God at Work where We Least Expect
Homily delivered for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP,
Ph.D.
16 February 2025
8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)
Jeremiah 17:5-10; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26; Psalm 1
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
What would the Beatitudes look like if they were written to reflect the values we see in the popular culture around us?
"Blessed are the wealthy; whoever dies with the most toys wins.
Blessed are the young; dying young beats rusting and growing old.
Blessed are the fashionable, for they can look down on others.
Blessed are celebrities; they are the beautiful people.
Blessed are the hip; they can be ironic without losers getting the joke.
Blessed are the thin; they are never the butt of fat jokes,
Blessed are the powerful, for they can totally have their own their way.
Blessed are the well armed, for they can stand their ground.
Blessed are the violent, because no one messes with them."
Jesus’ beatitudes suffer from our familiarity with them. We hear their first words and quickly lapse into a warm feeling of devotion and stop listening. Like the people at the back of the crowd in the Monty Python film, we hear only bits and pieces, and at the end smile and say, “oh, that’s nice … blessed are the cheesemakers. Good chaps, they.”
We think the beatitudes are moral targets, the way Jesus wants us to be: be-attitudes. Not so! Beatus in Latin means “blessed.” A beatitude is just a phrase that starts with the word “blessed.” Another word is macarism, because in Greek they begin with the word makarios, blissful or happy.
Jesus’ society, like ours, praised certain things, and called certain people happy or blessed. But Jesus turns these on their head. “It’s a good thing to be hungry, it’s a good thing to be poor, it’s a good thing to mourn, a good thing to be excluded.” Really?
The beatitudes are in both the gospels of Matthew and Luke. We are more familiar with them as they appear in Matthew, given the fact that it is the first of the gospels in our modern Bibles. The ones in Luke’s Gospel that we read today are less familiar. As a result, they jump to us out more clearly:
“Blissful
are you who are destitute,
for the reign of God belongs to you.
Blissful are you who are now starving,
for you will be fully fed.
Blissful are you who are now sobbing,
for you will once again roar in laughter.
Blissful are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and cast out as evil on account of all that I am,
because you stood with this Human Child…
But
wretched are you who are rich,
for you are already receiving your consolation.
But wretched are you who are fully sated now,
for you will go starving.
Wretched are you who now laugh,
for you will grieve and sob.
Wretched are you when everyone speaks well of you,
for it was just in this way that their ancestors
treated false prophets.”
(Luke 6:20-26, The Ashland Bible)
Obviously, whatever it was that the historical Jesus said, it troubled his followers. Both Matthew and Luke interpret these sayings in very different ways.
Matthew “spiritualizes” them, turning “hungry” into “hungry for righteousness,” and “poor” to “poor in spirit.” Jesus just can’t be talking about the literally poor or hungry can he? The sayings become a series of moral prescriptions, part of a New Law announced by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount: a New Moses coming down from Sinai.
In contrast, Luke adds a “now” to each misfortune marked as “blessed,” and adds a “then” phrase of how God will turn it around in the future. These are not moral nostrums, but affirmations of how God will straighten things out. Luke also adds woes to counterbalance the macarisms. He puts all in the second person, “blessed are (or woe to) you,” aiming them at us, part of Luke’s story of faith and grace in everyday life. Appropriately, in Luke they are not part of a Sermon on the Mount (of God) as in Matthew, but of a Sermon on the Plain (of ordinary life).
This is more than a simple “Happy are they who,” or “How blessed are they who…” The idea is more like “How favored by God (or honored) are the ones who.” “Woe to those who” is more like “Shame on those who,” or “How outside God’s grace are those who…”
Jesus turns conventional views on their head. Some things, let’s admit it, are just bad: starvation, hardship, sorrow at a loved one’s death, social exclusion. Some things are just good: having enough food and money to provide for yourself and family, being well. But Jesus is not so sure.
It’s easy to think that God blesses good people with good things and punishes bad people with bad things. But Jesus knows that bad things can happen to the good and that the evil can prosper. He says, “You misunderstand what a blessing or a curse is. Things are not as they appear.”
