Jer 17:5-8; Ps 1; 1Cor 15:12,16-20; Lk 6:17,20-26

COMMENTARY

The People blessed and loved by the Lord

Continuing our missionary journey with the Word of God on the Sundays of Ordinary Time Year C, in today’s Gospel we listen again to Jesus’ Beatitudes in St. Luke’s version. On the one hand, the Lukan beatitudes reflect those found at the beginning of the best known and most meditated Discourse on the Mountain in St. Matthew’s Gospel; on the other hand, they contain their own characteristics, concerning the proclamation context and the formulation. These are aspects that enrich and complete Jesus’ teaching in this regard. Therefore, they require a closer focus and a deeper meditation also today, in the current situation of our world, in order to learn from and live with a fresh impulse the Gospel of Christ, in all its wisdom and beauty, though ancient but always new.

1. A beautiful icon of universal missionary preaching

Jesus’ proclamation of the Beatitudes in St. Luke took place in a very solemn context with the Twelve around him, as in St. Matthew. The latter, however, “puts” Jesus on the mountain, the usual place of encounter with the divinity, as well as a clear reference to Sinai, where God gave the Law to His people through Moses. St. Luke, instead, “sees” Jesus who “came down with the Twelve and stood on a stretch of level ground.” (Therefore, Jesus’ discourse in Luke is called by exegetes as the “Discourse on the Plain”, while that in Matthew is known as “Sermon on the Mount”).

In such a place and occasion, St. Luke transmits a beautiful image of the listeners, divided to form almost three concentric circles with Jesus in the center. The first circle: the Twelve; the second one: “a great crowd of his disciples”; the third one: “a large number of the people” from all over the Jewish world (represented by Judea and Jerusalem) and non-Jewish world (represented by Tyre and Sidon). Thus we have a beautiful icon of Christian preaching with the “chain” of transmission from Jesus to the Twelve, and then to the disciples, and then finally to the multitude. (Jesus – the Twelve – the disciples – the people). It is not a question of the cumbersome intermediates between Jesus and the people, because He spoke and speaks always directly to the heart of everyone who listens to him. All the contrary, the groups of the Twelve and disciples are formed to carry the message of Jesus further and further away, and what was physically true at that time on that “stretch of level ground,” holds true symbolically at all times throughout the world. Thus, through His disciples, the voice of Jesus spreads throughout the earth. And so, he still needs messengers today to bring his Gospel to the people of every place with the power of the Spirit, to forward that proclamation of God’s love especially to those who, exhausted and desperate by the oppression and weight of life, are waiting for it.

2. The People of the poor, hungry, disheartened, persecuted

The Beatitudes open the concrete announcement of the good news that Jesus fulfills as consecrated and sent by God to “evangelize the poor” after his solemn declaration in the synagogue of Nazareth. Unlike St. Matthew, St. Luke the Evangelist reports the four beatitudes, which seem to express universality as the four cardinal points of the earth. In addition, while St. Matthew uses the third person plural form in the beatitudes (“Blessed are the poor in spirit”, “Blessed are they who hunger”), the message of Jesus in St. Luke is in the second person plural, addressed directly to the disciples: “Blessed are you who are poor,” “Blessed are you who are now hungry”…

Accordingly, this Lukan form wants not only to transmit the universal character of Christ’s discipleship (as in St. Matthew), but above all to accentuate even more the divine predilection for these categories of disciples: poor, hungry, sufferers, persecuted. If in the OT it says: “Blessed the people whose God is the LORD” (Ps 144:15), now this blessed people of God will be men and women from every nation and every language, people who are deprived of what is necessary for life, of daily bread, of every human right. They are blessed, not because of their deplorable condition from which it is necessary to escape, but because God in Christ comes concretely close to them to change their lot now and today, and that through his disciples sent to the world.

3. An incarnated message

I conclude my comment with a precious reflection/resonance on Jesus’ Beatitudes that a long-time missionary has sent from Myanmar, a wonderful land but lately ravaged by violence. These are the thoughts that flow from the heart:

The people of Myanmar, in their silence, know how to live in pain. I look at these people with a sense of admiration and respect that I have never felt before in my life. It is a people who arouses affection and love. I think of this people as the people of the Beatitudes.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, and blessed are the people of Myanmar who in their impotence in the face of evil, they know that their heart is an inviolable, impenetrable force.

Blessed are they who mourn, and blessed are the people of Myanmar who in their families, split and divided by violence, cry to “irrigate their future,” to give joy to the sons and daughters of a land that cries as a gesture of intimacy with its own history. (…)

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and blessed are the people of Myanmar who knows well that justice is not a right inherited from history, but a difficult and painful path, a life choice for which one must also be willing to die.

Blessed are the merciful, and blessed are the people of Myanmar who does not ask for revenge, does not desire it and does not esteem it, but only asks to be able to live in peace and to be left in peace.

Blessed are the pure of heart, and blessed are the people of Myanmar, with whom it is beautiful to live, and from whom I learn what forgiveness is, from whom I learn what is the joy of simple things, from whom I learn what patience is, what is love that covers everything, and thanks to whom I am discovering what happiness is!

Blessed are the peacemakers, and blessed are the people of Myanmar, because from their own blood they learned to make peace, to desire it for everyone, and blessed are the people of Myanmar because every day they do not pray only for peace for themselves, but pray for the peace of the peoples, for the peace of humanity, because peace is beautiful.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, and blessed are the people of Myanmar, because in this persecution they learn unity, live generosity, teach perfect joy.

Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you, and blessed are the people of Myanmar who know how to hope for good, who know how to speak the vocabulary of the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are the people of Myanmar who know how to talk about love, and when they talk about it they tell the truth. They talk about reconciliation, and when they do it they tell the truth. They know how to talk about fidelity, and when they talk about it they tell the truth.

The people of Myanmar are shy, ashamed when they are the center of attention, embarrassed by praise. The people of Myanmar are strong and delicate: they have a strong delicacy. They know how to love with fidelity and allow themselves to be loved with docility, but they require to be looked at and loved with the same delicacy with which they love, because they have too many wounds.

Late last night, from the room where I am writing now, I could hear the voices of families praying the rosary: a voice that broke the darkness, a prayer that penetrated the darkness, illuminating it. This is how I imagine the silence of the people of Myanmar: they speak in the dark, they speak with the darkness, because they know how to live it, that is, they know how to illuminate it.

I am writing these lines with a request: that such a beautiful people do not fall into our silence. Please: talk about them! Talk about this people with anyone: at work, in family, with friends, at school, at the bar, with your teammates, with your boyfriend or girlfriend, during your homilies, with your family doctor. With anyone.

If you can, talk about them! With delicacy, because this people have an important lesson to give to the history of humanity: this people, like few others, embody the discipleship of the Kingdom of Heaven in history, who made seed, falls and dies in the earth, but gives life.

Let us then pray:
O God who opposes the proud,
But give grace to the humble,
Listen to the cry of the poor and oppressed
Raised from every part of the earth:
Break the yoke of violence and selfishness
That makes us strangers to each other,
And do that by welcoming each other as brothers and sisters
We become a sign of humanity renewed in your love.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.