From the Sunday Note, with additional thoughts…
Jesus came down with the Twelve
and stood on a stretch of level ground
with a great crowd of his disciples
and a large number of the people
from all Judea and Jerusalem
and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon.
And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for the kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!
Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. …
from Luke 6:17, 20-23 in Sunday’s Gospel
Who are these “poor” who have the kingdom of God? Jesus is looking directly at his disciples rather than the whole crowd when he teaches this, so his words are spoken directly to all those who decide to follow him. How so? You and I may claim to be his followers, but are we poor? If we live in one of the richest countries in the world, swamped with technological marvels and struggling with overweight, how can his words be meant for us? In material goods, we are not poor.
And yet…consider what a poor man faces: he may either eat and listen to his children cry, or he may feed them the little he has and remain hungry himself. She must undergo the humiliation of begging or may be taken advantage of to keep her baby alive. The poor person is not listened to seriously by successful people who know how to make thing add up and compound to their advantage. Being poor reaches down into the very roots of what it means to be a human being. The poor man or woman faces those things every day. What we fail to recognize is that our “riches” tend to blind us to the same kind of realities in our lives, too.
One obvious example is illness—life becomes less certain, we are probed by pain or embarrassing forms of distress; it may not be curable, or it may leave us diminished in large or small ways. Another example is having to live without affection from family or others we feel close to, leaving us, like the poor man, open to exploitation and humiliation in a hundred ways.
Even if we escape serious illness and have healthy family ties, age brings its own poverty of limitations, restrictions, and deteriorations over time. These are as inexorable as the slow grinding down of the poor. Perhaps this form of poverty is compounded by a sense of guilt over past actions, broken relationships, time wasted on not achieving some important goals, or realizing we have lost, or never looked for, or cannot find a fulfillment we sensed we were meant to achieve.
If we are honest with ourselves, we can see our condition in life as a whole is one of profound poverty. For all our gifts, for all our hard preparation and study, for all our work and years of efforts, there remains, at the center of our being, a hole that we ourselves cannot fill. The poverty of the poor man confronts us to our faces with the deeper truth of the matter. It’s no wonder we are so often uncomfortable around him—we do not want to confront our own poverty. So why does Christ call us his followers “Blessed” yet “poor”? To acknowledge that we are poor is a blessing because it is an invitation to center our lives in Christ, who has shared the human experience of so many kinds of poverty.
If we center our lives in Christ, we are invited to learn how to depend in faith on his Father who created us to live in joy with him forever. It is not an easy road, that is, to walk with Christ toward the various crosses that come along in our daily lives, but there is no other road. It is in the midst of our acknowledged poverty that we give God opportunities to bring new and unexpected life into us, to grow closer to him. Truly did the prophet Micah speak: “Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.” (Micah 7:8)
For further reflection:
One lesson we should NOT take from all this is “since it is all for your own good, shut up and suffer.” We don’t have any option but to suffer, that is true, but the Lord’s Good Book gives us many examples of his people complaining in strong language about what they must endure. The Psalms are crammed with examples. Even Jesus on the cross cries out “God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” Like any honest man, Jesus bears his emotions outwardly to the world as he speaks to his Father. It is necessary to do this to move on emotionally as the rest of Psalm 22 shows. Being honest with God, and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, (“this hurts, really bad”) is simply being truthful. Truth helps build trust–and the rest of Psalm 22 shows that happening, too.