6th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 - The path of beatitude and the path of woe

 

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives his most famous sermon on top of a mountain: his Sermon on the Mount.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus gives his first major sermon, which we heard today, not from the top of a mountain. In fact, St. Luke tells us that Jesus came down from the mountain, and taught his disciples and this large group of people on a stretch of level ground. This passage of Luke’s Gospel is known as Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, and is delivered immediately after spending a night in prayer and naming the 12 apostles.

In this sermon, the Lord teaches us how to live in such a way on this earthly plain, that leads to the joy of heaven. The path to lasting joy, he indicates, is the life of faith, one in which we place our trust in God rather than in money, in pleasure, in entertainment or in the esteem of others. 

Whereas Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount features eight aspects of the path to beatitude, in the Sermon on the Plain, the Lord offers four beatitudes contrasted with for “woes” or warnings. 

In contrasting the four beatitudes with the four woes, the Lord contrasts the way that leads to holiness and heaven with the way that leads to perdition. 

And the path of beatitude is a serious business, which is why the Luke introduces this sermon by telling us, “ Jesus raised his eyes toward his disciples,” In other words, Jesus looks each of us straight in the eyes as he gives us this teaching. It’s like a scene in the movie where the action stops and the main character stops and looks directly into the camera to explain what is really going on.

So let’s look closely at these four contrasts.

Firstly, the Lord contrasts “Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours,” with “Woe to you are rich, for you have received your consolation.” This was a revolutionary teaching and still is one today: earthly riches are not necessarily a sign that you are blessed by God, nor that you are on the road to heaven. Riches cannot buy you real happiness, and they certainly cannot buy you eternal life; you cannot buy your way into heaven. So, a life bent on obtaining riches is a misguided life. We must never, never, never allow the pursuit of riches keep us from cultivating holiness. 

The second contrast is “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be satisfied,” versus, “Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry.” 

There are people who make earthly pleasure their highest good. They live to satiate their bodily appetites to the detriment of their souls. Those who are physically full without Christ are spiritually starving to death.

The Christian, rather, is to hunger and thirst for holiness more than for bread and water—to hunger for God and the things of God.

Fulton Sheen used to say that there are two philosophies of life: The pagan philosophy is first the feast, then the fast. The Christian philosophy is first the fast, then the feast. Pagan seek to enjoy the goods of the earth now, but are deprived of what is truly substantial. Christians practice fasting, and self-control of our bodily appetites, so that we may feast in the eternal banquet of heaven. 

For a culture bent on instant gratification this is a difficult teaching. But if we don’t learn how to say “no” to some appetites we may find ourselves indulging in what is forbidden and deadly to our souls.

Next the Lord contrasts “Blessed are you who are now weeping for you will laugh” with “Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep.” 

There are many today who go from earthly diversion to earthly diversion, party to party, who don’t take life seriously because they claim they’re living for the present moment, as if that’s the most important thing in life. But in reality, they are trying to escape from reality, trying to insulate themselves from sadness and suffering as much as they can. They don’t realize that there will be a time when the music will stop, and poor choices catch up to you, not to mention having to come face to face with the eternal judge and being required to give an account of our use and waste of our earthly time and treasure.

Rather, the Christian, instead of running away from sorrow, fear, and death, we face these things with courage, faith and hope. There is power and grace when we unite our sufferings with Christ. There is heavenly consolation when we allow ourselves to weep with His blessed mother, or like St. Monica offer up our tears for the conversion of our misguided family members. 

Lastly, the Lord contrast “Blessed are you when people hate you, … exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man” with “Woe to you when all speak well of you.”

Many people find it unbearable when people don’t like them. Social pressures are among the most driving forces in our culture. So when Jesus says, you will be hated by all because of me, some people, even Christians, say, fine, I’m not going to let anyone know that I follow Jesus, especially if my Christianity would affect my professional or social standing. 

The Lord presents us, here with a choice: will you live for pleasing God or pleasing man? Will you be a prophet or will you persecute prophets?

And this is a very serious choice—the most serious. Because this word “woe”—“woe to you” is a warning. Jesus is warning us that there are consequences for rejecting his teaching here. He doesn’t say, “it’s preferable if you are poor in spirit, but I understand, no big deal, it’s of no consequence if you ignore this stuff, live your best life as your feelings dictate them.” That’s the world talking. That’s the world perverting the Christian message. Living only for the earthly feast will mean exclusion from the heavenly one.

