Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The reading for Sunday, February 13, 2019:

• First reading
  • Jeremiah 17:5-10
• Psalm
  • Psalm 1
• Second reading
  • 1 Corinthians 15:12-20
• Gospel
  • Luke 6:17-26

We may feel that this Gospel is familiar; careful readers may see a difference between what we read this week in Luke, and the more common version of the Beatitudes we usually read in Matthew.

Luke begins similarly enough with 4 Blesseds:  "Blessed are you who are _______."  It sounds much more familiar than the way that Matthew says it:  "Blessed are the  ______."

Unlike the Beatitudes that we read in Matthew, in Luke, 4 blessings are followed by 4 woes:  Woe to you who are rich, full, laughing, spoken highly of.

Is Jesus really cursing those of us who are wealthy and well-fed, those of us who are in a good place in our lives?  That would not be the Jesus that I know.  I don't usually wish I had a knowledge of Greek and a gospel written in Greek, but here I do.  I wonder if there's a better interpretation of "woe."

One of the traditional approaches to this version of the Beatitudes is to say that this text shows Jesus upending the traditional order.  Everything our culture teaches us about who is a winner and the vast lot of us who are losers--Jesus comes to tell us that in the Kingdom of God, we can look forward to a new social order. 

That idea can lead us to lots of new questions:  is this Kingdom of God Heaven?  Is it an earthly Kingdom?  Did it come when Jesus came to us 2000 years ago or is it still in the process of evolving? 

And if we're more honest, those of us who are in a less-distressed/more comfortable part of our lives might wonder where our place will be.  Do we need to give up all our money?  Are our happy days numbered?  Is Jesus reminding us that all is cyclical?  What does Jesus really want from us?

These are the questions that have kept theologians busy for centuries.  Some have said that if you were choosing the most important passages of the Gospels, we'd do well to choose this text. Some have called it a guidebook to the proper behavior of Christians. Is this text an updating of the Ten Commandments or the replacing? Or something else altogether?

For those of us who see the Bible as a guidebook for moral behavior, we might see ourselves challenged to approach the text in a new way. For those who see moral behavior as our ticket to Heaven, we might also be challenged to think differently.

Christ came to announce that God's plan for redeeming the world had begun. That plan involves our pre-death world, which is not just a place where we wait around until it's our turn to go to Heaven. No, this world is the one that God wants to redeem. Christ comes to invite us to be part of the redemptive plan.