Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 16, 2025 - Jeremiah 17:5-8; 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20; Luke 6:17, 20-26

So, aside from Jesus sounding a little bit mean, what else is wrong with this gospel? It sounds a little bit like something we’re more familiar with, like “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land.” You’re right. What I just recited comes from Matthew’s gospel, where there are eight “blessed”s and no curses. Here, there are four “blessed”s and four curses. Also, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus went up on a mountain and sat down. And his disciples gathered around him, while everybody else stayed away. Here, he comes down from the mountain and he is riding high for everybody in the crowd.

I’m sure all of you have had this experience at some point in your life. You’re at one of those family restaurants, and you and your companion or companions are quietly having dinner when, all of a sudden, the wait staff comes bursting out of the kitchen with something with candles on it and goes to another table and sings Happy Birthday. And almost everybody else in the restaurant eventually joins in singing Happy Birthday, and so do you and your companion at your table. It’s a nice experience. And nobody in the restaurant has a mean-spirited attitude toward what’s going on. And nobody is singing Happy Birthday ironically, but everybody’s singing Happy Birthday out of a different point of view. The people at the table, presumably, deeply love the other people at that table. They’re singing Happy Birthday to someone who is very dear to them. The wait staff, on the other hand, is being paid to do this. That’s their job. And they do it sincerely and with lots of fun, but that’s their job. You, on the other hand, join in out of sort of a fellow feeling. There’s a moment of community among the people in the restaurant, even though no one knows anybody else. And so, there are different motivations and different experiences of the same singing of Happy Birthday. And that’s what will help us to understand what goes on in our gospels.  

Most scholars think that what Jesus may have said on that occasion, whenever it was and whatever the setting might have been originally, he may have said, “Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the hungry.” Because he was speaking to people, many of whom were on the margins of society. They were poor. They were meek, because they were broken people, a people who were controlled by another country, far away. Many of them were hungry. Many of them were outcasts in their own country. Perhaps because of leprosy or because of a bleeding illness that made them unclean. But, as the story progresses from one generation to the next, before being written down, the Christian community begins to see, in the words of Jesus, other things that also apply.

And so, one of these gospels becomes a moral teaching. Luke’s gospel, the one we read this morning, is a diatribe against social injustice based on his own understanding of morality and challenging both civil authority and the Torah. Matthew’s gospel comes out of an original Jewish experience of Matthew and his community and is changed utterly by their experience of the Risen Lord. And he begins to see, in each of these things, the promise of eternity for those who live a moral life.

The Word of God is living and active. It’s not a dead thing. As it moves through the generations and the centuries, it grows in its meaning. No meaning is contradictory to the other   meaning, but the meanings evolve in such a way that what started out in one place, winds up in another.

And so, how should twenty-first century Catholics hear either Luke’s gospel today or Matthew’s gospel, when we read that one? It’s about who we are in the eyes of the Lord. People who are and should be, a certain way. People who do and should treat other people in a certain way. In order to be blessed by the Lord.