Those who experience poverty and grief and hunger are the good soil in which the seeds of the gospel can easily take root.
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A few years ago when I began to seriously discern my vocation to the priesthood, I used to volunteer in a Church food bank. Susan, I’m sure remembers that time. I could spend some considerable time relating stories that I heard of great suffering and woe, and I lost count of the times that I left the food bank almost in tears and feeling utterly useless.
Instead, I’d rather like to relate one particular incident which left a rather strong impression on me. On Saturday morning there was a man who came in and he arrived carrying a rucksack and a tent, and he was by appearance, no young man.
He appeared to be in his late 60s, but he still carried himself upright and despite his faded and well worn clothing there was a sense of purpose about him and he looked fit. To cut a long story short, it transpired that he had served in the army.
Like all ex soldiers, he was very reluctant to talk about himself, but he mentioned some names and places with which I was familiar as an ex service man myself. But what happened then was that despite having fallen on hard times, he was not allowing himself to feel any self pity. And in fact, when other people started to come into the food bank that morning, he actively engaged with them and began to volunteer alongside us and help them.
The man told me that his name was Steve, and yet despite all of the hardship that he was clearly going through, he showed complete and utter compassion, despite his own obvious difficulties, to all the other people who were coming in that morning.
I commented on this to him, and his reply was that it was his duty to help others. Even though he had left the army some ten years previously, it still felt a duty and an obligation for him to help others, even though they were complete strangers, he could recognize that they too were going through great difficulties. And he said that whilst his training enabled him to make the best of any situation or good or bad, he would never sit back passively and allow suffering to go on without him trying to intervene in some way or other.
I came to the conclusion then that the very people that society seems to deem as being poor or living on the margins all too frequently display an openness that those with great wealth tend to lack. And I see the same sentiment in the Gospel reading that we’ve just heard. The very openness is the revelation of God’s Kingdom. We know that Luke in his Gospel, which we have just heard, gives us the famous Sermon on the Plane. It has very similar elements to Matthew’s Gospel version, but there are several key differences.
While Matthew is interested in Jewish tradition and worship and therefore places Jesus symbolically on a Mount, hence the Sermon on the Mount, Luke seems more interested in placing Jesus on level ground in solidarity with the masses of people who came to be healed. We can interpret this healing in many ways, surely the kind associated with physical ailments, but also with economic and political healing, something more in line with liberation. In a way, while Matthew talks of the poor in spirit, there is no way of dismissing Luke’s emphasis on the economic poor. It should also be noted that this passage directly follows the passage where Jesus calls the Twelve Apostles from amongst his disciples and from this point on, Luke later on says, When Jesus turns his face towards the cross in Jerusalem. We have a series of teachings, a series of healing, and a series of parables about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, or, to put it another way, to live as though the Kingdom of God is here now.
It may help looking at Holy Scripture to focus on various themes such as discipleship or the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God plays a great prominent role within this Holy Scripture. The poor are blessed and the Kingdom belongs to them. Jesus continues to place blessings and woes juxtaposed poor and rich, hungry and well fed, mourning and laughing, hate and beloved. We struggle with the idea that the Kingdom seems to privilege a particular group of people simply based on their social condition or social advantages.
Through no choice of their own, the poor are blessed. We much prefer the relationship established in Matthew, which is much easier to visualize and spiritualize. We can make sense of blessings to those who are poor in spirit. It seems much more inclusive, but Luke’s gospel is consistent in incorporating the economic poor, the financially poor within God’s history of Salvation, and opposing the rich. Luke’s gospel is the only one that includes Zacchaeus, the rich young ruler, the rich fool, and the unjust steward.
Luke tells us that there is a direct relationship between poverty and hunger and mourning to the experience of the Kingdom of God. But how can this relationship be defined? I perceive that there are a few things happening. First, Luke is writing in a context in which the Church is slowly beginning to emerge in its infancy. Questions revolve around relationships between the Church and the synagogue, the Roman Empire, and the significance that Jesus has yet to return.
In the meantime, the followers of the way still live on the outskirts of an Empire that puts great emphasis on power through a violent hierarchical structure. The new religious sect – Christians – are small, insignificant, poor, and highly ostracized and alienated, both by the pagans around them and by the Jewish Peoples as well. Perhaps Luke’s admonition that the world will hate you if you follow after Jesus is a way, in fact, to encourage the growing Church in the present adversity. It could also mean that the following way of the cross is also a missional call of solidarity with the world’s poor that have been hung up on crosses of poverty. If the cross is God’s ultimate no to the world’s, violence and the resurrection is the renewal of God’s life for the world, then we resurrected ones, protest and resist all the forces that continue to bring death, poverty, and hunger are among the chief, most oppressive systems that we can think of.
And so we come to another Lent through which we can focus our gaze. Power. The crowds pressed in on Jesus and wanted to touch him because power would come out of him and heal them. Power is not an evil thing in itself. There are many different sources of power. Simply expressed, power is the ability to do or to change oneself or others or our own environment.
We see this in the passage of Jesus power to heal. However, if we focus on the idea of power into blessings and woes of this part of Scripture, we can begin to see how Luke links rich and poor together. St. Basil the Great continues this connection when he wrote a homily called To the Rich, and I’ll just quote a little bit from it.
How did you come by this abundance of wealth? Care for the needy requires the expenditure of wealth. When all share alike, distributing their possessions among themselves, they each receive a small portion for their individual needs. How else can this be but that you have preferred your own enjoyment to the consolation of the many? For the more you abandon wealth, the more you lack in love.
Wealth is one of the sources of power which allows human beings to change, but it also directly connects to those who are poor.
How wealth is used is what matters. Both Luke and Saint Basil tend to lean towards the idea that wealth should be used for the good of the whole community. Woe to the rich because they have allowed their hearts to turn inwardly. Salvation is difficult for them because they have no reason to need or turn towards a savior. Woe to them because they have received their consolation already.
God reveals to the humble of heart the true source of abundant life and happiness. Jesus promises the disciples that the joys of heaven will be more than compensation for the troubles and hardships that they can expect to face in this world. A great Church Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, said,
no person can live without joy. That is why someone deprived of spiritual joy goes after carnal pleasures.
St. Ambrose of Milan said the following,
When I have laid aside every sin and I have taken off all malice, I am content with simplicity, destitute of evils. All that remains is that I regulate my conduct. For what good does it do me to lack worldly goods unless I am meek and gentle?
The poor and the marginalized, though know the injustice of the situation, and they therefore accept the Kingdom of God with willingness and openness, they recognize intuitively that the Kingdom of God and poverty are incompatible,and that the embrace of Jesus Christ is the means to reestablish justice.
Those who experience poverty and grief and hunger are the good soil in which the seeds of the gospel can easily take root.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy spirit.