So, how can we take the Lord’s teaching today to heart? The Catechism recommends making an examination of conscience based on the beatitudes. That means reading through the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the plan and asking yourselves questions related to these truths: “have I sought after earthly riches to the detriment of heavenly ones? Have I pursued sinful pleasures instead of practicing temperance, chastity, moderation? Have I given into diversions instead of bringing my wounds and difficulties to God? Have I hungered and thirsted for doing what’s right, working to right the injustices that I perpetuated or participated in? Have I retreated in fear when it was my time to witness to Christ?” 

Jesus looks us in the eyes, he looks into our heart and speaks these words of truth, that we may follow the way he has tread before us. We do well to consider all those things we should fast from, restrict, and restrain, in order to walk more faithfully the path of beatitude for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

28th Sunday in OT 2018 - Joylessness and the Rich Young Man

This weekend, Pope Francis is celebrating in Rome the Canonization of six new saints. Three of them were founders of new religious orders, one of them was a humble diocesan priest, one is the great and courageous Archbishop Oscar Romero who denounced the violence of the civil war in El Salvador in 1980 and was assassinated offering mass in a hospital chapel. The sixth is Pope Paul VI, whose Papacy from 1963-1978 was marked by his deep sense of prayerfulness, as he led the Church to become a greater instrument for evangelization and conversion to the modern world.

The temperaments and lives of these new saints could not have been any different. Yet, their commonality, is certainly their love and obedience to Jesus Christ.

Like the young man in the Gospel today, they each approached the Lord, fell to their knees and asked the question: “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” For three of them it was founding a religious order for ordinary men and women like you and me to live a life of prayer and penance that points to God. For Archbishop Romero, it was standing up to a corrupt government. For Paul VI it was leading the Church in a time of social and cultural upheaval. But, “what must I do to find joy, to find eternal life?” That is probably the most important question anyone could ask.

One concern I know many priests and many of you have is that so many of our young people and so many of our family members do not consider this question important.  One of the symptoms of the secularism of our age is an indifference to eternity. Plenty of young men and women ask questions like, “what must I do to get into Harvard, what must I do to be a famous athlete, what must I do to make my first million by the age of 30, what must I do to have as much pleasure as I can?”  These are all valid questions if one is merely concerned with earthly happiness and temporal success.  But these are not concerns about ultimate reality.  So this young man in the Gospel is in a much better place than many of our contemporaries.

How did the Lord answer this young man’s questions? He first begins to list off the commandments of God’s law.

Rules are important. We have rules for good health—you can’t eat a bag of pork rinds every day if you want to be physically fit; we have rules for good finances—don’t spend more than you make. So, too, if you want to have good mental health, there are some rules—learn to let go of anger and grudges, read a book once and a while to keep your brain active, maintain supportive relationships, develop a sense of gratitude for life’s blessings.

Every relationship has rules; rules which prescribe what is good and prohibit what is bad. When a bride and groom stand up in front of the Church and their families and recite their wedding vows, they are agreeing to the rules of their covenant relationship: we are going to be faithful even when we are tempted to be unfaithful, we are going to care for each other in times of sickness, in times of economic hardship, when physical beauty fades, we are going to raise our children to be good Christians.

Families have rules which support the harmony and happiness of the family. Don’t talk back to mom and dad, don’t fight with your siblings. When I was growing up, we had a lot of rules about keeping the house tidy: make your bed, clean your room, dirty plates and dishes weren’t to be left lying around, they were to be placed not just in the kitchen sink, but the dishwasher, and they had to be rinsed off first.

The spiritual life has rules, too. If you want to spiritually fit, if you want your relationship with God to be healthy—if you want this earthly journey to lead to eternal life with God, we must follow spiritual rules. And the commandments of God are the basic rules for that end.

Now of course, we all fail to keep these commandments for a variety of reasons. And the Christian recognizes the necessity of repentance, of confessing the serious violations of our covenant relationship with God. We admit to God even our smaller, venial sins, as well as we can, so that they do not pave the way for graver violations.

