For Sunday
Epiphany 4A
Collect
Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
From Matthew 5:1-12
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Reflection
Jesus kicks off his most famous teaching by saying that people are blessed when they feel bad. A most counterintuitive idea. When I feel bad, I don’t feel blessed.
Similarly, when I am feeling bad, I don’t then feel a blessing hit me.
We can then take this out even further. When we scope out our world and see the people who really are poor in spirit, the very thing we don’t see is blessing.
Which leaves us, then, with this as some eventual promise. That it comes in death or at the end of the age. This does provide us some comfort. But most of us really would prefer to have a bit more of that blessing now.
We are wise to remember, however, just how much the people following Jesus are likely to only see blessing in the form of relative success in the community. That, if one has children, for instance, they were blessed. And the ones without, therefore, are obviously cursed. Same goes for money, power, influence, and any other means of evaluating each other in society.
To speak of one without these things as blessed is to circumvent that evaluating. It renders blessing outside the realm of one’s place in society.
These blessings also highlight a couple of other things.
They come as antidotes to what ails, regardless of standing. These blessings meet the real needs of people.
And they also come to transform society.
We tend to see blessing as personal and individual. But these blessings are all essentially relational.
They come to those who witness pain, mourn, demure, strive, show mercy, show dignity, and work for peace. When we are doing this work with one another, we are blessed to be children of God and inheritors of the Kin-dom.
In this way, blessing itself becomes redeemed. Because even the concept of God’s blessing had become a vehicle to benefit the powerful, connected, and wealthy. Not the means by which those things came to them, but the excuse for why they are deserved and not shared.
What easily resonates with us is how Jesus can see the need for blessing in the world. And he offers a way for us to see that blessing is actually for us. It is ours. And it is the blessing of our whole community. In love and grace and truth.