Sixth Sunday after Epiphany – Year C – Bill Harkins
The Collect
O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Gospel: Luke 6:17-26
In the name of the God of Creation who loves us all…Amen. Good morning, and welcome to Holy Family on this sixth Sunday after Epiphany. I have been thinking about the beginning of the Gospel text for this morning…the part where Luke tells us that Jesus came down from the mountain after naming the Twelve, and stood on a “level place” with a large crowd of disciples and others waiting for him. I found myself thinking about the implications of this act…particularly since Matthew’s “Sermon on the Mount” includes similar teaching but takes place on the mountaintop. Matthew’s version is also more “spiritualized.” He says, for example, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Luke’s account, on the other hand, begins with “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.” Somehow the fact that Jesus came down from the mountain to this level place seems important. He is not talking down to the crowd but is rather on a level playing field with them. There is a kind of reciprocity and availability here that I find intriguing. Perhaps this is, in part, because I don’t believe the beatitudes are about us…or that they were spoken those listening in such a way as to give them prescriptive commands about how to live. It’s so easy to hear them this way, but I think doing so misses the point. I once had a professor who constantly reminded those of us would-be pastoral therapists against giving advice. “Your clients can go out onto West End Avenue and get advice for free,” he said. “What they can’t get is the availability and wisdom and presence you bring to the relationship. It’s a relationship unlike any other.” I believe this is what Jesus is doing here, and I think it is a good practice for the priesthood of all believers, too—and that means all of us.
Because, you see, in this Gospel text Jesus is offering relationship. He is not so much offering commands for how we should live, or prescriptive advice about what we should do. We hear these words and some of us imagine Jesus to be telling us that we should go be poor, or learn to cry more, or find ways to be persecuted. I think this misses the real issue. The harder we try to make these rather distinctive sayings into some kind of prescriptive marching orders, the less sense they make. Moreover, I believe the paradoxical nature of these beatitudes is, in a sense, precisely the point. Nowhere in these sayings is there a directive of any kind—to anybody. Nowhere does Jesus use the imperative, nowhere does he give any orders or advice or requirements. The entire section is in the indicative—that is, he is showing—not ordering. He is signifying and suggesting—not telling people what to do.
This invitation to consider a different view of reality is precisely in keeping, I believe, with the symbolic act of coming down from the mountain, on an even plane with the people, and giving an indication of the kingdom of God from ground level. I am not persuaded that this passage is about making the world a better place, or how to become more prosperous, or how to earn favor with God. I believe Jesus is giving the crowd, and by extension giving us, a glimpse into the way God thinks, who God is, and what the Kingdom of God is like. If the beatitudes don’t seem to bear much likeness to reality, as we know it, so be it. They are not about the way the world really works, just as they are not about how we are to behave. The beatitudes are about imagining what matters to God. And how we respond to this knowledge is up to us—wherever we are in our lives, here and now. Jesus offers us a glimpse of the paradoxical picture of God’s values and priorities—and he does so as an alternative to our ordinary ways of viewing the world. Jesus is giving us an opportunity to see that which is often hidden to our day-to-day vision. What we do with this is up to us.
Perhaps we will find that we are encouraged in a rough spot, or cautious during a soft spot.
Perhaps we will see ourselves as one kind of person or another among these categories, even paradoxically so. That too is finally between each one of us, and God. Regardless, the promise is that the way things are is not the way things will always be. I don’t know about you, but when I imagine Jesus coming down off the mountain and being at eye-level, I find myself more open to hearing what he has to say. I am drawn to him precisely because of this gesture of availability. I feel, well, a sense of openness to the possibilities. I can imagine stretching on tiptoes to see, and straining to hear Jesus speak these words and, upon hearing them, walking away, shaking my head and laughing. I can imagine thinking to myself “Wow, now that is a new light on this business of being alive…and it will take a while for me to begin to ponder this, and perhaps to see my life in this new light.” Perhaps the laughter in my imagination is instructive. Isn’t it true that so often laughter can ease the bumps in the road, level the anxiety we may feel, and give us a new perspective on what it means to be human? As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “Laughter is the beginning of prayer, humor is the prelude to faith.”
