Let Your Soul Dance Series

Sixth Sunday in Course year C

There is a very unexpected expression in today’s reading from St. Luke. The most literal translation reads: Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

To most folks’ ears, this entire passage looks deranged. Happy/blessed are the poor, the hungry, the mournful, the persecuted? Most of us would excuse ourselves from this particular celebration. We know what it is to be happy, and we are distinctly unhappy when we are hungry, crying, broke and hunted down. The first-century Jews were just as logical as we, and that’s why most of them, particularly the rich and powerful, refused to believe in this crazy carpenter, this itinerant preacher from Galilee. It was all just too much for a reasonable man, don't you know?

The key phrase here is leap for joy. There are code phrases in the Gospel that remind us of other words from the Old and New Testament. This phrase is one of those reminder-codes. The only other place in the Bible where we see this phrase “leap for joy” is in the first chapter of Luke. There, Mary, recently pregnant with Jesus, God made man, is visiting pregnant Elizabeth. Mary’s greeting “shalom, aleichem” resounds through the home of Elizabeth and her speechless husband, Zechariah. Elizabeth feels her sixth-month baby jump more than usual. She gets up and embraces Mary and says: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! ?And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? ?For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy. ?And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord."

John the Baptist is not even born, yet he was aware of the presence of his Queen and her preborn son, the King of the Universe. So the response Elizabeth felt was not just a kick or a stretch. She actually felt the tiny baby boy somersault in her womb. John would be the greatest of the prophets, yet Herod Antipas would murder him as a response to John’s telling him to repent of a particularly nasty sin. So John, poor, hungry except when he would eat locusts, mournful over the wickedness of his people, and persecuted by all the authorities, himself lived out the beatitudes Jesus lays out for us here. John, alone in the desert waste, was a tree watered by the Word of God, bearing fruit in the repentance of those who came to him for baptism.

Mary did as well. We have listened for so long to Christmas carols that sing of her being the Queen of Galilee that we forget who she really was, the Mary that Jesus knew. But for one single attribute, she was just a nothing girl from the nothing town of Nazareth at the extreme fringe of the Roman Empire. The one thing, the gift that made her the Queen Mother, was her faith. Blessed is she who believed the word of the Lord would be fulfilled. The word? You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus. He will be great, the son of the Most High God, the heir of his ancestor king David, an everlasting King.

It was this reality, Mary’s faith, that caused her to say “yes” to the angel, even though in time it would lead to a misunderstanding with her espoused husband, Joseph, even though in her own day people must have whispered about her pregnancy. It was her faith that let her lead an impoverished life in the backwaters of Galilee, that encouraged her when she had to go to bed hungry to feed her little boy, that sustained her when she at an early age had to bury her husband and rely on Jesus for sustenance. When Jesus was persecuted, she felt His pain intensely. The prophecy of Simeon came true—your own soul a sword will pierce. The lance that dug into the heart of Jesus cleaved her own.

John, Mary, Jesus. Would any of us doubt that they were blessed, blessed by their faith in the enduring presence and redemption of God? Happy were they, though poor and hungry and mournful and persecuted.

On the other hand, the ones who were rich, mirthful, fat and happy and highly esteemed were the Pharisees and rich priests of the Temple. Jesus didn’t have to act to bring about their downfall. They managed that quite well for themselves. Within forty years of Jesus’s death and resurrection they engineered their own comeuppance. Their extravagance brought on a popular uprising. Those that didn’t die and lose their property in the revolution were caught up in it, and almost certainly died or were hauled away as slaves when Vespasian and Titus brought their Roman legions down on Palestine in retribution. This must be a warning for us, two thousand years later. Greed, hedonism, gluttony and pride sow the seeds of our destruction, will ruin us just as surely as they ruined the leaders of first-century Judea.