Announcing the coming of God’s reign, Jesus sees God at work exactly where we expect not to find him: hunger, yearning, dependence, and vulnerability are all signs of God’s active presence and saving work, not marks of God’s curse or punishment.
It is important, profound theology. He is not making light of suffering, or saying, “it’s not all that bad.” He knows that hunger, grinding poverty, misery, deprivation, grief, and deadly exclusion inflicted on marginalized people are all truly intolerable and not what God wants. He is not trivializing suffering, but magnifying grace. God is the answer to, not the source, of horror.
Isaiah 45:15 says “Truly you are a God who hides himself, the God and Savior of Israel.” St. Thomas Aquinas draws from this to develop his doctrine of Deus Absconditus, the Hidden God. God by definition is hidden, but if you have faith in God, it is God whom you must wholly trust. Martin Luther later places this in the context of a larger doctrine of Grace. The basic idea is “God’s nature is to be at loving work where we least expect.”
Horror, Evil, in the world is not evidence that God does not exist. Rather, the fact that we revolt against it and find it intolerable is one of the strongest evidences of God. Our idea of justice and right cannot grow merely from this messed up world we live in. Rather, it comes from God himself, imprinted in the creation of God bearing God’s image, written in our hearts. Immanuel Kant expresses this when he says that he finds evidence for God not just in how the stars are moved above, but also in how our hearts and minds are moved.
Buddhism teaches that all suffering comes from attachment; getting rid of all desire will end suffering. Christianity teaches that while we must learn acceptance and patience, it is all right to feel the discomfort and pain caused by need and dissatisfaction with wrong. In fact, it is essential because God is at work in such need and discomfort.
Each of the macarisms includes dissatisfaction: hunger, grief, need. Mourning is unhappiness at the loss of a loved one, not a state of relief or acceptance. Neediness and hunger do not describe satisfaction, but desire for something beyond what we now have.
Reinhold Niebuhr's great "Serenity Prayer" is misnamed. It is not a prayer only for serenity to accept the things we cannot change. It also prays for courage to change the things we can. It also asks for wisdom to know to distinguish between the two.
God at work in the day-to-day things of life, even its horrors, is a key idea
in Jesus’ preaching, his announcement that “God’s Reign is in your midst.”
If we put the idea into modern words and references, we see the point. It should shock us into recognition of God at work in all sorts of situations where we normally only see horror:
God favors those with AIDS; he is at their bedside and in their prayers.
God favors outcasts, because he was an outcast.
God favors the homeless, because he himself is shelter.
God favors the abused, because he himself was abused.
God favors undocumented aliens, because he was one of them.
God favors trans people, because few recognized him for his true self.
God favors “losers” because he turns tables on everyone.
God favors the addicted, because he relieves them of cravings and obsessions.
God favors the solitary, because he brings them into community and family.
God favors “nobodies,” because he knows them each by name.
God favors women, because she knows what they go through.
Shame on you who have big houses, because you mistake them for your true home.
Shame on you celebrities, because you are already being forgotten.
Shame on you powerful, because you must struggle to maintain power, and your fall will be great.
Shame on you Empires, because you are going bankrupt fighting your wars.
Shame on you righteous, because everyone knows your secret sins.
Shame on you fashion plates, because you will have to go naked.
Shame on you brilliant minds, because senility awaits us all.
Shame on you beautiful people, because you will grow ugly and die like everyone else.
So what applies here to us? First, God expects us to be dissatisfied with things that are just plain wrong. We should be part of the social and moral conscience of our peer group, our colleagues, and our age. Next, God expects us to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. God’s grace must work through us. Third, in our prayer life and meditation, we must more fully empathize with those suffering, and redouble our efforts at the corporeal acts of mercy and organizing for social justice to alleviate hunger, poverty, persecution, and disease.
“You think I’ve gotten things upside down?” Jesus says. “Look around you and tell me who is getting things backward.” Notice the work of God exactly where we least expect, blissfulness in the settings we are taught are least to be desired. Then help bring blissfulness for those we are least inclined to help.
In the name of Christ. Amen
