OUR SUNDAY’S IN FEBRUARY 2010

Wednesday – Ash Wednesday – here we are again – beginning our annual Lenten Retreat. It requires focus if it is to bring us closer to Christ. Think about how many Lenten seasons have gone by without focus. Hopefully, this year, come Easter, we might realize a change in our lives – hopefully, a deeper relationship with God. We refer to Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the Beatitudes as “The Sermon on the Mount”. This is an accurate title for Matthew, but not for Luke. Luke presents Jesus “coming down” and standing “on a stretch of level ground”. We recall Jesus delivering this sermon to the multitude. In Luke, however, Jesus speaks only to the disciples. Matthew’s version is addressed to the rich and poor alike. Luke’s is addressed only to those who would be termed “rich”, not to the poor. These differences are important. They give Luke’s version a different meaning than Matthew’s. In Luke’s version the first Beatitude is about what the “poor” already have: the poor have already received the kingdom of God. They have it now. It is not something they will get later – Luke truly means the economically poor, not the “poor in spirit” of Matthew.

Luke is teaching about a way of living. Ultimately he is speaking of a culture. With Jesus’ teaching there is a new “culture of God” emerging in the world, a culture that stands opposed to the culture of society in which the disciples were living and in which we live.

Luke’s community of Christians had a lot of rich people. They were well fed. For the most part they did not worry where they would lay their head at night or where their next meal might come from. Luke is passing judgment and at the same time throwing down the same gauntlet that Christ threw down. For the disciples, being “rich” was viewed as being an outward sign that a person was blessed or favored by God. Being poor was a sign of being outside God’s family. Luke, in speaking for Christ, reverses this notion. We need to starting living within God’s culture.

Maybe this will help us toward the culture of God. In our culture, the poor serve the rich. In God’s kingdom, the rich work for the poor. To be rich is to be blessed, but it is to be blessed for a purpose, a vocation. To be rich is to be put into a position by God to help and serve the poor.

Therefore our reward will not be recognition, it is knowing that we have pleased God. This Lent, our focus can be “How do I enter the culture of God?”

The Most Rev. John P. Walzer, D.D. Archbishop