God at Work Where We Least Expect
Homily Delivered at St Luke's Episcopal Church, Grants Pass (Oregon)
The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
1 February 2026
Fourth Sunday After Epiphany Year A
Micah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12; Psalm 15
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so people persecuted the prophets who were before you.”Matthew 5.3-12
The beatitudes, or macarisms, at the start of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew are so well known that often we unfortunately miss what they actually are saying. When we hear them, we tend to quickly lapse into a happy, warm feeling of devotion and stop listening. Familiarity with these sayings breeds not so much contempt as it does inattention. We usually find the beatitudes vaguely comforting or reassuring without much thought of the content being conveyed. We are like the people at the back of the crowd in the Monty Python film, Life of Brian. They struggle to hear the Sermon, but at the end leave, saying, “oh, that’s nice … blessed are the cheesemakers. Good chaps, they.”
But these sayings are a core statement of Jesus’ message to his people, a people with clear opinions on what was blessed and what was cursed, like us. They turn these values and platitudes 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, to be excluded,” he says. Really?
A little less familiar version of the beatitudes is found in Luke’s telling of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, as a result, some of these jump out at us in their forceful clarity:
"Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.
Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Human Child! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their ancestors did to the prophets.
But alas for you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Alas for you that are full now, for you shall hunger.
Alas for you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.
Alas for you, when all people speak well of you, for so their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
Luke 6:20-26
It is clear that whatever it was that the historical Jesus said here, it troubled his followers, as it should trouble us. Each author, Matthew and Luke, has adapted the series of “blessed are” statements in their shared sayings source for his own purpose.
Matthew has “spiritualized” the sayings, turning “hungry” into “hungry for righteousness,” and “poor” to “poor in spirit.” Jesus just can’t be talking about the literal poor or the literally hungry can he? So Matthew turns these paradoxical declarations of true blessedness (beatitudes, from Latin beatus, blessed) into a series of moral nostrums, of “BE-attitudes,” ways of being that we should strive for.
In contrast, Luke adds a “now” to the misfortune being marked as “blessed,” and a “then” to the good thing God will do in the future to fix the problem, turning the sayings not into moral nostrums, but affirmations of the coming completion of the Reign of God whose inauguration Jesus has come to announce. Luke also adds the woes that counterbalance the “blessed are” statements, placing them all in the second person, “blessed are (or alas for) you,” thus working the eschatological contrasts of his version of the sayings into his overall Gospel story of everyday faith of everyday Christians. These woes may or may not have been listed together before Luke wrote. Since several separate “woes” are found on the lips of Jesus in multiple early Christian sources, I think that Luke is probably reflecting something close to what the historical Jesus actually said.
The non-canonical Gospel of Thomas preserves some of these sayings—both macarisms and woes—separately as well, and also adapts them for its own purpose, the promotion of gnosticism.
The idea expressed in the literary form used in these sayings 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.” “Alas for those who” in Luke is more like “Shame on those who,” or “How outside God’s grace are those who…”
Jesus is turning conventional values of what is desirable on their heads. Some things just on the surface of them are bad: starvation, hardship, sorrow at a loved one’s death, social exclusion. Some things just on the surface are good: having enough food and money to provide for your family and (to quote some of the rabbis) to have the leisure to study scripture. But Jesus is not so sure.
Some of Jesus’ contemporaries taught an ancient version of modern day “Gospel of Wealth.” They said, “God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked. Since rich people are obviously blessed, they must be close to God; the poor must really be rejected by God.” But Jesus knows that bad things can happen to good people and that sometimes evil people prosper.
He says, “You’ve misunderstood what a blessing from God is. It is the poor who are blessed by God, not the rich.” If those around him say, “Religious and respected people are close to God,” he says, “No, actually, it’s the people who have been excluded because people think that they are unclean or evil who actually are closer to God.”
