Sunday 13 February, 2022, Third Sunday before Lent
Lectionary Readings for the Third Sunday Before Lent
Jeremiah 17: 5-10
Thus says the Lord:
Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes.
They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.
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.
Psalm 1
Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
1 Corinthians 15: 12–20
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.
Luke 6: 17–26
He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
Then he looked up at his disciples and said: Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
Sermon for the Third Sunday Before Lent
It is good, sometimes, to stop to think about the usual phrases we exchange with one another in the course of an ordinary day. How about Good bye? Good bye is a contraction of the phrase God be with ye. It is first documented in a letter English scholar Gabriel Harvey wrote in 1573. When you say this as you part from someone, you are bestowing on them a blessing! You may not intend this, but this is what the words mean: God be with you!
Or what about the word, awful?
In Old English, the word awe meant fear, terror or dread. This changed to connote a sense of solemn, reverential wonder: awe-full and awe-some were synonymous with awe-inspiring. Much later, awful came to be used for something simply extremely bad: That was an awful dinner you made for me last night! The word awesome, however, evolved in the opposite way, probably in the mid-1900s, and came to mean extremely good. That’s awesome, man! But I think this expression is out of date, by now….
There is a danger that the more familiar the words are that we read or hear or speak, the more they lose the power they once had. The less we are able to really hear them.
The Beatitudes are a classic case.
Even the word, beatitude, is hard to hear in a fresh way, I think. In the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible the word that begins each phrase of Luke’s and Matthew’s lists is beati pauperes; beati…beati…beati. The Latin name for this list was anglicized to beatytudes in the Great Bible of 1540.
So here is a stranger-sounding word, the Greek word makarios. It means the same: blessed, happy, fortunate, prosperous, originally with a connotation of heavenly bliss. The word, macarism, has passed over into the English language as meaning a blessing, but I don’t believe I have ever heard anyone actually use this word….
Why are the Beatitudes worth knowing? Even, perhaps, memorising, as Sunday school children used to do?
Luke 6 and Matthew 5 contain what could be said to be the heart of Jesus’s teaching. If you had to choose one chapter in both Gospels to give to a person who didn’t know anything about what the living of the Christian life was all about, choose these. They
are more or less parallel. A scholar calls this collection of material in Matthew The Great Instruction. And so it is.
The differences in Luke’s and Matthew’s beatitudes are interesting, and by looking at those perhaps we can hear them with renewed interest.
Luke has only four Beatitudes; Matthew has nine. Luke’s are followed by four corresponding woes; these are lacking in Matthew.
Here is the list in Luke:
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
These first three are a unit, as you can tell by the lineation in a good study Bible. The fourth is a later addition:
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
By the way, these are not the only beatitudes in Luke: it would be an interesting exercise to re-read Luke’s Gospel with these nine other places in mind! (1:45, 7:23, 10:23, 11:27-28, 12:37, 38, 43, 14:14-15, 23:29).
This block of material is what the disciples, the main group listening, are to hear and receive in order to know what to teach others about the coming Kingdom of God and how to live it out. The Beatitudes are part of the core of a sermon that Jesus gave early in his ministry, probably in his first year, and that each evangelist, Luke and Matthew, re-worked in his own way. Mark 4 may be a recollection from the tradition of a similar early extended sermon of Jesus.
Luke probably preserves more of the original order of the Q source both Matthew and Luke drew upon; Matthew has, in an orderly manner, arranged additional material in his chapter 5, according to topic.
The Lucan beatitudes are addressed to the disciples and to those others whom they will teach as the real poor, hungry, grief-stricken, and outcasts of this world; they are declared blessed because their share in the kingdom will ensure that for them that abundance and joy await them in heaven.
Luke has not spiritualized the condition of the disciples as Matthew has done:
Blessed are the poor in spirit….
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness….
Rather, poverty, hunger, weeping, hatred, and ostracism characterise the real condition of the Christian disciples whom the Lucan Jesus declares ‘blessed.’
(Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S. J. The Anchor Bible Commentary, 1979)
Luke follows the four beatitudes with four ‘woes.’ They are the opposite of the beatitudes: they make very clear the point that for those who live well now, there is also a coming time when God who sees into all hearts will judge the injustice of this world. Its inequality of wealth, its casual indifference to the least of God’s children, its cruelty to those excluded from opportunity and privilege.
These lines of Mary’s song, the Magnificat, in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, include one of Luke’s other beatitudes:
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.’
When Jesus took up this theme in chapter 4
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free….’ words he quoted from Isaiah—-
the ones who were listening to him say these words were enraged at his presumption, and took him to the brow of the hill to throw him off it.
The Beatitudes are actually hard words to hear. We need to hear them again in ever new ways, I think. The Beatitudes are not about living a nice life, being nice to others so that you will have a nice reward in heaven.
They are about living in the real world and making real decisions about children starving in Afghanistan, the elderly and poor who continue to die neglected and alone, the persecution of Christians in Nigeria and Pakistan and other countries
around the world. What are we called as Christians to do about these terrible realities?
The beatitudes have been called a Magna Carta, a spiritual charter, of the Kingdom Jesus came to announce, breaking in at that very moment before the disciples’ very eyes, in Jesus’s very person. It is about the great gift of God’s freedom to choose how we will live. With the arrival of Jesus, God’s intention for his creatures—-that we respond to his gift of grace by righteous living—-this hope, and opportunity, took on for those first disciples a new urgency.
May we also feel a renewed sense of urgency in living out these beatitudes, in our real world, in our own present time.
Makarioi oi ptochoi
Makarioi oi peinontes
Makarioi oi klaiontes
Amen!
The Revd Dana English
The United Benefice of Holland Park
February 13th, 2022