NewCreation

Homily for Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. And we now begin the Sermon on the Mount. This is going to take several weeks, so the Gospel will be continuous for several weeks, and it's the major piece of Christian teaching in Matthew's Gospel — and of course one of the major texts of Christian teaching at all. So let's examine how it begins, because how it begins is going to give us a very clear hint of how it's going to work all the way through. So when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain. Now the interesting thing is that he's in a mountain, or in a hilly area, which looks out on both Jewish and pagan areas. So the people surrounding it, the crowds in question, are not only Jewish — they're also pagan. Whatever is going to be given is going to be given to a much wider public than only Israel. But he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Now of course the references are to Sinai, and in Sinai Moses went up the mountain to be given something. And then there is an occasion which kind of — how would you say — encapsulates all the goings up the mountain, when Moses and the elders go up and there they have a feast in the presence of the Lord, and they eat and drink before him. And it's at that passage, the culmination if you like, which is intimated here. But Jesus goes up the mountain and then he sits down, so he is now in the position of the Lord, the one who's going to do the teaching — not the one who is receiving the teaching, but the one who's going to do the teaching. And the disciples come to him, so this is the elders coming to the Lord. Then he began to speak. And what is interesting is that the indication is that the word is now not coming from an apodictic outside source. The word is coming at a human level from one seated visibly in our midst. And every one of these words — these are the new oracles — and my guess is that once heard, we tend to remember them. We can, if not quote this whole passage by heart, at least remember significant elements of these: "Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness." These are things which once heard we know. But in all the cases, Jesus is not speaking as it were from a starting point, but from a midpoint. This is God in the middle of us, speaking into the midst of all our lives and indicating something about a quality of being alive, which is what he is promoting. Which is why I tend to — of the various translations of the Greek makarioi, which can be translated as "blessed" or "happy," those are the two standard translations — "happy" suggests a, I don't know, a good mood, and it's perfectly nonsense that many of the people in this situation are not happy in the normal sense. "Blessed" suggests a kind of a fictional description of them that although life is really awful they're blessed, so it's kind of extrinsic and outside them, a label. The translation which I've chosen, which is not really a translation — it's a proposal — is "radiant." And why do I say that? Because each one of the groups described are people who are in the midst of the grind in one way. They are precarious, on the inside of the grind of being human, but they're beginning to turn up the right side. There is something about going through the grind in which they are being brought to radiance, which is why I know it's not a translation, it's just a suggestion. But I think it's a suggestion that indicates something of the quality of someone who's going through the grind and is beginning to come out with a sense that they're doing something real. So: "Radiant are those who are actively poor, for God is their king." Well, it will be more literal: "For God is their king." Why do I say "poor in spirit"? Because obviously it doesn't mean those who are poor-spirited or mean-spirited, which is one of the senses of "poor in spirit." Nor does it mean simply those who, having a lot, have given it all away — which would mean that there was good poverty for those who are rich, and terrible and unredeemable poverty for those who find themselves in a situation of acute poverty, which is awful. And I'm very glad to have had conversations over the last couple of years with a friend who has found himself living in acute poverty, and he has made it very clear to me what the difference is between voluntary poverty and finding yourself sucked into the survival of a system, being ground down by a system of poverty. These are very different things. So for a white middle-class male like myself to be cavalier in how I describe this would be really letting people down. "Blessed are the active poor" suggests that there is something about not having money or goods as an idol — even in the midst of great want and seeming nothingness — that means you have God as your king. The opposite to having God as your king is having money as your king, and this is the standard form of idolatry. But there is something about occupying a place of not-enough generously that is a sign of something out of nothing, which is how you know that God is king, for only God can produce something out of nothing. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." Again, people who are in the midst of the precariousness of loss — who have lost not only someone they love but a sense of belonging, whatever. There are endless forms of mourning, but all of them are to do with the sense of death, and again facing nothingness. And they will be comforted. The one who brings into being "will give them something. Radiant are the meek" — one of the most difficult terms to understand. I learned something about this from a friend of mine who worked with indigenous groups in Colombia, teaching them practices of non-violence when faced with terrible intrusions on their land by both drug cartels on the one hand and paramilitaries on the other, many of which — often the drug cartels and the paramilitaries were the same people with different uniforms. And one's natural response in the face of terrible and much more powerful abuses of your land is to fight back. And the amazing thing is that he taught these groups not to resist. And the astounding thing was that eventually the outsiders just gave up and went away. They didn't know how to cope with this. It was an extraordinary example of meekness actually winning. And it does seem, what it says: "Radiant are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." It seems that originally meekness, rather than just being — you know, the demeanor proper to a Victorian young lady — meant something much more to do with actual property and land. It meant something to do with those who are actually in the land that is theirs, in the face of people who want to take it. There's something very… at least in the Hebrew things, there's always something chunky and physical at the bottom of these things. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." We're talking about precarious people. Their radiance comes even in the midst of situations of injustice where they're having to actually fight for something. They're hungering and thirsting. It's unbearable to be in a situation of such injustice, and the notion that they will be filled — that God is the filler of people from that space. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God." Again, singleness of heart: its first understanding would have been with relation to financial matters. Blessed is someone who is single-hearted in the way they conduct their business, their deals. They're not trying to fool others, or allowing themselves to be fooled — if necessary, they allow themselves to be fooled by others rather than trying to fool others. The singleness of heart obviously also has references to sexual matters — singleness of heart in the same way — but it's the singleness of heart that is central here. And remember that this is the only form of purity that is ever mentioned in Christianity already. Christianity is not a purity religion. except for purity of heart, which is something much to be desired and is something only achieved in the midst of the various temptations to go after other gods, to become double-hearted, triple-hearted, etc. And of course it refers to behavior in the midst of a people for whom purity was essentially a matter of various transgressions that needed ablutions to wash them off, and various things to avoid touching and so forth. So there's a certain — what's the word — push here for singleness of heart as opposed to sorting things out exteriorly. That's something very striking, and at least possibly new. "Blessed are the peacemakers," or "radiant are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." And peace of course didn't really mean trying to get people to stop war — that clearly includes that, and we all understand "blessed are the peacemakers." It meant peace in the broader sense of prosperity, well-being. That's what shalom has: a bigger sense than merely a cessation of hostility. So for instance, I would think in some of our western countries in history, union leaders and those who have pushed for workers' rights to enable there to be better circumstances for production and living — these are contributing to shalom. And those who contribute to this are called children of God, because they're doing exactly what God does, which is to try and create peaceful prosperity and security for people. And then of course, "blessed are those" — radiant are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. In other words, in the world in which we live, it's always going to be much easier to go along with bad things than to blow the whistle. And if you blow the whistle, they'll come after you. That's the way things work. And part of being radiant is learning when it's right to blow the whistle, to stand up for what is right, and to face the consequences. There is a certain radiance that comes with that in the kingdom — again, for God is their king, because that's what God does: God brings forth what is good even in the midst of, and despite, all our attempts to close it down by grabbing false sources of security, false sources of togetherness. And then he turns to you — not only the disciples but all people. "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account." In other words, your presence, as you listen to me, is going to be that of my presence in the world — basically as someone who occupied the space of the victim without being run by it. I'm not asking you to become self-victimary. I'm asking you to realize that when you occupy that space, as I occupied it, these things will happen to you. If they happen to you, rejoice and be glad. Because it means that your reward is in heaven — this is how you get onto the inside of the life of God. Now, the importance of all this, it seems to me, is that he's saying these are not instructions from above; these are indications of what really is from within. And that's going to be the extraordinary thing about what we're going to learn over the next few weeks. It's all to do with patterns of desire in the midst of living with real things. It's never a question of "I give you an order, now you must fulfill it." It's always a question of: this is what is going on, and this is what desire looks like. Let's work out how to live this in such a way that it bears witness to God. So, radiance — the notion of God not coming down from above but being in the midst, and actually beginning to show forth what it's going to be like to be radiant with life alongside him, with him being alongside us and enabling us to inhabit and to discover the kingship of God. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.