Some words are spoken about people, and some are spoken to them. Today Jesus does the second thing: he raises his eyes, finds the faces of his own disciples, and speaks in the second person, singular in its aim if plural in its grammar. What follows is not a description of the poor. It is an address to them.
And lifting up his eyes to his disciples, he said: "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who are weeping now, for you shall laugh. Blessed shall you be when men will have hated you, and when they will have separated you and reproached you, and thrown out your name as if evil, because of the Son of man. Be glad on that day and exult. For behold, your reward is great in heaven. For these same things their fathers did to the prophets. Yet truly, woe to you who are wealthy, for you have your consolation. Woe to you who are satisfied, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when men will have blessed you. For these same things their fathers did to the false prophets." (Lk 6:20-26)
We are used to hearing these lines from a mountain, in the third person, with a qualifier attached: blessed are the poor in spirit. Luke has come down onto level ground, into the middle of a crowd that has walked a long way, and the sentence has lost its cushion. Blessed are you poor. Nothing softens it. He is looking at people whose poverty is a fact of their week, not a figure of speech, and he tells them that the kingdom of God belongs to them already.
The word that governs the whole passage is a very small one, and it is easy to read past. Now. Blessed are you who are hungry now. You who are weeping now. Woe to you who laugh now. Four times a clock is pushed into the sentence. Jesus is not offering a general theory of spiritual states; he is dating his words. He means this month, this cupboard, this grief that has a name and a beginning.
Then look at the tenses, because they do not match. The blessing is in the present: yours is the kingdom of God. Not will be. The consequences are in the future: you shall be satisfied, you shall laugh. This is not a promise that suffering will be compensated later by a fair God keeping accounts. It is the announcement that the Kingdom has already been handed over, and that everything else is still catching up with that fact.
The four woes that follow are not curses, and Jesus is not angry when he says them. The word is closer to a sigh of grief, the sound a doctor makes when reading a scan. Woe to you who are wealthy, for you have your consolation. The verb is the point: you have it. It has already arrived, it is already in your hands, and there is no space left in them for anything else.
That is the danger, and it is not a moral one so much as a matter of geometry. A full life has no doorway. Hunger is not good in itself; Jesus spends most of his public life feeding people and telling us to feed them. But hunger keeps a room empty. Those who are satisfied now have quietly stopped expecting anything, and expecting nothing is the single condition under which God, who does nothing but give, finds nothing he can give.
The fourth beatitude is longer than the others and more personal: hated, separated, reproached, your name thrown out as if it were something foul. And then a phrase that decides everything: because of the Son of man. Not all rejection is blessed. Some of it we have simply earned. The test is whether it came to us on the way to Christ or on the way to ourselves. And the sign of authenticity is startlingly inverted at the end: woe to you when everybody speaks well of you, for that is exactly how the false prophets were treated. Approval is not evidence.
Paul, writing to Corinth in today's first reading, plays the same music in another key. The time is short, he says, and the world as we see it is passing away. So he prescribes a strange grammar for daily life: let those who have wives live as though they had none, those who weep as though not weeping, those who rejoice as though not rejoicing, those who buy as though they possessed nothing. This is not contempt for marriage, or for sorrow, or for a household budget. It is a loosening of the grip. Hold everything, but hold it the way you hold something that is on loan.
Saint Peter Claver, whom the Church may remember today, took that grip loose and never closed it again. He was a Catalan Jesuit who landed at Cartagena de Indias, the great slave port of the Spanish Main, and for forty years he went down into the holds of arriving ships with water, biscuit, brandy, medicine and a small group of interpreters he had trained himself. He met people who were literally the poor, the hungry and the weeping of this Gospel, coming off the boats sick and terrified and treated as merchandise. He did not preach the beatitude at them. He climbed down into it.
He signed his final vows as the slave of the Africans for ever, and he paid for the phrase. Colonists complained that he lowered the tone of the cathedral; some churchmen found his ministry undignified and told him so; he was accused of profaning the sacraments by giving them to such people. He spent his last four years half forgotten in a cell, neglected by the very household that served him. He is the fourth beatitude wearing a cassock, and he shows us that the blessed are not a category to be admired from a distance but a place one can walk to, carrying something useful.
There is Bethlehem in all of this, long before the sermon was preached. The Child was born on the left-hand side of this page, among the poor, the displaced and the badly spoken of, with no consolation of his own already in hand. When we say that God comes to us small, we are saying that he chose the half of the sentence where the Kingdom is already given. He did not admire poverty from above; he was laid in it, and asked to be received.
So here is one concrete thing for today. Find the place in our life where we are satisfied now, where we have stopped expecting anything of God because we already have enough of everything, and make it a little emptier on purpose. Skip something. Give away something that still stings. And then go, in whatever small way our city allows, to where the hungry of Luke's list actually are, and learn one of their names, because Peter Claver's whole method was to treat a cargo as persons.
He lifted up his eyes to his disciples. That gesture comes first, before any of the words. Somebody is looking at us today, from level ground, and reading the truth of our lives without pity and without illusion, and beginning with the word blessed.
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
Father, your Son looked at the people in front of him and called the poor blessed, without softening a single word. Give us the courage to hear that sentence spoken to us today, in the exact hunger and the exact grief we carry now. Loosen our grip on the things we hold too tightly, and keep some room empty in us, so that there is always somewhere for your gift to be set down. Where we are comfortable and no longer expecting anything, disturb us gently; where we are afraid of being thought foolish for your name, give us the steadiness of Saint Peter Claver, who went down into the ships. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- Where has our life become so full that we no longer expect anything from God?
- Which of the words hungry, weeping or excluded belongs to us right now, and can we hear the word blessed attached to it?
- Whom do we currently know as a category, and what would it take for us to learn their name?
