“If our hope in Christ is good for this life only and no more, then we deserve more pity than anyone else in all the world.” I Corinthians 15:: 12, 16-20
“Blessed are you who are poor…but woe to you who are rich.” Luke 6: 17, 20-26
Today’s readings can be a little puzzling, so may require both explanation and time for reflection. Why, I wonder, did Paul confront his community with the fact that God had raised Jesus from the dead? Well, it seems that some early Christians had doubts about the resurrection of Jesus. Moreover, if they were able to accept that God had raised Jesus, some were unable to grasp that Jesus’ resurrection meant resurrection for them (and for us, too.) In today’s second reading from Corinthians, Paul offers a straightforward explanation of Jesus’ resurrection. It goes like this: Jesus died on the Cross, and Jesus was raised by God. We, too, die and we, too, will be raised. Jesus was dead and buried, and now he’s not. We are going to die, but that’s not the end of everything. The foundational message of Christianity is that Jesus died and was raised by God and that the same future awaits us. Paul’s words in this second reading echo Jeremiah’s blunt statement in the first reading: “I will condemn those who put their trust only in the strength of mortals” (Jeremiah 17: 5)
I would like to share a few lines written by a priest by the name of George McCauley more than forty years ago. His words explain the significance of Jesus’ resurrection and how Jesus’ resurrection is indispensably connected to us. He wrote: “Jesus’ resurrection was not simply a statement about the power of God at work….When God raised Jesus from the dead, it was to show what God thought of the human life Jesus had lived. All Jesus’ striving, all his quiet reflection, his speaking engagements, his explosive encounters, his personal struggle to do something worthwhile and valuable in his life, his shyness in notoriety, his stiffening determination at the very end – on all this God placed a final YES. God undid Jesus’ undoing foisted on him by those who hated or feared a life of love…The resurrection is a statement that God was moved to applause by the human drama of Jesus…God’s yes was also a bravo. That’s the kind of God who raised Jesus from the dead. The same God, by a marvellous condescension, has thought to extend applause to our human dramas, by raising us together with Jesus.” (George McCauley, The Unfinished Image, Sadlier, New York, 1982, pp 248-249)
We would have to agree that those words beat a polished headstone engraved with compliments, in a lawn-cemetery.
Today’s gospel-reading is equally challenging. In order to grasp its significance, we need to note that, woven throughout Luke’s Gospel is a theme of God’s unwavering compassion and love for the poor, the dispossessed, the overlooked, captives and the despised, even for one who had a hand in creating the unenviable circumstances into which he had slipped. Luke’s list of beatitudes and woes is his way of stating that Jesus was pointing out that the poor, the neglected and the deprived were better placed to understand the new world order God had missioned him to usher in. The woes which Jesus listed serve to illustrate how well-to-do people can get so preoccupied with their own good fortune that they cannot even notice the poor and the dispossessed beside whom they live. Such people will not even notice the kingdom of God, the new way of living, let alone notice the poor and all those other people who are regarded as second-rate.
Perhaps this is best illustrated by a parable from the Orient, recounted by writer Jay Cormier: A bird of prey was scouring a frozen landscape for food. On a large ice floe in the river, the bird spotted the remains of a deer left behind by hunters. It quickly swooped down and began to gorge itself. It was so preoccupied with eating the prize it had found that it ignored the sound of water thundering in the distance. In next to no time, the ice floe had reached the edge of a large waterfall and was about to topple over. The bird flapped its wings hurriedly in order to escape but its claws had been frozen into the icy remains of the deer. It was trapped, powerless to break free.
We can be so consumed by the marks of success held up to us by the world in which we live that we end up losing ourselves as we chase after them.
We are only up to chapter 6 in Luke’s Gospel and God’s predilection for the poor has been mentioned at least three times. Mary, in her Magnificat (Luke 1: 46-55) proclaimed: “God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” In spelling out the mission God had entrusted to him, Jesus has stated: “The Spirit of the Lord…has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free” (Luke 4: 18-19).In chapters still to come, Jesus will tell the story of the poor Lazarus who sat hungry at the door of the rich man, Dives who didn’t even notice him (Luke 16: 19-31) Luke also spells out the message of Jesus special concern for the poor, the rejected and sinners in his parables of the widow and the unjust judge (Luke 18: 1-8), the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32) and the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37). Moreover, Luke tells how Jesus urged the wealthy people of his time to make sure they invited to their banquets the crippled and lame, the blind and the poor. While all these illustrations highlight the theme of God’s love and compassion for the poor of every description in Luke’s Gospel, the message for all of us who live comparatively comfortable lives is to be found in the third beatitude of today’s gospel-reading: “Happy are you who weep now”. Luke’s point is that it is only when we notice the pain of the poor, the neglected, the despised and the overlooked, and learn to weep for them in their suffering will we learn how to be truly compassionate, will we begin to reach out to them in compassion, care and love.
That leads me to ask myself if I have ever wept for the people of Gaza, Libya, the Sudan, the Congo and Ukraine on whom destruction and brutality have been visited by their brothers and sisters from other nations and from within their own nations. Jesus himself wept over Jerusalem and its people, over his fellow citizens who eventually murdered him. Might we ask him to teach us compassion?