Announcing the coming of God’s reign, Jesus sees God busy at work exactly where we usually expect least to find God: 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 an important idea, and profound theology. He is not trying to belittle suffering, or say, “it’s not all that bad.” He is not like the hero of The Life of Brian, who when on the cross, bursts out into the cheery song, “Always look at the bright side of life.” He knows that hunger, grinding poverty, misery, deprivation, grief, and the deadly exclusion inflicted on marginalized people by the so-called righteous are all truly horrible and not a bit of what God wants for his creatures.
When he says that God is at work in these horrors, that God’s favor can be found there, Jesus is not seeking to minimize or trivialize people’s sufferings. He is seeking to magnify God’s kindness. God is the answer to, not the source, of horror.
St. Thomas Aquinas developed this idea into the doctrine of the Deus Absconditus, a term taken from the Latin version of Isaiah 45:15, “Truly you are a God who has been hiding himself, the God and Savior of Israel.” God may be hidden, but if you have faith in God, it is God that you must wholly trust. Martin Luther developed the idea further by placing it in the broader context of his doctrine of Grace. The implication of both Aquinas and Luther’s doctrine of the Deus Absconditus is this: horror and evil in the world are not evidence that God does not exist. Rather, the fact that we revolt against and find horrible the evil in the world is great evidence for God, since the very desire for justice and the right cannot come merely from this messed up world we live in. Rather, it comes from God himself, imprinted in the creation God made, in the creation of human beings, where it is written on our hearts. Immanuel Kant expressed the idea differently when he said that he found evidence for God not just in the order he saw in the workings of the stars, but also in the workings of the human heart and mind.
Where Buddhism tells us that the source of suffering is desire and the solution is getting rid of all desire, and becoming detached and truly apathetic to world around us, Christianity teaches us that while we must learn acceptance and patience, it is alright to be dissatisfied with wrong. In fact, it is essential because God made us thus.
Each of the macarisms includes some point of dissatisfaction: hunger, grief, need. Jesus thinks it’s O.K. to be not O.K. Mourning means unhappiness at the loss of a loved one. It does not describe a state of acceptance or serenity. "Blessed are those who mourn." Neediness and hunger do not describe satisfaction, but desire for something different that what we now have.
Reinhold Niebuhr's great "Serenity Prayer" 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.
The idea of God at work in the day-to-day things of life, even its horrors, is
a key part of Jesus’ message announcing the arrival of God’s Reign.
Putting the idea into modern words and references, we see the point Jesus is trying to make. And the point should shock us into recognition of God at work in all sorts of situations where we normally only see horror:
God favors outcasts and deportees, because he will include them.
God favors the abused, because he will defend them.
God favors the powerless, because he will empower them.
God favors the homeless, because he will give them shelter.
God favors those with AIDS; he is at their bedside and in their prayers.
God favors the addicted, because he relieves their cravings and obsessions.
God favors the solitary, because he brings them into family and community.
God favors “nobodies,” because he knows them each by name.
God favors those killed by agents of Empire, they are free at last.
God favors the sick, because he heals them.
God favors sinners, because he forgives them.
God favors women, because she knows what they go through.
Shame on you who have big houses, because you will lose your estates.
Shame on you celebrities, because you will be forgotten.
Shame on you powerful, because your fall will be great.
Shame on you Empires, because you will go bankrupt fighting your wars.
Shame on you agents and supporters of Empire, no one will ever believe you again.
Shame on you so-called righteous, because everyone will know your secret sins.
Shame on you beautiful people, because you will grow ugly and die like everyone else.
Shame on you fashion plates, because you will have to be naked.
Shame on you, oh so brilliant minds, because you will go senile.
So what applies here to us? First, remember that 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, remember that God expects us to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. His grace must work through us. Third, we must empathize with those who suffer, and redouble our efforts to do corporeal acts of mercy and organize 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.” “You seek to be great, and to make your nation great again. How’s that working out for you?” If we love God and trust God, we too must actively engage with evil, in order that grace more fully abound.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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