We can make too much of the Beatitudes. It’s tempting to make them a kind of law for everyone to have to obey … a test to pass … a checklist to tick off … and be able to measure and decide who’s in and out … maybe even a kind of contract or guarantee of what we can count, in this life or the next, for what kind of behaviour or attitude we think we show.
We can
also make too little of them – see them just as some kind of perfect ideal that
Jesus is putting out there … a kind of heavenly, spiritual perfection that of
course we are meant to be able to practice, or at least most of us aren’t
expected to live up to, because that kind of life just isn’t practical, isn’t
realistic.
But when
Jesus says these things – pronounces these “beatitudes” – the word “beatitude”
is simply the Latin word for “blessing” – so when Jesus pronounces these blessings
he is surrounded by, looking at, and speaking directly to a big bunch of
regular, ordinary, very practical people who have gathered as his disciples and
followers in the very down-to-earth region of Galilee, and he is affirming and
blessing them as being among the sanest and most helpfully down-to-earth people
in the kingdom.
After
his baptism in the Jordan, his purification in the wilderness, and the
imprisonment of John the Baptist, Jesus has left the insanity developing in the
southern kingdom – with fervent millennialism rising at the riverside and
paranoid authority coming down from Jerusalem and Rome, and he’s come up north
to the city of Capernaum and the surrounding region of Galilee to heal people’s
bodies and spirits, to teach them the ways of God, and to tell them the kingdom
of heaven is come. And people have
responded – in large numbers – “bigly,” as some might say today. And now this morning we read the opening of
his first major public address – his first press conference you may say – his
first major outline of what his movement is about, what the kingdom of God is
like.
He
might have started, “My fellow Galileans” and made his movement all about the
rise of Galilee – making Galilee great again.
He might have started, “Friends, Israelites, countrymen,” and made it
all about a populist overthrow of the corrupt rulers in Jerusalem and Rome.
But what
he does instead is look within himself – what he has learned to see and
embrace, and look around at the crowd – at what really on the deepest level
brings them together around him, and from all of that he pulls out the words
and the characteristics and the behaviours and the longings that most deeply
unite and identify them as friends of his, and together as friends of God on
the face of the earth – as people who are among the sane ones on the planet,
and who represent the people’s, the kingdom’s, and maybe even Earth’s best hope.
And
what it is that he sees, names, blesses in them and blesses them for – when you
read through the Beatitudes, is their emptiness – basically their emptiness,
their knowledge of their own and others’ emptiness – and in that knowledge,
because of that knowledge, and from that knowledge their freedom and their
willingness to walk humbly and openly with one another, with Jesus, with all
others, and with God towards the way the world is to be, and is to be good for
all.
Emptiness
– known and named, accepted and embraced, shared and blessed.
It
makes me wonder why do I run so much, and in so many ways from my own
emptiness? Why do I work so hard to hide
what I don’t know, what I don’t have, what I’m not able to do? Why do I even try – as I have for most of my
life, to mask my incompleteness? Why am
I so afraid of it? Why do I blame others
for it? Why do I try to fill the void,
the emptiness I feel sometimes – that’s really deep inside all of us – with
busy-ness? With toys and games and
diversions and aggressive self-defences?
With obsessive or compulsive food and drink – especially if I’m up late
at night? With who know what habitual
and even addictive behaviours and stuff when my emptiness makes itself known in
the cracks and corners and centre of my life?
It
makes me think that the way we handle our emptiness – what we try to fill it
with – what we say to it, or let it say to us – whether we embrace and befriend
it or not, whether we are able to see it on ourselves, recognize it in others,
and work together from it … is one of the most fundamental questions of our
life, that goes a long way towards shaping and determining the kind of life we
have, the kind of people we are, the kind of species we become, and the kind of
world we create.
About
thirty years ago I was given a gift by a good friend at the time. Father Jerry was a Carmelite brother at the
Mount Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls, and for a time he was my
spiritual director. For a few years I
saw him sometimes monthly, sometimes every few months for direction in the
journey and opening of my spirit. The
relationship ended when he left the Centre and before he left, he gifted me
with these two framed sketches – one of Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day
(the founder of the Catholic Worker movement), and Mahatma Gandhi; the other of
Maryknoll sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel and
lay missioner Jean Donovan, who in the words of one website, in 1980 “joined
the ranks of some 70,000 people in El Salvador killed by their own militia
during that nation’s civil war when they were killed on a roadside and buried
in a shallow grave, December 2, 1980.”
These
people were – are, contemporary saints – people who in their own lives were
shaped by, and came to embody the Beatitudes of Jesus. Like those who followed Jesus in real and
practical ways in Galilee in the first century, they lived the Jesus-life among
us in North America in the twentieth.
These sketches of them hung for years on the wall of Father Jerry’s
office because they reminded him of Jesus’ call to us all, and inspired him to
live it out in whatever ways he could.
I
heard later from other brothers at the Centre that Father Jerry left Mount
Carmel to go to Chicago, in part to face some of his own recovery issues, and
also to work in an HIV-AIDS hospice that the Order had established there, to serve
as priest and chaplain to those who were suffering and dying from the disease.
Blessed
are … Blessed are you … and blessed are
they … friends of Jesus and of God, all of them, because of the way they handle
their own and others’ emptiness.
Sometimes
the friends of Jesus are big – big names, big personalities, big stories. And it’s good that some are, because the
world is also so full of big people with big egos, needs and power to lead us
in all the wrong directions and reinforce us in all the wrong, all the evil
ideas of how we and the world should be.
The world needs people who can also bear big witness to another way.
But we
all are not big, and don’t need to be.
Nor do
we have to go far, to live as a friend of Jesus and friend of God, and make a
Jesus kind of difference in the way the world works. Some are called to leave where they are and
go to places like El Salvador, Chicago, Haiti, the Dominican, the Galapagos and
Bolivia.
But
for most, the place to be a friend of Jesus is right where we are – just as far
away as our daily routine, the person next door or even next to us, the next
person we meet, the next step we take.
The
poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for
justice, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who suffer in
any way for doing or saying what is right … these are not exotic, unrealistic,
overly idealistic kinds of people. They
are people like us, who learn to handle their own emptiness well, befriend it
and share, and let it guide them into the ways of the kingdom of heaven on
earth.
Thom
Shumann is a minister whose words we often use to guide us in worship here – in
calls to worship and responsive prayers.
This week he took a little stab at translating the Beatitudes into
contemporary and ordinary images, and came up with this:
·
blessed are the dog-walkers, for they
will discover the streets of the kingdom:
·
blessed are those who welcome
refugees, for they will embraced with unimaginable love;
·
blessed are those who read to
children, for they will plant seeds that bear fruit;
·
blessed are those who shelter the
homeless, for they will be shawled in God's grace;
·
blessed are those who stock food
pantries, for they will taste God's hope;
·
blessed are those who reach out to the
outsiders, for they shall be called bridge-builders;
·
blessed are the faith-full foolish,
for they shall be called the clowns of God.
And that’s just a start, isn’t
it? Just scratching the surface. There are at least as many things to add to
that list as there are people here in this sanctuary, as there are relationships
and encounters in our lives, as there are days and nights to our living.
And to think it all starts by letting
Jesus bring our emptiness out into the open, and build holy community with
others around it.
No comments:
Post a Comment