The Beatitudes (Matthew 5)

 

     In the Name etc.  Amen.

     It is possible to understand the Beatitudes  as a list of progressive steps, as stages on a journey, from the beginning stage of a life in poverty of body and spirit, to its culmination in the Kingdom of Heaven. Indeed, the Beatitudes (remember that the word means 'blessings') begin with the Kingdom: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven," and they end with the Kingdom: "Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in Heaven." Each of these Beatitudes, or blessings doesn't merely describe a condition; the condition, or conditions, are not the whole story. Each blessing concludes with a promise: the kingdom of heaven; comfort; an inheritance; satisfaction; mercy; the vision of God; and, again, the kingdom of heaven, where we begin.

     This is not "pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die" heaven, but something quite different, as our text plainly says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven," right here and right now, not in some remote future, but in the present. Earth and heaven, our lives and God's life, are connected in the present. The relationship already exists; it remains to learn how they are related, and how to make awareness of it actual in our present reality.

     The idea that earth and heaven, God and his creation, are tied to each other, connected to each other, goes back a very long way. In Jacob's dream at Bethel, Genesis, chapter 28, says: "He dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it." And this idea of a ladder from earth and heaven has inspired some commentators to see each of the Beatitudes as a step on that ladder, each one higher than the one before it, each step founded on the one below it, and each one bringing us closer to the transformation and fulfilment that God intends for us: becoming fully what we already are, children of God.

     Poverty of spirit is something we all experience at one time or another. It may begin in material poverty, brought on by job loss or other misfortune. Depression, confusion, uncertainty may follow, leading us to become aware that we are not what we are meant to be, not what we could be, not what we want to be. This may lead us to realize that some essential thing is missing in life, something that we can't locate exactly. Our Buddhist friends call this dukkha, suffering, off-centredness, the first truth of the Buddha's dharma, and for us, the first truth, the first blessing, of the Beatitudes.

     The succeeding Beatitudes expand and build upon the meaning of poverty, by including mourning, meekness, and hungering for righteousness. The second Beatitude says, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted". Mourning is likely the first reaction to the realization of loss. The sudden discovery of our poverty, material or spiritual, of our loss of goods or money or job or a partner or loved one, or confidence or belief or trust -- losses like these lead to mourning, and paradoxically, as is typical of the Christian religion, lead to the promise of comfort that accompanies the second Beatitude. Our Lord is telling us here that poverty and mourning are not the whole story, that the Kingdom is not far away.

     As we recover from poverty of whatever kind, and we pass through mourning, we learn humility, here called meekness, in the third Beatitude. "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth". We realize our true place in the scheme of things, we lose illusions about ourselves, about others, about the world, we realize that whatever we thought we had is gone. This realization is a liberation, although we may not think so at the time. Concluding the third Beatitude is the stunning, absurd  promise, that we will inherit the earth. It seems to me that this means only one thing, the only thing that makes it a realistic promise: that we inherit, that is, we come into full realization of what life really is, the only thing that we actually have and ever really had. This inheritance can't be taken away from us. It is the solid rock of our experience of ourselves and others and the world as they really are. That's why our Lord can promise comfort to those who mourn, and promise the Kingdom to the poor in spirit. Comfort, inheritance, kingdom, are all words for the one unshakable thing which is always there: God himself. Poverty, mourning, meekness, open us up to the experience of the reality of his presence, because we lose those things which obstruct awareness of him.
     And we come to the fourth step on the Ladder, the fourth  Beatitude. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." It is possible to understand this Beatitude as a change in the list, turning from poverty of spirit, mourning, and meekness, toward the mercy, purity of heart, and peace of the  following Beatitudes. A soul purified by poverty, mourning, and meekness is ready for the next step in growth in the Spirit, in the approach to God, in achieving the destiny God intends for every person. To hunger and thirst for righteousness is to want the world and everyone and everything in it to become, to be, what God intends them to be. This step, the fourth Beatitude, is possible only at this point, when we have let go of those things which have obstructed us. Then, as the promise says, we will be filled.

     Filled with what? Our Lord goes on to say, in the next three Beatitudes, that we will be filled with mercy, purity of heart, and peace. They are the results of the purification wrought by  the first three Beatitudes. We are liberated to manifest these results, these attributes. We are free to show mercy, and we receive it, as our text says, "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy". But perhaps it is not quite right to say that we receive it, because we discover that it has been there all along. We receive it the same way we receive grace, become aware of God --- grace, God, have  always been there, and we have got to the point, in the fifth Beatitude, where our true nature begins to shine through.

     Now, at the sixth step, the sixth Beatitude, we achieve, or rather, we become aware of, our purity of heart. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God". Mercy given and received are signs of this purity, this clarity, this presence of God in our lives. The promise is the sight of God.

