The Great Reversal
Sixth Sunday of the Year. Fr Bede Mullens shows how the life of the beatitudes is a lot more than merely human wisdom.
Early Christian moral teaching was often presented in terms of ‘the two ways’: the way that leads to life, and the way that leads to death. There is plenty of Scriptural warrant for this manner of speaking. Moses, towards the conclusion of Deuteronomy, presents to the people ‘life and blessing’ as the reward of obedience to God’s law, ‘death and curse’ as the punishment of disobedience. Today’s Psalm and the prophecy of Jeremiah both compare the righteous to a well-watered tree, while the unjust are likened to dry scrub or chaff. Christ himself uses a range of equivalent parables: the broad way and the narrow way, the house built on sand and the house built on rock, the good tree which bears good fruit and the bad tree bearing bad.
The point of this teaching is that God’s law is not an arbitrary imposition – it is good for us! And that makes a certain amount of natural sense. The wisdom of many cultures has arrived at the conclusion that virtue, while it may be difficult to acquire, makes us better human beings: better at coping in adversity, better at building and sustaining good relationships, better at dealing with wayward emotions and desires. Evil, by contrast, may be superficially seductive, and self-indulgence is certainly easier than self-denial. But the satisfaction of our impulses to greed, violence, lust, meanness, domination, and other forms of wickedness corrodes the communities in which we live and, in the end, does not really leave us satisfied – instead, we find ourselves going back for more and more.
All well and good – but did we really need a revelation from heaven to teach us this? The pagans knew as much; listen closely enough to Yoda, and you might distil similar advice from Star Wars. In fact, today’s Gospel shows that Christian teaching on the two ways is rather more scandalous. The narrow way is far narrower than we would ever have expected, and the broad way far broader. ‘Alas for you who are rich…Alas for you who have your fill now…Alas for you who laugh now…Alas for you when the world speaks well of you!’
Jesus came announcing a great reversal. ‘The first will be last, and the last first.’ The Kingdom would turn the world as we know it upside down. That is just the point of the woes and beatitudes. By them, Jesus exhorts us to start living as subjects of the Kingdom of God, no longer of the kingdoms of this world.
It’s true that one way that Jesus draws the distinction between those kingdoms is in terms of present and future suffering and satisfaction: go hungry now, he seems to be saying, so that you may later be satisfied. That might lead us to think that here we have just an exaggerated statement of the familiar sober calculation promoting delayed gratification in the pursuit of virtue. Another, more fundamental way Jesus distinguishes the kingdoms is in terms of the source of the satisfaction they provide. The woes are directed at those who contrive their own wealth and satisfaction and joy and respect. Like Jeremiah, the woes curse the one ‘who puts his trust in man and relies on things of flesh’. Blessed rather are they who receive from the Lord, who make the Lord their hope.
Who for us Christians is this Lord, but Jesus himself? The beatitudes are a call not to prudent and respectable living, but to unwavering discipleship. A key to their significance is found in the culminating declaration, ‘blessed are you when people hate you, drive you out, abuse you on account of the Son of Man’. Poverty, hunger, grief, and persecution are not and cannot be made good in themselves. Suffered for the sake of the Gospel, however, in union with Jesus, these are the means of holiness and the promise of a glorious future. As St Paul says, if Christ is not raised from the dead, then we Christians labour pitiably and in vain. But Christ has been raised from the dead. There is the great reversal: death has given way to life. And that is the curious, narrow way we are called to travel.
Readings: Jeremiah 17:5-8 | 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20 | Luke 6:17, 20-26
