Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany [Proper 4], rcl yr c
MICAH 6:1-8; PSALM 15; 1 CORINTHIANS 1:18-31; MATTHEW 5:1-12
God’s weakness is stronger than human strength
I find that reading the Beatitudes—the “blessed are” sayings of Jesus that we heard today—to be something of a challenge. Because they just bring up feelings of failure, honestly. Am I there? Am I really able to embody such blessedness?
I may mourn, I do that; and I do hunger and thirst for righteousness, but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes Sundays, the rest of the time I’m quite content with the ways I benefit from injustice; the same for the show of meekness I try to make, I have my ambitions; I am hardly pure of heart; I am not persecuted in any meaningful way, not for my faith anyway; not everyone likes me but the ones that dislike me, don’t dislike me on account of my faith in Jesus.
It’s just really hard to identify with all of these blessings as described by Jesus, and like most of us—well, I fail to live up to them.
I’m not the first to say this. It’s a common approach especially among the churches of the Reformation to first, recognise that we all actually fail to live up to the Beatitudes, and then, to say, well— maybe it’s supposed to be a list of things we can’t live up to, because in that way, we would seek out the grace and forgiveness of God in recognizing our failure. That this is an intentional list of impossibilities intended to make us seek God.
This has its appeal, doesn’t it! But … it is pretty much the definition of cheap grace according to Bonhoeffer. We throw up our arms in failure giving up on being disciples, and throw ourselves in with the same world that has little regard for God and Jesus—to the point that the church disappears, it becomes invisible; and the church’s difference, the church’s Christ-centred eccentricity, fades away.
Maybe, do I need to just try harder? But it doesn’t seem to simply be a matter of effort, either. As though if we just tried hard enough we could be blessed, we could be saints. I’m reading Pope Francis a bit these days—and I have to be honest, I wish I was enjoying it more. He was such an important witness for Christianity as a whole, with his emphasis especially on justice and compassion.
But when it comes to the Beatitudes, he sees them as a roadmap for holiness— but my experience tells me that if its a roadmap, it gets most of us lost in our failed efforts to get from accursed to blessed. And to make this roadmap to holiness a matter of trying harder gets us further away, not closer, to God’s grace.
There is another place to start, though, I’d like to suggest; and it’s not with us. We will get to us, but let’s start first with Jesus, and his work—in what he accomplishes for us. We often think of Jesus as a teacher—and he is that. But Jesus is more than a teacher, he is the one who in what he does, draws us closer to God and ultimately makes us holy. We can see this especially in the crucifixion and the resurrection—that he suffers, and lives, in order that our suffering can be transformed into new life, both in this age and in the age to come. What Jesus does is what makes certain things possible for us, including our transformation into his likeness, and into blessedness.
And as we start with Jesus, and who Jesus is and what he does, rather than beginning with us and our possibility and our failure, we can begin to see something about Jesus and the Beatitudes—that the Beatitudes are about Jesus, before they are about us.
The one who is poor in spirit, who mourns, who is meek, who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, who is merciful and pure in heart, the one who is a peacemaker, reviled and persecuted, is Jesus himself. Jesus is the blessed one, Jesus is the holy one.
And we are gathered to him—this was part of what we learned last week. Part of what it is to be a disciple is to be gathered into Jesus’s own orbit as a community of faith and trust in him. In John especially we get a sense that being a disciple is in great part about spending time with Jesus. And as we spend time with Jesus we end up spending time with others who are also spending time with Jesus.
(Which is a way of saying that Jesus has a way of gathering us up with people we may not have chosen—but that Jesus does choose. So if you are looking at your neighbour somewhere in another pew and thinking “I have nothing in common with that person,” well, welcome to church! Jesus gathers us and others, not according to our own desires or with the people we think we fit with, or the people we might think are doing the right thing and acting the right way—we spend time with others not according to our desire for some sort of perfect community, but according to Jesus’s own desire to gather all others into his care.)
So we have a holy, blessed Jesus, the one described in the Beatitudes, and this Jesus is gathering a people around him—called the church—and this is how to understand, I would suggest, what the Beatitudes have to do with us. We are holy, not because we are individuals doing just the right thing, we are holy because Jesus is holy, Jesus having gathered us into his blessing, and making us together a holy, and blessed people.
And looking out at us gathered here today, I do see, among us, as a whole, something very close to the whole of the Beatitudes taken together than I would if we looked at one another as individuals apart from the whole of the gathered community called the church. Some of you are poor in spirit, some of you are mourning, some of you are meek, some of you do hunger and thirst for righteousness, some of you are merciful or pure in heart, or a peacemaker, some even know persecution, and what it means to be reviled for your faith in Jesus.
This is the way we make Christ visible in the world, this is how we take part in the believability of God—not through our personal spiritual heroism, not through trying hard, and certainly not by giving up on the challenge, difficulty, and joy of following Jesus. But because in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God is making each of us new, bringing each of us deeper into the goodness and holiness of Christ, and each of us in different ways, together as a whole, in the church. So that when the world looks to us, as one body, as the church, we will show forth the eccentric, distinctive, holiness of Christ where happiness is not a matter of wealth, pride, injustice, or power over others.
Do we have these things in our hearts too? To be sure. Do we seek forgiveness and reconciliation as we encounter this in ourselves? Absolutely. Are we given, though, gifts of the Spirit, according to God’s grace, and a holiness that is not earned but is given freely? Absolutely.
And together, as we embody in the church the Beatitudes that describe Jesus in the first place, we make Jesus visible to a world that desperately needs him, and his grace, too.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.
As our parish musician, he provides both support and leadership so that a variety of parish programs can find musical expression and attract participation. When our handbell choir is in season, he is one of our ringers. At parish dinners, he provides popular piano music for the guests to dine by. For both worship services and concerts, he will rehearse and accompany vocal and instrumental soloists from our congregation on piano, organ, or even accordion.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.