SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

Jeremiah 17:5-8 | 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20 | Luke 6:17, 20-26

Oh God who teach us that you abide in hearts that are just and true, grant that we may be so fashioned by your grace as to become a dwelling pleasing to you.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This is a fascinating gospel to me because of the way in which I feel Jesus was talking to two groups of people, one the disciples and the other the crowd.  So I want to talk first about what I think he was doing with the crowd that he had in front of him.  I’m always fascinated by the fact that Jesus could talk to so many people, like 500 or something like that, without a microphone and all that stuff.  Anyway, he must have had a very wonderful voice that carried.  That’s a wonderful way of thinking of him, with his beautiful voice and a beautiful message.  But back to the audience, one of the things that’s clear in the Old Testament that’s different than the New Testament is the Old Testament there is a strong theme that human beings are earning salvation.  They’re earning the love of God.  It shows up over and over and over again, because God first revealed himself to the Israelites by saying, “I am — I want you to understand that I am the only God, and I have a burning desire to connect with you, to lead you, to guide you to a place that you cannot get to on your own, a place you don’t even know fully what it is.  But I want you to trust me.  Go with me to a land that you have never been there before.”  And that’s a good image of the way in which God comes into human nature and changes the way we imagine things, the way we see things, but again, back to the image in the Old Testament.  It’s basically that, when God was working with them, he would do this: he would say, “I will show you how much I love you by helping you with your enemies.”  Now, you have to understand, back at the time that this was written — that’s almost 4,000 years ago — life was very different, and enemies were something that was real.  You just had to — it’s why the cities were all walled, and there was always some group that might come in and destroy you.  So there was a sense of war and battle throughout the whole thing.  So that’s where you see God working with the Israelites.  “I will be the source of your success in battle, and I will crush the enemy for you,” which must have sounded wonderful.  But then that same God revealed himself as the source of everything.  He was the source of that kind of goodness to his people, but he was also the source of evil, which is hard for us to imagine.  But they saw gods as in charge.  Anything bad that happened, it was the God that was angry, and so God acted like the rest of the gods so they could begin to understand.  “All right, he’s credible.  He’s like the other gods.”  But they’re going to learn slowly how different he is, and that’s not fully revealed until Jesus.  But basically what I’m trying to say is that there is this pattern in the Old Testament of God being the source of all good and all evil, and one of the things in which that left people with was the sense that God could turn on them.  And he could crush their enemies, but if they didn’t do what they were told, he’d crush them. 

So in that system of God’s favor, if you follow the rules and the laws, that was something that pleased God very much.  So there are many people who just follow the letter of the law, and the sign that they follow the letter of the law was wealth, abundance, well-being, a wonderful, glorious life, almost like a prosperity gospel.  Turn to God and believe in him, and your world becomes rich and full of all that the world offers.  That’s what basically was being presented to these people.  And so the opposite would be, if you were sick, if you had leprosy, if you had a problem that was really terrible, then that was always God punishing you, and if you didn’t do anything wrong, then you were told, “Well, it was your parents’ sin, and you’re being punished for their sins.”  So they have an image that God’s favor is a result of their obedience, and God’s favor would be that they would not have disease or a difficult life situation.  So the sign of God’s favor was prosperity.  So Jesus in this thing flips it.  He said, “No, the rich, those that are satisfied, those that are accepted, those that are looked up and honored, they’re in trouble.  Woe to them.   A warning: you’re not going to be who I call you to be living in a life of —” I will just stretch it a little bit, “— luxury and prosperity.”  But there’s something else.  

There’s another way of living and of being in union with God.  God’s not interested in taking care of all of your needs so that life is easy.  But if you’re like me, I don't know, if you have something horrible that happens — I hear this from many people.  Something bad happens.  They say, “Oh, God is upset with me,” or, “What did I do to deserve this?”  And those are still remnants of that way human nature is wired together naturally, that we think pleasing someone gains some kind of access to their generosity and their goodness, and that’s normal.  But it’s not who God is.  God is the one who longs to dwell within you and within me.  Jesus reveals him in his fullness.  He’s a lover.  He’s someone that’s come into your world not to judge you but to forgive you.  He wants to offer you the fullness of life, and the fullness of life is such a beautiful image.  There’s a way in which scripture captures that gift of life so beautifully in the image of water — water, life-giving water.  Remember the woman at the well when Jesus met her, and he broke all the rules by talking to her, because no rabbi or Jew would talk to a gentile?  He just disregarded those laws and had a conversation with her and said, “If you knew who I was, you would ask me for a drink, and that drink would be a life-giving fountain inside of you.”  

So listen to the image in the first reading, because it’s really beautiful.  It’s also in the Responsorial Psalm.  We in this life are like a plant that God has placed here, set on the earth, and we see two images of plants.  One is a barren bush in a lava waste.  I went to Iceland a couple of years ago, and I know what a lava waste looks like.  It’s devastatingly empty of any life, and here’s a bush with no leaves sitting in it.  That’s the human being who trusts only in himself and needs nothing from God, is not interested in God and maybe doesn’t reject him so much.  We don’t necessarily go around rejecting God, but we ignore him.  It’s a really hard    thing to imagine that we do, but we ignore his help, his presence.  And our life becomes empty, and that’s an image to me of darkness and depression.  And then the other image is a beautiful tree, tall and strong, filled with beautiful leaves and fruit to nurture other people, and it’s right next to a river, a stream.  So it can endure the extremes of weather, because the water is always there.  What a beautiful image to hold in our hearts of that’s who God wants to be in your life and in mine, life-giving water, a source of life.

