Blessings and curses are
on today’s liturgical menu. We got them from Jeremiah; we got them from
Jesus. Jeremiah stated the case for both curses and blessings.
Those who place their trust in human things are cursed, he says: they
are like “a barren bush in the desert.” Those who place their trust in
God are blessed: they flourish like a tree planted near water.
We all know the kind of
people Jeremiah describes as cursed - people who don’t know good when
they see it: the goodness of God, the good in themselves, the good in
the people and the world around them - people so fixed on things that
they are oblivious of God and God’s wondrous gifts. Their lives are a
dead end street. Often they’re people who, humanly speaking, seem to
have the most going for them, but appearances are misleading. I think of
a well-off fellow I once knew. He was kind of a hot shot and a high
achiever. He had it all, but he was so busy making money that he had no
time for family and friends. He was even too busy to spend his money! He
seemed obsessed by the thought that he would end up one day with
nothing. Well, he did. But the nothing he ended up with wasn’t what
he’d feared. He died young, his legacy a fat bank account and a large
investment portfolio, but he didn’t leave much love behind.
On the blessed side, I
think of Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche movement, one of the
saints of our time. Vanier was born into privilege: his father was the
Canadian ambassador to France who later became the Governor General of
Canada. He himself became a highly respected naval officer with an
advanced degree in philosophy and a brilliant career as a professor
ahead of him, but one day he decided, at the gentle encouragement of a
priest friend, to invite to live with him two men with intellectual
disabilities who had been confined to a mental institution. His life was
never the same, and neither was theirs. Reflecting on it later, he
wrote, “I made the great discovery that we are healed by the poor and
the weak, that we are transformed by them if we enter into relationship
with them; that the weak and the vulnerable have a gift to give to our
world, and that the poor and weak are also ourselves, each one of us.”
Jeremiah’s blessing fits Jean Vanier to a tee: “Blessed is the one who
trusts in the Lord. He is like a tree planted beside the waters whose
leaves are always green.”
In today’s readings,
Jeremiah’s blessings and curses are nicely paralleled by the blessings
and curses of Jesus in that passage from Luke’s gospel commonly called
the Sermon on the Plain. That’s to distinguish it from Matthew’s
collection of similar sayings of Jesus known as the Sermon on the Mount.
And similar they are,
except that the first of Luke’s Beatitudes is strikingly different from
the first of Matthew’s. We know Matthew’s best. Jesus says, “Blessed are
the poor in spirit.” In Luke, he simply says, “Blessed are you who are
poor.” The rest of Luke’s beatitudes are substantially the same as
Matthew’s, but what a list they are: the hungry, those who weep, those
whom people hate! With a lineup like that we can hardly be very
eager to hear the list of those who are cursed, can we! But that’s
precisely the point: the blessed are not the ones we normally consider
blessed, and the cursed turn out to be people who seem to have it all.
This is a paradox we can
understand only if we have some understanding of Jesus because I see
Luke’s Beatitudes as a window onto the heart of Jesus. I think Jesus
could say, “Blessed are you who are poor” because he himself was poor.
Born poor among the poor, he held onto absolutely nothing in life –
didn’t even have a place to call home or to lay his head. So, of
course he could say “blessed are you who are poor!”
And Jesus could say
“Blessed are you who hunger” because his fast of forty days and forty
nights probably made him so physically hungry that all he had left was a
hunger for God. Well could he say “blessed are you who hunger.”
And Jesus could say,
“Blessed are you who weep” because, time and again, he allowed himself
to be moved – deeply moved – by the tears of those who were suffering –
the sick, the sorrowing, the sinful. One day he himself would weep
over his beloved Jerusalem and later, in the garden of Gethsemane, he
would cry out to his Father with tears and great trembling. So, well
could Jesus say “blessed are you who weep!”
And Jesus could say
“Blessed are you when people hate you” because he knew well the sting of
rejection – he whose own neighbors and friends angrily tried to throw
him off a cliff at the edge of his home town, he “who came unto his own
and whose own received him not.” Well could he say “blessed are you
when people hate you.”
My friends in Christ,
each one of those four blessings that seem so much like curses was for
Jesus a meeting place with God, a point of profound transformation. And
Jesus says to us today: it can be that way with you, too.
And it can. But
only if we are willing to loosen our grip on all those things in our
lives that look like blessings but really are not; only if we take steps
to follow the way of Jesus. I admit it seems like a huge gamble,
but it’s really not, for didn’t Jesus say, “yours is the kingdom of
God!”
Father Michael G. Ryan
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