Mike Boucher preaches about how Jesus uses the beatitudes to provide a new understanding of whose experience is centered in the kin-dom of God.
Homily Transcript:
So
a poorly dressed man who seemed somewhat intoxicated and was smelling pretty
ripe gets on a bus and sits down next to a Catholic priest and the priest was
visibly annoyed. But the man seemed
oblivious, he opens up his newspaper and starts reading and after a couple
minutes he puts down his paper, elbows the priest and says, “Hey! Father, what
causes arthritis?” The priest says,
“Mister, arthritis is caused by loose living, excessive drinking and blatant
disregard for your fellow human.” The
guy goes, “Imagine that!” and goes back to reading his newspaper. So the priest feels horribly about this and
then eventually says, “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t meant to come on so
strong. You know…How long have you had
arthritis?” “Oh! I don’t have arthritis,
Father, but I was just reading in the paper that the Pope does.”
Now,
we are always surprised by reversals, right?
Something we thought was true turns out not to be so. I love the quote by Mark Twain, “It isn’t
what you don’t know that gets you in to trouble, it’s what you know for sure,
that just ain’t so.”
In
today’s Gospel we hear what are traditionally called the “Beatitudes”. Biblical scholars often call this passage the
great reversal because all these categories of people that might be considered on
the outs or despised are said to be blessed.
And all the people who were thought to be blessed were told that it just
may not be so. Now, if you grew up
Christian or Catholic, you are probably quite familiar to hearing this passage
and you might even have some sentimental reaction or sweet feeling when you
hear this in church, like, “Oh! My God.
Blessed are the poor, yes. They really are blessed.” But Jesus’ words actually shocked his
audience. It would be like Jesus saying,
“Blessed are those who have cancer.
Blessed are those whose hearts are torn open by grief. And we would be like, “Wait! What?”
And we are told in the Gospel that Jesus had come down from the mountain
and he found a huge crowd gathered.
People who had come to hear him.
They were seeking healing for a whole host of problems that had made
their life miserable – poverty, sickness, hunger, mental illness, addiction,
abuse, rejection. Now when you hear the bible use the word, the “poor” this is
who they are talking about. People who
are destitute, people with few options, people with broken hearts and crushed
spirits. And then the passage tells us he came down and stood on a level place
with them. And I just love the geography
of that statement. He stood on a level
place with them. He looked at them
eye-to-eye and then told them something they needed to hear.
Father
Greg Boyle wrote a wonderful book called, Tattoos
On the Heart, which I would highly recommend. He works in Los Angeles with ex offenders and
really some of the most marginalized people in this country, and in it he says,
“…that compassion isn’t just about feeling the pain of others, it’s about
bringing them in towards yourself. He
goes on to say what we need is a “…sense of kinship with people who are
marginalized. And, kinship isn’t serving
the other, it’s being one with the other.
That’s why Jesus knows what people needed to hear. He’s been around them, up close and
personal. And his words today are
directed at people where society just doesn’t have much time for. Now we as a culture seem to spend a lot of
time and energy trying to get away from people who are hurting or in pain
somehow. We live in neighborhoods that
isolate us from one another. We build
highways around places we don’t want to go through. We don’t talk much about certain groups. we talk a
