Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 29, 2023 – Zephaniah 2:3, 3;12-13; 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; Matthew 5:1-12A

I’m sure some of you may remember when there was no Route 17. This road right out here was Route 17. The first time they brought my Irish grandmother up to Wurtsboro and made the big turn around the bend up there on Shawangunk Ridge and she could see the whole valley for just a moment, she said, “Oh, it looks just like Ireland.” The first time my father and mother brought my Italian grandmother up here, as they rounded the bend on the Shawangunk Ridge, my Italian grandmother said “Oh, it looks just like Italy.” When Samuel Morse was ready to test out his brand-new invention, the telegraph, the words he typed, hoping they would go out over the airwaves as Morse Code, were “What hath God wrought.” What hath God wrought. Alexander Graham Bell was a little more prosaic. When he picked up the telephone for the first time to call his assistant in the next room, he said, “Come here, Watson, I need you.” But when Neil Armstrong stepped off the last rung of the ladder onto the surface of the moon, he said, “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.” 

At critical moments, when people are struck by the immensity of what they see and hear, they tend to express themselves that things are awesome. Now, we call it an “aha” moment. We are so used to hearing the story of the Beatitudes and the story of The Sermon on the Mount that it no longer impresses us, but it was, at one time, an “aha” moment. That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to what was missing from the story. What’s wrong with the story as I read it this morning?

The problem is that, when we read Scriptures on Sunday, we read them out of context, and you have to know the context that came just before the very first words I proclaimed. And this is how it went. “And great crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan followed Him. When He saw the crowds, He went up the mountain.” When He saw the crowds. That’s the part that’s missing from our quotation. It’s, “when he saw the crowds” and the sentence before it that tells us who was in the crowds.

The first thing that’s a problem is that St. Matthew says, “He sat down and his disciples gathered around Him and He began to teach them. Who’s the them? Is it the disciples, or is it the whole crowd? 

So far, in Matthew’s Gospel, there are only four disciples. Only Peter and Andrew, James and John. They’re the only ones who’ve been called, so far. So, did Jesus go all the way up on a mountain to talk to four people? That’s ridiculous. But, if you stand in your backyard and shout at the top of your lungs, it’s possible that your next-door neighbor might hear you, but nobody further away can. How could great crowds from everywhere, going up the mountain, hear Jesus preaching? And who is in the crowds?  We don’t care that the crowds were from the Decapolis, whatever that is, and Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem.  It means nothing to us. But St. Matthew is telling us something essential about who’s listening, who’s listening.

The Decapolis were ten cities in present-day Syria.  Up in the north, beyond present-day Israel, right at the border of the two countries, there are bunch of little towns, they called them cities back then, that were all Pagan cities, where there were temples to Pagan gods and people believed in many gods or no god, but certainly not the God of Israel. And right next door to them was the Galilee, part of the three States of Israel in the first century A.D., but the place where heretical Jews lived. They were heretical because, for so long they had been interacting with the Gentiles right around the Sea of Galilee that their faith had become corrupted and sometimes their family structure had allowed for the horrible thing of intermarriage.  So, for the rest of Jews, they and their partners, the Samaritans, were unfaithful Jews. But in the same crowd, according to St. Matthew, there are people from Judea and Jerusalem. That’s where the so-called faithful, righteous Jews lived, especially the ones in Jerusalem.

If Jesus is speaking to His disciples and to the crowds, He is teaching the ones who will be the teachers. And yet, the ones who will be the teachers, Peter and Andrew, James and John, are from the Galilee, and they are the same kind of loosey-goosey Jews as everybody else in that area. And so, Jesus has chosen as teachers those who still need to learn what proper Judaism is all about. And yet, and yet, those pious Jews in the crowd will tell you how hard it is to keep the Torah.  It’s a real struggle. And, the more you know, the harder it is. But. the better schooled you are, the more you know. And so, in some ways, they’re just like the unfaithful Jews who don’t understand the Torah, and can’t remember the laws, and couldn’t keep them if they could remember them.  Jesus is talking, according to St. Matthew, to a whole bunch of people who are struggling to do right. 

He does not give them, at the beginning of his speech, eight different propositions.  If you listen carefully to who is blessed and why they are blessed, in all eight of the propositions it’s really the same people. Poor in spirit is the same as meek.  Clean of heart is the same as merciful.  Hungering for righteousness is the same as being persecuted for what is right.  It’s the same people.  And it’s basically the same promise that Jesus holds out to them.  What He’s doing is saying, “Look, I know all about those 500-and-some-odd regulations.  What do they boil down to?  They boil down to what present-day, modern Jews would call being a mensch.  Living a decent human life.  Being humane and just and fair and kind in all of your actions. And, for all those people who are listening, whom St. Matthew artificially places there, the four learners will have to become teachers. And all that big crowd, filled with the faithful and the unfaithful, for all of them, what Jesus says is an “aha” moment. “Oh, that’s how we keep the Torah. We just try our best to be the kind of human beings God made us to be.”

Good storytellers try to get you so deeply involved in the story that you identify with one or other of the characters. Who, in this story, do you identify with?

But great storytellers make this story so that you can identify with more than one character. Who, in the story, do you identify with?