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
Reflection
The story moves quickly up to this point. Chapters three and four fly with the introduction of John the Baptist, the baptism of Jesus, the temptation in the wilderness, and the calling of the disciples. And in the last verses of chapter four, it highlights the expanding fame and interest in Jesus, particularly as a healer. This is important to note as the crowds that have formed to follow the one who heals people and exorcizes demons walks up a mountain and starts to preach a three chapter sermon that begins with a transformative vision we call the Beatitudes.
Jesus offers a collection of blessings that, taken individually, seem far from the grace of God. And there is beauty here, isn’t there? Because it uses our expectations against us. Blessed is a word we attribute to God’s grace, coming as a reward for good behavior in the here and now. We say we are blessed with love or shelter from the cold or a job during tough times. Jesus turns this on its ear by suggesting that we are blessed in situations we don’t associate with benefit — poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness — and that benefit comes later.
Imagine these hearers, bringing their loved one to be healed, to follow Jesus as the Messiah, thinking he would deliver them from evil (which implies, I suspect, into greatness) only to have him say: blessed are you when you suffer. If they are stuck on greatness, this is a hard message, but if they aren’t, if all they know is challenge, if all they see is struggle, then all of this hits different.
When we take them as a whole, too, we can see a message that is way more than comfort and way more than encouragement and is about sharing a fundamental theology of God’s love for those who feel the pain of their neighbors, who long for more for them, for the people of their community, who see the suffering and pray and beg and fight for change and are willing to put their body on the line for it. For the love of all that is good. For love. For God.