter the way of humiliation. It is, obviously, Christ’s way, the way of the Cross. God’s mercy seems to be going always further down. One day St Jeanne Jugan, the foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor, was knocking at the door of a rich family and asking for alms in favour of the poor old men and women she and her sisters were caring for. Instead of a donation, she received a slap in the face. To which she answered: “This is for me. Now can you give me something for my poor?” Whoever comes near to the poor will at some point share with them in being despised, reviled, ill-treated. Jesus himself went this way even to the point that he became the one at whom “the rulers scoffed […] saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One!’” (Lk 23:35). Poor and despised: such was our Saviour.
Now just as there is joy in poverty if you open yourself to God’s gift, there can be joy in humiliation if you recognise that you are sharing in Jesus’ humiliation. Of course, we do not like very much to hear such things. We would like to be the friends of Jesus and at the same time rich enough, well fed and joyful, and possibly celebrated by all around us as “a good man” or “a good woman”. We dream of having at the same time money, to quiet our worries for this world, and virtue, to stop our anxieties about the other. But the Beatitudes tell us most clearly that this is not the way it works.
If our salvation is founded on God’s mercy, there is no other way for us that to enter the movement of mercy and to become merciful – that is to say, poor and humble. This will lead us to encounter Christ in the poor and to share with Christ in the privilege of being reviled with Christ and with the poor. This will be what Saint Francis called “perfect joy”. This is the direction the Beatitudes show us; obviously a direction which is very contrary to the aims and the illusions of our capitalist society. Of course the Beatitudes are extreme. Of course, they are, in a sense, impossible to live out. They are not, though, a way for the great saints only, but the way for all, the only way. If, out of faith, and love for Christ, we consent to take this way, the Spirit will lead us; the Spirit will widen our hearts; the Spirit will pour into our hearts a greater love; the Spirit will give us access to a joy with which nothing can compare; He will make us “rejoice and leap for joy” for out of our poverty, God found the way to lead us to a share in His infinite Mercy – which is the only treasure worth our efforts.