So I said the last of these — well, let me put it this way.  What God was doing to the audience in general was shocking them with almost a scandalous way of describing God by saying he is not showing favor to people, or people are not receiving this favor from God as a reward for their perfection.  And the ones that are in serious struggle and striving and working and struggling, those are the ones that have received God’s favor.  So they flipped the image.  So it’s wonderful, and it’s also, when he flips the image, he’s also directing the words now not so much to the crowd, but he’s directing them to his disciples.  And let’s look at why this reading fits so well to what the disciples were getting ready for and what Jesus was getting them ready for, and it’s this: “I’m asking you to give up everything, not so much your fishing with your family and giving up family and coming and following me, but I’m — like God in the Old Testament, I’m going to take you to a brand new place, and you are not going to be able to endure it and understand it without my presence in you.  So I am going to put you in a place of great emptiness, I guess you would say, poverty.”  He’s saying, “You are going to experience something that is essential to you being a person who depends upon me for everything that you really need. You will receive a sense in yourself that you are not enough for what I’m asking from you.”  Because he’s going to ask for their life.  They were all martyred.  So he’s saying, “What I want you to do is understand that I am going to be in your life.  I’m entering into your life to change you, but I need your poverty to enter in, because if you don’t have a need for something more than you can handle on your own, you probably won’t turn to me.”  Isn’t that interesting?  The blessing of poverty is not necessarily being without money.  The blessing of poverty is, “I am not self-sufficient.”  And that’s like an opening to the rich, wonderful waters of life.  And he says, “You’re going to thirst for things.”  And I think what that thirst is all about is longing.  If we have a longing to do something that we really long to see happen, we want it very much, and it’s something that’s hard to achieve without wisdom or without a lot of discipline.  And when you’re in that disposition of deep thirst and longing for something more than you are, you also have another way of inviting God into your life, because he’s going to come in, because you’re going to instinctively cry out for help.  “Oh God, what am I going to do?”  So the person who is not enough, the person who longs to make the world better but can’t figure out how and perhaps doesn’t have the energy to do what is necessary, God is there to help them, and they’re open to it. 

He’s also saying, “Blessed are the sad,” which is interesting.  And the disciples, I don’t know if you’d say the life they led was sad, but the sadness that I think he’s talking about is the awareness, the being awake to what is happening in the world.  And one of the things that Jesus wanted his disciples to see so clearly was the abuse that was happening through the temple and the extreme demand of laws and rules and condemnation and judgment and expensive rituals for forgiveness.  He saw the temple as a horrible place, and so he wanted them to realize how many people were suffering deeply so that they would be, I would say, blessed with an awareness of the pain the world that doesn’t necessarily have to be there and certainly should not be attached to God and his divinity.  And so they were very conscious, compassionate, had empathy to the people that were suffering.  

And the last is, “Blessed are you when they reject you.”  And I don't know if you think about this much, but I’ve often thought that, when you are like the rest of the culture — let’s just say whatever the culture honors, you’ve got it.  If it’s height, you’re tall.  If it’s handsome or beautiful, it’s that.  If you’ve got a great education, all these things, if you fit in this category of being what the culture and society expects to be — that you should be, then you’re going to be acceptable.  Everybody looks up to you and puts you as a model or something like that.  But all of that is the subtlety of the way human beings, in order to belong, in order to feel acceptable, will become whatever they need to be.  If there’s one thing the disciples are going to have to have, it’s this strength inside of them that is so convincing that they know that, when they start preaching and they are rejected and they’re trying to destroy them, and they ultimately will destroy them and take their life — all but John was martyred — it’s because they  have confidence, confidence in who they are, confidence in their message.  

It’s interesting that, when you think of these gifts of being confident, of being compassionate, of being — wanting the world to be better, of realizing that we humbly are not enough, all those are such blessings, and that’s why he could say, “Blessed are the poor, the thirsty, the sad and the rejected.”  What a beautiful way in which he’s beginning to form the disciples, and this is even before he called them.  They were listening, but they were there.  So I wonder what their conversations were afterwards?  “Who is this guy?  What’s he talking about?”  But then living with him, working with them, he in their presence made all the difference, and what God was saying to them is, “I am in my Son, and when my Son was your life-giving source, it was a sign that that’s who I am, and that’s who I want to be.”  So anything that moves you or me to realize any of these weaknesses that we have and see them and feel them, then we know that we’ll be more open and receptive to this incredibly complicated but simple but wonderful in-dwelling presence of God.  It’s what I long for everyone to feel.  It’s what I long to feel over and over again, and there are moments when I feel it.  And it slips away, and I feel insufficient.  The key is to trust that he will be there when he needs to be there. 

Father, your longing for intimacy with us is beyond our imagining, and so bless us with the kind of imagination that can be excited by the fact that, if this is true, imagine the things we can accomplish, that I can accomplish.  Imagine the anxiety that will go away.  That’s our inheritance.  That’s the challenge to believe in who God really is.  So bless us with openness to him.  Amen.