The young man in the Gospel, seems like he was doing pretty well. "Teacher,” he says “all of these commandments I have observed from my youth." Okay, good. Jesus recognizes that in this young man, the fundamental are in place, the aspirations are right, but the Lord sensed a restlessness in the young man. “You are lacking in one thing”, the Lord said. What was he lacking?

Despite his fidelity to the law, the young man was unwilling to detach himself from his possessions and follow the Lord radically.

“Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." The Lord knew that the man’s possessions had become a stumbling block to his salvation, so he illuminated this fact, and showed him what he had to do. This does not mean every single one of us has to get rid of all of our earthly possessions to follow Christ, but it certainly means that we must be spiritually detatched from them and dedicate them to God's purpose rather than our own selfish ends.

At that statement we then hear one of the saddest lines in all of the Gospels. “his face fell, and he went away sad.” The encounter with the Lord is meant to bring us conversion, joy, and life, but the young man walked away from that which would have brought him joy and that is always a sad story.

Last week in our parish youth group, we talked about joy, how following the commands of God leads to joy, how prayer and service bring us a joy that nothing else in the world can possibly give. Joy, is very different from happiness. Happiness is satisfaction with temporary things. I’m happy when the browns win, I’m happy when my chicken wings are at the perfect level of crispiness, I’m happy when the traffic light turns green at just the right time.

Joy, however, comes from our relationship with the eternal things of God: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Our hearts are filled not just with happiness, but joy, when we learn the Truth that comes from God, when we engage in truly good acts, caring for the poor, caring for a sick family member, feeding the hungry, forgiving those who hurt us. And we are filled with joy at the sight of beauty, true beauty, beautiful and timeless Christian art and architecture, the beauty of God’s creation.

The young man turns his heart away from joy because he chooses to value passing, temporary, earthly things, his possessions, over the truth, and goodness, and beauty of Jesus Christ.

I guarantee, that each of the saints being canonized this weekend, knew this secret to joy. Now, that doesn’t mean their lives were easy. Each faced tremendous suffering, but that did not diminish their joy. Because authentic joy does not diminish in the face of suffering, but can intensify it, when that suffering is embraced for the good of the Church and the spread of the Gospel.

As we celebrate the Eucharist today, may the Holy Spirit help us identify those attitudes or habits that we need to turn away from in order to experience the joy and eternal life God wants for us, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

Homily: Monday - 8th Week in OT 2017 - Possessed by possessions?

A few years ago, the Arts & Entertainment channel began airing a show called, “Hoarders”.  The show chronicles people whose accumulation and hoarding of material stuff has become so excessive that it is has become difficult to move through the house; whole rooms of their house have become inaccessible due to this behavior.  In many cases the houses become so unsanitary that children are forced into foster care, or the house is condemned.

There are no doubt many psychological factors involved in compulsive hoarding, but often the show challenges the viewer to examine his own life.  For we can all develop a disordered attachment to material things.

Jesus confronts such a person in the Gospel today, one who has developed a disordered attachment to this things, he has begun to be possessed by his possessions. The rich young man wasn’t an evil person, it seems he kept many of the commandments, but when Jesus invited Him to a deeper relationship with God, the rich young man rejected the invitation, he failed to see Jesus’ invitation as the pearl of great price worth selling everything you have to obtain.

Most of us are not compulsive hoarders, and most of us are following the 10 commandments pretty well. However, each of us are at risk of allowing the preoccupation with earthly concerns to lead us away from our concern for our souls.

When our lives are overly focused on the material, the earthly, we become unhappy and exhausted.  Like the rich young man in the Gospel today, we leave saddened. Likely, so much of the sadness we carry around with us, is because in fact, we have turned away from opportunities to trust in Jesus, to follow him for deeply.

With Lent beginning this week, Our Lord invites us once again to trust in him by engaging seriously in the practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We will never walk away sad, when we are sincere in our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

We are reminded once again today that our true joy is not found in the accumulation of earthly things, earthly successes, earthly honors or distinctions, but in abandonment to Jesus, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

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That the upcoming season of Lent may be a source of renewal and spiritual growth for the entire Christian Church.

That we may guard our hearts from all kinds of greed, be free from everything which keeps us from loving and following Christ with undivided hearts.

For deliverance from any form of avarice which has crept into the hearts of Church or government leaders.

That we may be wise stewards of earthly things in sharing the goods of the earth which come from the rich mercy of God to all those in need.