1st Reading: Jeremiah 17:5-8
2nd Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20
Gospel: Luke 6:17, 20-26
Homily: Ted Keating SM
The hardest work of the Planning Committee was how to take with utter seriousness the Beatitudes and Woes of Luke in today’s Gospel (while) staying open to context of the reading and the Gospel of Luke. As we say, “text without context creates pretext.” If we are not being faithful to the context of the Gospels (and all Scripture), we may find (ourselves) “making up” an interpretation that is not so faithful to the Gospel as it is our own ideological hang up’s.
So, let’s begin there. We are more used to the Beatitudes and Sermon on the Mount of Matthew. There it is the “poor in Spirit” that are comforted and consoled. Much of the Gospel of Matthew is directed and slanted to the Jews who have become Christians. He is trying to help them (understand) that their deep commitment to Judaism is not erased or weakened by their Christian commitment—as a matter of fact, their Jewish commitment is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Scholars think he was writing to a more Jewish community. The whole Sermon on the Mount in Luke is a universalizing sermon that from Judaism and Christianity a call to all humanity is being proclaimed not unlike the Letter to the Ephesians with its emphasis that it was always God’s purposes since the beginning of the World to reconcile Jew and non-Jew—all humanity.
The Gospel of Luke is directed to a fairly well-off Christian Greek community in the Gentile world. Luke himself is reputed to be a medical doctor and artist whose Gospel is beautiful Greek with some of the most striking parables/ stories in all the Gospels. Luke seems to be concerned that for all their Christian fervor and generosity, they may have been weakening on identification with the poor, the powerless, and even the sinners. The parables he has presented in his Gospel consistently (repeats) these concerns to the community he is addressing. Would it be fair to compare the community of Luke with PAX? Many in the PAX community have done what they need to for a basic sense of security in American life—health insurance, pension programs, ownership of a home, funds gathered to help the young get a good education, etc. But No one here is flying around in a private Jet or tearing bridges down to fit their yachts into city harbors. I leave that to you for further discussion.
For Luke it is the poor who are blessed and the rich who evoke a “Woe” from him. It is not the “poor in Spirit” that are presented but the real, honest to God “poor”. Much of his Gospel in many ways is attempting to awaken a devoted Christian community to constantly remember, honor, weep for the poor and forgotten, and the supposed sinners who gradually turn into all of us in his Gospel. So, awareness, mindfulness, heart break, and even grief for the life of the poor in our world is the center of the call of Luke through many parables and sermons like the one in today’s Gospel. Security for even (the) best of us can lead to a gradual anesthetic of forgetfulness of those who have no security and who our world and society often find ways to hide, and finding the call to journey with the poor and do all in our power to soften their suffering and help their inclusion into Society.
But we are not finished with this task of “uncovering” and bringing forward the deep context of this challenging Gospel so we can hear it in all of its power for us. This powerful reading can be heard as a call to some kind of Marxist revolution on behalf of the poor and holding the “rich” to accountability for their callous and tragic oppression of the poor. It also could call us to a judgementalness against the wealthy that sours the mouth and does not sound like the way of the Gospel of Luke and its call for following the non-violence, and non-judgementalness of Jesus. There are other Beatitudes here that would make that sound mindless. But a mindful listening would certainly call us to reflection and analysis of the situation of the rich and poor in our world, and how we can prophetically awaken a sleeping society that often can’t see its cruelty and lack of sympathy and love for the oppressed poor. We discern in faith where we need to go from there with this ever-deepening awareness, still staying within the guard rails of an authentic Gospel life.
But We need to take another step even deeper into the context of today’s Gospel in order to be faithful to its authentic reading. The world of Israel in the time of Jesus was not a capitalist free market society. The rich talked about so much in the Gospel of Luke were not entrepreneurs who had gambled and played the market and became wealthy. They were wealthy because they were powerful. They were not powerful because they were wealthy as in our social system; they (had) simply taken their wealth from those with less power or no power at all. Think the Soviet State after the “wall” came down and the ruthless rush of the brutal to capture and steal the wealth that had piled up in the Communist State, and taken it for themselves. It rings hollow to use the words of the Beatitudes and Woes to condemn wealth when it was originally directed to the wholesale abuse of power by those who had used that power to steal what they could from others, especially the poorest in the parables of Luke. It lets many in our social system out of the challenge of corruption and over-focuses on the economically wealth-whether or not they responsibly share their wealth.
Pope Francis had a special audience in which Martin Scorsese was present. It was an open mic type of audience and Scorsese very honestly shared with the Pope the horror of the neighborhood in which he grew up in the lower West Side of New York city riddled with a culture of violence, gangs, and killings. He talked to the Pope how little the parish Church has to offer the neighborhood. It might have been a peaceful and safe place to go for a few minutes but little else. It was obvious that Scorsese was still feeling deeply the effect of it. The Pope said that we have to learn to “grieve”, to grieve deeply the sorrows of the world and to let that grief grip us and lead us to do what we can with the suffering, knowing that all we will do will not change the suffering of the world. That will only come with the final Reign of God. But we have to pour our hearts and minds into the world anyhow, not necessarily expecting success. We will die grieving as well.
Our second reading helps. We live in the light of the Resurrection full of hope and trust in God, but still in the light of the cross when even the innocence and tenderness of God is murdered by the civil and religious leaders. Let me close with a poem by a famous Guatemalan poet who lived through the horrors of that country’s tragic violence and racism.
They Have Threatened Us with Resurrection, Julia Esquivel
It is something within us that doesn’t sleep,
that doesn’t let us rest,
that won’t stop pounding
deep inside
it is the silent, warm weeping
of Indian women without their husbands
it is the sad gaze of children
fixed somewhere beyond memory, . . .
What keeps us from sleeping
is that they have threatened us with Resurrection!
Because every evening
though weary of killings,
an endless inventory since 1954,
yet we go on loving life
and do not accept their death.
. . . because in the marathon of Hope,
there are always others to relieve us
who carry the strength
to reach the finish line
which lies beyond death.
Join us in this vigil
and you will know what it is to dream!
Then you will know how marvelous it is
to live threatened with Resurrection!
To dream awake
to keep watch asleep,
to live while dying,
and to know ourselves already resurrected.
Valentine Meditation:
Shall I Compare Thee to A Summer’s Day? Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Community Sharing: (paraphrased)
Various members shared how they sit with the World’s woes:
Nellie Ohr suggested a practice of breathing in grief and breathing out light and hope;
Marilu MacCarthy learned to “absorb” grief from Abbot Aidan Shea, take it into ourselves – which lightens it somehow;
Sylvia Diss recommends the work & practice of Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar (https://www.joannamacy.net/main), and believes grief can spur us into action;
Bob Merrill shared how Buddhists deal with grief and death by buying and burning prayers – sending their smoke into the sky and onward to heaven;
Sally Galiani recommends Maria Shrivers’ Sunday paper which this week quoted Leonard Cohen, “I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.” (https://mariashriver.com/the-sundaypaper/);
Kathleen Keenan recommends “Teach us to care and not to care, Teach us to sit still.” from T.S. Elliot’s “The Four Quartets,”;
Stephanie Niedringhaus offered the word “anguish” and how it enlightens our passion and perhaps action;
Mike Messinger shared the example of a Florida parish of 3,000 which welcomed 500 Guatemalan Indians with the help of the Catholic Church, Quaker Movement, and the Federal Government;
Ted Keating suggested the power of empathy may lead to non-violent action;
Charles Schehl shared his belief everyone would be poorer if we all shared the world’s wealth, until he read a book that argued everyone would live comfortably if the world’s wealth was shared equally.