     When we look back at the steps we have climbed on the ladder, we can see how they lead to the seventh step, the seventh Beatitude: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." Who else, really, is qualified to achieve real peace, in themselves and for others, except those who have been purified by spiritual poverty, mourning, and meekness? The Beatitudes show us how to reach this level, and what the consequences and rewards are. This Beatitude reminds us of the Russian saint Seraphim of Sarov, who said to one of his spiritual sons, "Acquire the Spirit of peace, and thousands will be saved around you."

      Now we come to the last two steps on the ladder, the last two  Beatitudes, which are difficult to hear. "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake," and, "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you..." There is an interesting change at this point. Up until now, all the Beatitudes are in the third person; they speak in general terms about others, not, apparently, the people being spoken to. Remember that the Beatitudes open the Sermon on the Mount, so there is an audience. But, in the last Beatitude, Jesus addresses his hearers directly, "Blessed are you, when people revile you....on my account." This is the goal, so to speak, of the Beatitudes. They are preparation for the full Christian life, the life that Jesus himself lived. He is the exemplar of his own teaching, and he is preparing his hearers for what will happen to him, and for what they may have to undergo as his followers. It is another step on the ladder to life in God, a step which not all are called to take, but one which is always available.

      The Beatitudes are about living a life, a God-centered life, a life in which God is a living presence. "Rejoice and be glad" in the comfort, the inheritance, the fullness, the mercy, the vision of God, which return us to the condition in which God means us to live. "for your reward" which is the vision of God "is great in heaven". 

     In the Name etc.. Amen.

Followers of Jesus (Luke 9)

       Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.”  From Luke, chapter 9, verse 62.

     Today’s Gospel reading begins Luke’s Travel Narrative, Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem. We can divide the reading into two parts: the first, the Samaritan village story, and the second, Jesus’s dialog with three followers. Both parts have a common theme: what it means, and what it does not mean, to be a follower of Jesus. And both parts also make clear, who Jesus is, and who he is not.

     “When the days for his being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.” In other words, Jesus knows his destiny; ‘days fulfilled’ means ‘days completed’; his Galilean ministry is finished and the next period, his “exodus” (as he says in chapter 9, verse 31), his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension will take place in Jerusalem. 

      “He sent messengers ahead of him.” There is evidently an organization around Jesus; today we would call these messengers “advance men”. But these advance men are unsuccessful; they are unable to persuade a Samaritan village to accept Jesus. The Samaritans miss a chance to meet Jesus; they may be afraid of him, with good reason perhaps. After all, they’ve likely heard of his healings and powers over demons and so on; and James and John don’t help matters when they propose to “call down fire from heaven to consume them,” for rejecting Jerusalem-bound Jesus.  James and John are thinking of the prophet Elijah, who called down fire from heaven to destroy two troops of King Ahaziah of Israel, a hundred men or so, as the story goes in the Second Book of the Kings. Jesus doesn’t accept the proposal. In so doing, Jesus dissociates himself from the ferocious attitude of his disciples, and rejects identification of himself with Elijah. Jesus is not trapped in the traditional mutual hostility of Jews and Samaritans, and is more than a prophet, and expects his disciples to leave traditional attitudes behind. So “they journeyed to another village, ” that is, they moved on to the next step in Jesus’s revelation of himself, and to the next step in their understanding of what it means to be a disciple, a follower of Jesus. 

      “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus’s oblique reply, “the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head,” is a warning to his disciple, of what following him may mean: no den, no nest, no resting place, no home. As it happened, disciples and apostles and more spread through the Roman world and beyond, far beyond their places of rest in Galilee and Jerusalem. Jesus freed them from their need to remain attached to their homes, their places of origin, their past, their tribe. The Son of Man is not limited to any particular place or time, is free to rest his head anywhere, and he does.

     “Follow me!” And we hear the reply, “let me bury my father.” But not even this family obligation, this filial duty, is more important than proclaiming the Kingdom. Jesus won’t even give leave to someone to say goodbye to his family. Only the spiritually dead, the housebound, would preoccupy themselves with the physically dead, would  allow themselves to be distracted from proclaiming the Kingdom. 

     It helps to keep in mind that Jesus is addressing these remarks to particular individuals, who are ready to hear the teaching. There are degrees of readiness. Jesus has the insight, as any illuminated spiritual teacher does, into the character, the depth, the receptivity of his followers, the level of commitment of which they are capable. He knows who is ready to set his hand to the plow, and who isn’t. It seems to me that Jesus knows who these would-be followers really are, that they are more ready for the Kingdom than they think they are, that they really can leave families and dead relatives behind, can leave behind old tribal attitudes and hostilities, can journey “to another village,” that is, they can journey to the next level of awareness of the Kingdom.

