We have an important message from the Cardinal this morning and, since this is his pulpit, I will spend most of my homily time reading that letter. But just two observations first about this passage from St. Luke’s gospel.

We are still in Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, where He is speaking directly to His followers, His disciples, those with whom He entrusts His mission, and allowing a crowd of skeptics, non-believers, and believers to listen in. Luke creates that scenario so that he understands, and wants his readers to understand, that he is speaking to the leaders of the church in the 80s, recognizing that the whole church, and the pagan world around, is listening with a mix of hope and curiosity.

Sometimes we are at a disadvantage when we hear the Sunday morning scriptures because they’re almost always taken out of context. St. Luke meant for last Sunday’s gospel and this Sunday’s gospel and next Sunday’s gospel to be read or heard all at the same time.

Remember what happened last Sunday. We had the beginning of a bunch of sayings of Jesus which were handed down in the earliest years of Christianity, and both Matthew and Luke took a shot at putting them in a context. Matthew’s context is very interesting. He has Jesus speak His beatitudes - …blessed are those… - at the very beginning of Jesus public life, and pronounce His woes against the Pharisees and scribes as part of His very last public speech. Luke, on the other hand, puts them all together. And, whereas Matthew had Jesus go up on a mountain, St. Luke is explicit in saying Jesus came down from the mountain, stood on a level stretch - in other word, eye to eye – with his audience.

You may have noticed that the ‘blesseds’ are just a little bit different from the way you remember them being. What happened to ‘poor in spirit?’ What happened to ‘the meek?’ Where’d they go? And where’d these ‘woes’ come from instead? In order to understand today’s gospel, we have to understand how the gospels were created.

During St. Paul’s lifetime, by the time he and Peter were executed by Nero in Rome, in the mid-60s, almost all Christians, small little communities dotted here and there around the Mediterranean, almost all Christian communities knew about Jesus and basically what He said and did. They knew it by word of mouth. First Jesus’ inner circle, then other people, spread the word from town to town and person to person. So, the gospels were written, beginning with St. Mark, after those events. They were written for a purpose. Each gospel writer wanted to retell and already-known story to add more detail and to make a specific point that he thought was essential to the spiritual life of his community.

Have you ever tried to build a house of cards? You know what happens, right? Bump the table slightly, or a breeze comes along, a bottom card falls, everything collapses. Today, in the second reading, St. Paul builds us a house of cards. He deals us four cards. Two of them are fact cards. Two of them are interpretation cards.

The first fact card is this – He was seen. That’s why I had us read the long version of the second reading this morning, so that you would hear all of the names and situations where the risen Jesus was seen by somebody or a bunch of somebodies. And St. Paul says that his experience on the road to Damascus was equivalent to all those other experiences of seeing the risen Jesus.