All Saints; St. Adalbert's Church
Video (homily starts at minute 18)
What we’ve just heard in
our gospel is, I think, one of the most beautiful readings in scripture; the
beatitudes. I remember being excited that I was going to get to teach this text
to our confirmation students when I used to work at Holy Cross parish and
school here in town, but then having an odd moment of discomfort when I noticed
quite where in the textbook it was. They’d put it in the morality section, on
the right-hand page of a double-spread, I remember, with the ten commandments
on the left-hand page. And I remember finding that really odd, because those are
such different texts. The Ten Commandments, of course, are wonderful too. They
pretty obviously belong as the first thing in a section of Catholic religion
textbook on morality. A list of do’s and do not’s that we all could do with being
more faithful to. I could tell the kids, make sure to honor father and mother when
you get home. Tomorrow, maybe work on not coveting so much. And there are
plenty of similar moral texts in the New Testament that could have sat on that
right-hand page next to them. But you can’t use the beatitudes in the same way.
You can’t use them as a to-do list to make yourself a saint. Firstly, because
you can’t make yourself a saint, that’s God’s job. And secondly, because they’re
not a to do list. At least, they’re not our to do list, though in a way they
are God’s.
“Blessed are they who mourn for they will be
comforted.” You can’t tell people to go home and mourn, like you can tell them
to go home and honor their parents. “Blessed are those who are persecuted, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” You don’t tell people to work next on getting
someone to persecute them. These aren’t entrance requirements for the kingdom;
these are promises to people who are suffering, promises that God is acting. Blessed
are those who mourn because God will comfort them. This is the assurance,
spelled out even more explicitly in the book of Revelation, that in the world
to come, God will wipe away every tear from every eye. It’s not an instruction to
go find something to mourn about. It’s a promise: if you’re mourning, God stands
waiting to comfort. God comforts in real ways in this life, but that is a mere
foretaste of what is to come, and every tear can in fact be looked at as a
blessing, because every tear stain is one more tender touch of God’s finger to
your face in his cleansing action.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for theirs
is the Kingdom of heaven.” Not an instruction to go find someone to persecute
you, but a promise: if you are kicked out or pushed to the side of earthly
kingdoms, God has a place for you in His. Again, the book of Revelation fills
in this picture that Jesus gives so briefly in the gospel. In the section from
Revelation we heard today, we get a picture of the Church Triumphant, the countless
martyrs who live through a “time of great distress,” and now worship God
forever around his throne, saying “Salvation comes from our God.” Holiness,
being a saint, comes from our God. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for justice, will be satisfied, will be made full. God will do it.
The beatitudes are first and foremost promises of
God’s action to those who are suffering. But, as Pope Francis has said, every passage
of scripture is first gift and then demand. And there is a gentle yet insistent
demand here, and that’s to dare to take risks. Without these promises, I don’t
know how many saints would have dared to risk some of the things they risked.
The one action, the one posture, that combines the greatest risk and the
greatest holiness is to love another person. If we love people, some of them
will let us down. Some of them, maybe, through no fault of their own. At the
very least, we’ll have to deal with the pain of losing a loved one to disease
or accident. If we love, we’ll end up grieving. The only (almost) guaranteed way
to avoid grieving is to put up walls and barriers and not love anyway, not
truly, not in a way that will hurt if we lose them.
And without these promises from Jesus, that might
even be the sensible option. But we have these promises from Jesus. We have the
promise and therefore the invitation and therefore the call and summons to risk
love, knowing that we will know grief, knowing that God will comfort, knowing
that tears are blessed because God will wipe them away. We have the call and
summons to dare to live life differently than the world around us, to risk
mockery or even persecution, and that might or might not come, unlike grief,
that almost certainly will, but if it does, we know we have a place of God’s
kingdom, even if the earthly kingdom disdains us. The beatitudes, by promising
us God’s care when we struggle, when we suffer, also challenge us to not live
lives characterized by fear of struggle or suffering. And by freeing us to dare
to live differently, to live lovingly, God leads us into holiness. That’s how
God can make us saints.
No comments:
Post a Comment