     After all this emphasis on journeying and following and leaving conventional obligations behind, it is curious, jarring even, that the reading ends with a rather conventional, agrarian image, that of a farmer behind a plow. Who is more located in a particular place and in a more traditional way of life than a farmer behind his plow? Who is less likely to leave regular obligations behind? After all, farming is the basis of all civilization. But Jesus says, Don’t look back. No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what is left behind is fit for the Kingdom of  God. See what setting your hand to the plow really means. Plowing in one place is itself a kind of journey, is itself a metaphor for the spiritual life, a life of following an illuminated teacher, leaving behind old conventions and obligations, of not looking back on what was left behind. The Kingdom, which is awareness of spiritual reality, of divine reality, is open to those who look ahead, who journey ahead, who don’t limit themselves to what is , what was, behind them. The plow turns over the soil, leaves it open to seeds of new life, new possibility; when the soil of routine is turned over and exposed to the light, the farmer, which we may call the soul, is making himself or herself, open to the reality of God, to awareness of God, and this awareness is the Kingdom.

     This is what gives Jesus’s teaching its uncompromising, demanding, all-or-nothing character. What can be more real than God? What can be more compelling than God’s presence? What can be more important? That is why Jesus says to those who are spiritually ready, “No one who sets a hand  to the plow and  looks to what is left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.”

     (26.vi.22 Adv.)

     

     

      

Temptations of Jesus (Luke 4)

     In nomine etc..

   The story of the temptations of Jesus presents warnings and reminders, about what religion is, and what it isn’t, that we need to keep in mind throughout Lent and beyond. The temptations of Jesus are archetypal, patterns of common spiritual tendencies that we need to recognize and avoid. 

    “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the desert for forty days to be tempted by the devil.” Led by the Spirit? What is going on here? What have the Spirit and the devil to do with each other? There’s a relationship here that we need to look at.

    The Spirit is clearly in charge, and the devil in this story is doing as he is told. The devil, in other words, is subordinate, and has a rather limited collection of possibilities open to him. The first possibility is his role as tempter. That is all. And he apparently has powers to change the environment, or at least the appearance of the environment, when he presents Jesus with different locations: the desert, a very high altitude with an impressive view in a very short time period, and the parapet of the temple. So the devil is limited to tempting and scene-changing. The Spirit is allowing these behaviors, and no more. From this we conclude that there is no balance of forces between the Spirit and the devil, that the Spirit can overpower diabolical deceptions of any kind, and the role of our religion is to remind us of this, especially during Lent.

    “Command this stone to become bread.” Jesus ignores this demand, he deflects it actually, by saying something about the place of bread in the greater scheme of things. Mere survival is not the goal of life; the true bread is the word of God, and true life is life with God who sustains us with his presence, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” In John’s Gospel Jesus tells us that he is the “living bread that came down from heaven.” True religion is not magic that turns stones into bread, but provides us with living bread, which is life with God. 

     “The devil...showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and he said to him, ‘I shall give you all this power and their glory, for it has been handed over to me.’” I said a moment  ago that the devil in this story is a tempter and a scene-changer. What he says in this temptation is not true, so we can add liar to his titles. The world does not belong to the devil. The devil’s claim to worldly power is ‘fake news,’ to use the current phrase. But in us the temptation to worldly power is always present. The thirst for power of many religious people is obvious in our world, which makes clear that the real object of their worship is power itself, and not God. But Jesus says, “Worship  the Lord your God, and serve only him.” I hear this as an unmistakable command, to avoid power-seeking of any kind in the name of religion.

    “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down” from the parapet of the Temple. It is hard to understand this demand as a temptation. The first temptation would of course be  attractive to a hungry man. But this temptation, so called, is really an effort to tempt God and the angels, to prod them to reveal themselves and their power, hardly likely to succeed with them, it seems to me. So it can be understood as an effort to inflate Jesus’s ego, to get him to imagine that in his humanity he has godlike angelic powers that he can rely on, that put him above the level of ordinary humans, that exempt him from the limitations of human nature. How better to prove Jesus’s claims, the devil thinks. The temptation to make religion into a display of divine power is ever-present; this is a constant temptation to religious people, to use religion to give themselves power over others. But true religion is about loving participation in the life of God, and it is love of our neighbors, not power over them, that makes this possible.

      “When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time.” Having passed through these temptations, the final steps in his preparation for ministry, the final steps of his initiation, which began with his baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus is free to participate in the divine life. The Spirit replaces the devil, and leads Jesus out of the wilderness, and on to his ministry in Galilee and beyond. 

       In Nomine, etc..     