And perhaps the reference to light is instructive, too. After all, the theme of Epiphany is light. Yet the past few days have been mostly gray and rainy and cold. But you know what? The past two weeks, on my runs on the trails, most of which have occurred in cold rain, I have noticed flocks of bluebirds; 10-15 of these lovely creatures creating a distinctive colorful, hopeful contrast to the gray skies.
I reminded myself that bluebirds begin nesting in February, and I remembered another cold and rainy February when I had put up a new bluebird box the previous fall. Why did I do this? Who knows? Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Maybe that had something to do with it. One evening, just before dark, I was getting some firewood from the back yard, and I decided to make sure the bluebird box near the woodpile was clear of insects and debris—just in case it might seem an appealing home to some pair among the recent visitors. Slowly, carefully, I opened the front door. In an instant I saw the momentary brilliant flash of a blue wing, perched high on the new nesting material in the box. The evening light, for a moment, revealed a deep, abiding faithful and mysterious loveliness hidden inside. I slowly closed the door, secured it, and moved away, shaking my head and laughing at the paradoxical mystery of this revelation—this indication, this signifier, this intimation—of a new season of life. There, in the soft last light of an Epiphany evening, still deep in winter, the mystery of these bluebirds is the same as the question abiding in the beatitudes—if such a thing as this is possible, this turning upside down of our expectations, how might our own lives be different?
These blessings and woes are certainly strange, but could they be the doorway to a life more beautiful and fuller of wonder than our deepest dreams? This depends on the choices we make. And Luke uses his gospel to show that people can fall under the spell of the Jesus Way and choose the winding path toward participation in God’s blessed kingdom. The good Samaritan provides emergency assistance to a man who has been robbed and then generously commits funds for his longer-term recovery. Following an encounter with Jesus, a tax collector named Zacchaeus distributes his wealth to those he has cheated. An unnamed woman breaks a precious jar of ointment so that she can use its contents as a blessing for Jesus as life brings him closer to the cross.
Because you see, Jesus uses blessings to encourage and give hope to those who have every good reason to be discouraged and hopeless. Underneath these words, he is saying, You are beloved. The world may not see you that way, but I do. And I will treat you accordingly. Where is the church speaking words that communicate that kind of hope? Where is the church acting to make these blessings come true? That’s the winding path of love that leads to the most amazing views.
Jesus cared so much for those who needed care that he held nothing back as he loved them. As Luke says, “Power came out from him and healed all of them.” He must have seemed strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than their deepest dreams. His spirit of compassion for those who were impoverished and ostracized was fierce and unwavering. He was issuing an invitation to those who had the means to make life more blessed for those without such resources. Indeed, Jesus’ blessings and woes are specific and daunting. They can make us reconsider how we have ordered and understood our world—and how to amplify compassion and generosity. That would be the first step along the winding road that leads to a world full of compassion. Do we believe this? Are we foolish for doing so? Is it possible that these beatitudes offer us what the poet Robert Frost called “something more of the depths,” … something, that is, beyond our own self-preoccupation? I believe this is a step toward wholeness, rather than cure. Curing means getting rid of the disease, while healing— “salve”, means becoming whole. We do far better to imagine that we have parts of ourselves more like Mary, or the prodigal, or Paul with his thorn, or Peter, who so faithfully struggled to be whole despite his limitations—limitations I share with him, rather than imagining ourselves to have all the answers. We all need grace, and the more deeply we understand this, the closer we move to wholeness. That is why Jesus “ate with sinners” and why he came down to level ground, and why the people felt so comfortable around Him. Robert Frost wrote:
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Jesus is offering us in the beatitudes a glimpse into the heart of God— “something more of the depths” as Frost put it. What we do with this glimpse—this light into the kingdom of God, is, finally, up to us. Amen.