6th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022
Jeremiah 17:5-8; Psalm 1; 1 Cor 15:12, 16-20; Luke 6:17, 20-26
St Luke, as anyone on the number 51 into Carnforth will tell you, is known as the scriba mansuetudinis Christi, “the one who writes of the gentleness of Christ”. If you continue further, on the number 55 to Lancaster, you may find those who will inform you that it was Dante who coined that expression: whether that is true or not I must rely on you to confirm or deny.
Therefore, when St. Luke of all people depicts Our Lord as speaking harshly, we must sit up and take notice. Today, in the Sermon on the Plain, Luke records Jesus delivering a starker version of the Beatitudes than we find in Matthew, and following it up with a corresponding list of woes.
Thus, whereas Matthew describes Jesus speaking of the blessedness of the poor in spirit, according to Luke it is the poor who are said to be blessed, without the addition of the spiritual element. For Matthew, the blessing comes upon those who hunger and thirst for justice, whilst Luke has Our Lord say simply “Blessed are you who hunger now”, seemingly implying a physical, rather than a spiritual hunger. Similarly, Luke is alone in lamenting the prospects of the rich, the well fed, the contented and the popular—those, indeed, whose needs are being satisfied by earthly things.
What are we to make of this? At one level, the Jesus of Luke’s Gospel is confirming the prophecies of Jeremiah and of the first Psalm. He is distinguishing those whose interests and trust are rooted in material things, and who are doomed to disappointment, from those who put their trust in God, and who, as both Jeremiah and the Psalmist declare, are like a tree whose roots reach down to the stream, relying on the ultimately reliable.
So far, so good, we may think. WE put our trust in God: we are all right Jack. But is it really as straightforward as that?
In blessing the poor and the hungry, and warning the rich and the comfortable, Our Lord is shattering any tendency that we may have towards complacency. Very few of us, I suspect, can genuinely claim to be poor, or to go hungry; yet poverty and hunger exist in our world, and even in our own country.
Nor are that poverty and that hunger inevitably people’s own fault, as some would claim. Yes, there are those who have squandered what they had, or who have pursued pleasure to the point of addiction, but that is far from being the whole story. It is very easy for people to lose their homes through redundancy, or marriage breakdown, or sudden illness. Thank God (and Aneurin Bevan) for the National Health Service, which ensures that we shall not be bankrupted by medical bills, as can be the case in poorer, or even in wealthy but less civilised nations, but the loss of income entailed in lengthy illness can have devastating effects.
Furthermore, how many of the homeless have a military background, people whom we were happy to laud as they preserved our security, but whom we ignore when they return, traumatised by their service?
The poor, the hungry, the distressed, are very much part of today’s world, as they were in the days of Our Lord; and, as this Gospel makes clear, we ignore them at our peril. It is not enough to claim that we, at least, have our priorities right: that we put our trust in God, and not in the things of earth, in material well-being. In many ways, we HAVE that material well-being. If we do not put it at the service of others; if we ignore our suffering brothers and sisters; worse still, if we join the chorus of those who point the finger and declare that it is their own fault, then far from being blessed, we shall hear those words “Alas for you” directed at us.
Lent is looming: it is two and a half weeks away. At the very least, let us commit ourselves to some contribution to the relief of the poor, making that a starting point.
