EPIPHANY 6, YEAR C

February 16, 2025

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

(via Zoom)

 

Jeremiah 17:5-10

I Corinthians 15:12-20

Luke 6:17-26

 

One of the most basic human desires is to believe that life is fair. When life seems unfair, we protest. Deep in our bones, we believe that life ought to be fair. Such is our innate sense of justice and injustice.

 

So, for example, when we encounter someone who seems to be doing really well in life, we’re often tempted to attribute that person’s good fortune to a combination of natural gifts and personal virtues. We wish such persons well. They’re talented, they’ve worked hard, and they deserve to enjoy the fruits of their success.

 

Conversely, when we encounter someone who gets in deep trouble, possibly to the extent of losing everything, our temptation is to look for ways to blame that person. Some character flaw or vice must have led to their downfall. It’s nobody’s fault but their own, after all. They brought it all on themselves.

 

The point is that as human beings we naturally want to believe that we live in a just universe. We want to believe that life is fair.

 

Today’s Old Testament reading supports such a view. Although it’s found in the prophetic book of Jeremiah, it really belongs to a genre of biblical writing known as Wisdom literature. This tradition’s basic assumption is that God has structured creation in such a way that good deeds and righteous behavior naturally bring good consequences, while evil deeds and wicked behavior naturally bring bad consequences. Thus, Jeremiah contrasts the blessings and curses that attend two opposite ways of life: “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength … Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.”

 

The problem with this vision is that sooner or later—often by the age of three or four—we make the inevitable discovery that life isn’t fair! Virtue isn’t always rewarded; vice often goes unpunished.

 

So, the question that keeps popping up throughout Scripture, as a sort of counterpoint to this dominant theme, is: “Why do the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer?” The Book of Job is one place in the Bible where this mystery of innocent suffering is explored extensively, if somewhat inconclusively.

 

This question raises in turn the classical theological conundrum: how can we maintain that God is both good and all-powerful when he permits the innocent to suffer and the guilty to prosper? For many people, this problem of innocent suffering calls into question God’s goodness and power, if not his very existence.

 

This background helps us to understand what’s going on in today’s Gospel reading, which gives Saint Luke’s version of the beatitudes. The more familiar version is found in chapter five of Saint Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus pronounces eight blessings, beginning with “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

 

In Luke 6, by contrast, Jesus speaks not on a mountain, but “on a level place.” So, instead of the Sermon on the Mount we have the Sermon on the Plain. Here, he pronounces four blessings and four corresponding curses or woes. Here, also, they’re more personal, using the second-person plural: “Blessed are you who are poor …” instead of Matthew’s third person: “Blessed are the poor in spirit …” Some commentators point out that Luke’s version is less spiritualized that Matthew’s; here Jesus speaks not of “the poor in spirit,” or “those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,” but simply “you who are poor,” and “you who are hungry now.” In other words, Luke’s Jesus addresses people’s outward economic conditions rather than their inward spiritual dispositions.

 

Be all that as it may, here Jesus stands in continuity with the Old Testament’s Wisdom tradition: pronouncing blessings on certain kinds of people and woes or curses on the opposite kinds of people. At the same time, however, he stands the tradition completely on its head. Look at the people he calls blessed: the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the persecuted. And look at the people upon whom he calls down woes: the rich, the full, those who laugh, and those who are honored and well thought of in this world.

 

These pronouncements run directly counter to the common assumption in both our Lord’s time and ours that poverty and wretchedness are God’s punishments for sin, while riches and prosperity are God’s rewards for virtue. Here, then, Jesus is blessing those whom the world deems cursed, and cursing those whom the world deems blessed!

 

Indeed, our Lord is clearly taking sides with the poor; and condemning the rich! On the basis of this biblical passage and others like it, recent theology has developed the idea of God’s “preferential option for the poor”—that is, in situations where the poor are being exploited and oppressed by the rich and powerful, God takes the side of the poor, and calls his Church to do the same.

 

This text’s underlying assumption is that the rich tend to trust in themselves rather than in God, while the poor have nowhere else to turn but to God, and so end up being truly blessed by God. So, to return to the question: “Why do the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer?” Our Lord effectively gives the answer: It may seem so now, but in the age to come, all will be reversed. In this age, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper; but the day is coming when divine justice shall prevail.

 

This juxtaposition of readings in today’s Eucharist suggests that we need to be careful to distinguish how we see things from how God sees things. We want life to be fair. Life can often seem grossly unfair. Today’s Gospel reminds us that those whom we consider most blessed in this life may have the greatest reasons for woe in God’s eyes. And those whom we consider most wretched and cursed in this life may indeed be the blessed of the Lord.

 

The challenge, then, is to try to see others as God sees them and not as the world sees them: and, indeed, so to see ourselves. In this context, it seems appropriate to give the last word to the Prophet Jeremiah. “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.” God alone discerns the depths of the human heart. And, in the end, he shall reward each of us according to his perfect justice—and his infinite mercy.