ORDINARY 6 (C)
Blessed are you who are poor; for the Kingdom of God is yours. – Lk. 6: 20
The word translated poor here doesn’t mean just financially deprived; it means destitute. Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes elaborates on this by using the phrase “poor in spirit.” I rather doubt that our Lord is advocating poverty here as an end in itself, for we all know how it can make people bitter & angry. What I think He is really getting at is a recognition of our fundamental powerlessness & helplessness in the face of life’s staggering problems.
Such recognition does not come easily for us humans, but especially for us Americans who have been raised on the Horatio Alger myth of the self-made man & the self-sufficient woman. It is an illusion that dies hard, but certain events in life have a nasty way of demolishing it. The result is often bewilderment.
I find it interesting that one thing that alcoholics have in common – apart from their addiction – is a tendency toward being control freaks. The irony is that their obsession with being in control demolishes them spiritually. The so-called “bottoming out” experience refers to the realization that they are not in control of themselves much less anything or anyone around them. Yet out of that experience comes the hope for rebirth, for with it comes the admission that they are in need of a higher power.
I don’t think “bottoming out” is confined to alcoholics. It is the precondition for spiritual growth in all of us. In this beatitude, our Lord seems to be saying that it is not until we experience spiritual destitution that we can begin to appreciate the richness of life lived in God. He saw how excessive concentration on the accumulation of wealth can harden the human spirit, how the feeling of self-sufficiency that accompanies excessive devotion to material riches can seal us off from the higher values in life – values that proceed from acknowledging dependence upon God in all things.
There is a remarkable story of a poor Mediterranean family that decided to emigrate to the U.S.:
At a ‘going away party’ given by village friends, they received the very practical gifts of several loaves of hard bread & several heads of cheese. The next day, they boarded the large ship on which they had booked passage. They went to their 3rd class cabin where they lived on the gifts of bread & cheese for several days.
On the next-to-last day of the voyage, one of the boys in the family said to his father, “Dad, I’ve had it with bread & cheese. May I explore the ship?” The father said “Yes” & the boy left, but didn’t return. The father went looking for him & found him down in the 5th Dining Room. He was sitting at a table overflowing with food. The father was aghast. He thought he would be arrested because he couldn’t pay for all the food his son had ordered. The boy said to him, “Dad, we have been living on stale bread & cheese all these days. I’ve discovered we could have been eating like this all the way. It seems that the meals are included in the price of our tickets.”
How long will we go on being satisfied with stale bread & cheese when God invites us to the feast He has reserved for His blest community? Blessedness belongs to those who acknowledge dependence on God not only for life but for the way of life. Blessed are those who realize that life without God is not real life at all. AMEN!