    

   

Call of Simon (Luke 5)

 

    “Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.’ When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.” From the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 5, verses 10 and 11.

     In Nomine etc..

     Our translation titles today’s Gospel ‘The Call of Simon the Fisherman,’ altho Jesus in this passage doesn’t actually call Simon, or anyone else. What I take from the narrative is that a number of men, only three of whom are named, on their own initiative, decide to follow Jesus, after their experience with him on the lake. How this happens, and what we can learn from the passage and what it may say to us, is our theme tonight.

     It is clear in this section of the Gospel, that a crowd is following Jesus and listening to him. To give himself space, as we say nowadays, he takes himself to the shore of the Sea of Galilee (called the Lake of Gennesaret in this passage) and gets into Simon’s boat, and speaks to the crowd from there. Note that Jesus basically has commandeered the boat, and expects Simon to accept his direction. And Simon does, lowering his nets, altho he protests that the fishing has been fruitless all night.

     This detail is interesting, fishing at night. The fishermen are likely carrying lights, torches or lamps, to attract fish, in exactly the same way I have seen fishing vessels working at night, very brightly lit. And in daylight, fishermen have other ways of finding fish. I remember an occasion in Newfoundland, when a fisherman (who was also a priest)  pointed out to me, ripples on the water, which I would never have noticed, but which to him meant a large school of fish just below the surface. He regretted not being in his boat at that moment. 

     Simon’s regret quickly leaves him, as he and his unnamed crew catch “a great number of fish and their nets were tearing.” The old translation calls this “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes.” It is certainly unusual and unexpected. It is also not clear who is catching the fish. In verse two the Evangelist mentions “the fishermen”; in verse 5, Simon says “we have worked hard all night.” At Jesus’s command “they” lower the nets. In verse 7, “they signaled to their partners;” “they came and filled both boats.” It is clear that a large number of men (I assume that they are men) are present and following Jesus’s instructions; only three of them are named, as I have mentioned: Simon, James, and John. 

     Simon’s reaction is one of awe and submission. The astonishment he feels is shared by “all those with him,” the named and unnamed men with him. Jesus ignores Simon’s protestation of his sinfulness, and Simon’s apparent desire that Jesus leave him. This desire doesn’t last long; “when they brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.” “They” evidently include both the named and the unnamed fishermen. 

      Now the only emotions mentioned in this passage are an implied skepticism and reluctance to go fishing again, and astonishment at the outcome when they do. But Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.” No one says that they are afraid. What is going on in this passage?

       We usually read and hear stories like this and follow and understand their natural, obvious meaning. Clearly, what is happening here is that Jesus helps the fishermen locate and haul in a large catch, which they had been unable to do on their own. We can all imagine the scene. I saw enough of fishing and fishermen in Newfoundland to appreciate how difficult and unpredictable the work is. And so it is in our story. But there is more to it than a simple tale of Jesus helping his friends haul in a catch.

     Jesus is willing to set out on the dark, cold water, with the fishermen, willing to help them in their work. His mere presence, and authority as a teacher who has just finished speaking to the crowd on the shore, are enough to encourage the men to set out again, with a happy outcome.

     There has been some conversation among Jesus and the fishermen, which is not recorded. But the point of it is that they will be leaving behind their work as fishermen, and taking up work of helping Jesus with his work, teaching and healing. His followers, named and unnamed, understand the fishing analogy, that their catch from now on will be humans, not fish. The large catch is a sign, a proof almost, that they will be successful in this work, and that their supposed sinfulness and inadequacy as fishermen are, will be, no obstacle in this work. 

     In saying “do not be afraid” Jesus is preparing them in advance for the reality that this will not always be easy, that there will be obstacles and even dangerous situations, that will put fear into them. But “from now on you will be catching men; ” their work will be fruitful regardless of circumstance, from now on.

     The only command that Jesus gives in this story is the one in which he commandeered a boat and told the fishermen where to let down their nets. Their response led to success in their task. Jesus did not tell them to follow him, in so many words. “They left everything and followed him” of their own free will; there is no suggestion of any compulsion in this story. 

     The free response of the fishermen to Jesus’s actions and teachings is what makes their work possible. So it is with us; Jesus presents his teaching and example and invites us to follow him. He promises that the work will be fruitful, and that there will be times of uncertainty and fear. This is important for us to keep in mind, in this strange and difficult period in which we find ourselves. The apparent shrinking of the Church, at least in this part of the world, and great changes in society, in our collective health, politics, the ecology and so on, are occasions of anxiety, confusion, and fear. But Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.” If we leave fear behind, and freely choose to follow him, as his earliest followers did, the outcome, our “miraculous draught of fishes” will surely result. 

     “Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.’ When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.”

     In Nomine etc..