Wednesday in the 23rd Week of Ordinary Time, September 11, 2024

Luke 6, 20-26

Raising his eyes toward his disciples Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.  But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. But woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.”

This discourse of the Lord Jesus is sometimes called “the Sermon on the Plain” because the Lord delivers it from a flat area on a mountain (cf. Luke 6, 17) and to both compare it to and distinguish it from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. 

“Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours.”  We should understand “now poor” from the verses that follow.  That is, Blessed are you have left everything and are now poor in order to follow me.  The Lord is speaking here to and about his Apostles and anyone who through the ages has given up everything for his sake.  This also distinguishes these verses from the Beatitudes, which are offered as a general teaching on sanctity.  

“Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.”  The Apostles, who were at times reduced to plucking and eating the heads of grain, but also St. Maximilian Kolbe, who was starved to death at Auschwitz.  And also all those who fast in their penance. “Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.”  Weeping due to the mockery and physical suffering incurred for the sake of Christ.  “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.”  Initially, those who would do this were the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin, but later the Gentile unbelievers.  “Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.”  These words must have puzzled the Apostles, for they were uttered before there was much resistance to Jesus, and the idea that anyone would oppose and persecute the long-awaited Son of Man and even his followers could not have made much sense.  Like so much that the Lord taught and preached, they would understand this only in hindsight.  “For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.”  As the descendent, so the ancestor, in the Jewish understanding of the time.

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”  That is, as the rich young man who turned away from following Jesus, “for he had great possessions” (Mark 10, 22).  Those who are “rich” in this sense need not own vast tracts of land or piles of money: but they are those who do not give their wills to the Lord to do his bidding irrespective of what it means for us in this life. “But woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry.”  We are “filled” in this life when we devote ourselves to obtaining that which fills us, and not to Jesus: “He who is not with me is against me and he who does not gather with me, scatters” (Matthew 12, 30).  “Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep.”  That is, those who mock those whose humble words and deeds are done for the sake of Jesus.  “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.”  The Lord is teaching here that the believer should not act in such a way as to deliberately gain favorable notice: “Take heed that you do not perform your justice before men, to be seen by them: otherwise you shall not have a reward of your Father who is in heaven. Therefore when you do an alms-deed, sound not a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets” (Matthew 6, 1-2).  Rather, we should do our work quietly so as to gain nothing for ourselves: our sole intention is to please God. As the Lord Jesus puts it, “But when you give alms, let not your left hand know what your right hand does so that your alms may be in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you” (Matthew 6, 3-4).

The world abounds in false prophets.  But let us be true prophets who imitate the Lord Jesus, who himself came not to do his own will, but the will of the One who sent him.