Epiphany VI, Year C

Jeremiah, 17:5-10
1 Corinthians, 15:12-20
Luke, 6:17-26

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A couple of years ago, I received an email with an attached news story, a sad, gruesome story about a group of friends a few years out of high school. After a night of bar hopping, they returned to their small, Texan town and got into a heated argument about who would go to heaven and who would go to hell. In a bizarre series of events, heavily influenced by alcohol, one of the friends was fatally shot.

I had received this story along with several other people, and it provoked some electronic chatter among us. Someone asked, "What if you don't believe there is a 'hell' - as in the gnashing of teeth, give me a drop of water because it's hot down here, Dante type of hell?" This person wondered whether a more sophisticated view of hell would've prevented the death.

Impressed by the implicit snobbery of this point of view, I decided to weigh in with even more snobbery. I recalled a television episode of HBO's 'Sopranos' in which one of the thugs, named Dante, said, "Hell is hot. Nobody's ever disputed that." I pointed out that it was a literary joke because Dante, the author of The Inferno, had, in fact, disputed it. At least in a couple of places, Dante describes hell as being cold, a place of sleet, fierce winds, and darkness, a place of shivering and ice. Of course, I wouldn't take this picture literally, nor would Dante, but it's a helpful image, a poetic description of humanity's condition when separated from God.

After I sent out my response to everyone in the group, another email participant, Fr. Major, then took his turn to remind us he also could be a snob. He declared that no one takes the afterlife seriously. The point of Dante, and the dispute of the young Texans, is to establish hierarchies about life here and now. Fr. Major wrote: "No one cares about hell; all people always care about snobbery." Unlike early fourteenth century Florence, Fr. Major snobbishly argued, in a small Texan town it's hard to be a snob because there are not a lot of obvious distinctions among people.

People feel compelled to make distinctions in this world, and when there are not obvious distinctions, one of the ways to create them is by making claims about our ultimate fate. For example, "This kind of person is going to heaven. This kind of person is going to hell." In some cases, we take these claims very seriously, very personally, because we place too much of our sense of self in these distinctions we've snobbishly created.

God's purpose is to unite human beings - every one of us - in the love of his Son. In general, the gospel does not try to draw distinctions between people, but tries to unite people. That is a common goal of Christians, emphasizing our unity, not our division. S. Luke's beatitudes and woes do issue a warning about the end times, about who will be blessed, happy, and who will not be. But this warning is not so much about who will be in and out in heaven, but about how we should shape our lives now and about who is most open to God. Luke is saying that the Kingdom of God should shape our world, that the future reality should shape things now. Luke is more interested about the here and now than about the afterlife.

More than any of the other evangelists, Luke takes pleasure in the reversal of fate that God will ultimately cause. Luke believes that life as we experience it now is unjust. The poor do not deserve to be poor, and the rich do not deserve to be rich; the weak do not deserve to be weak, and the powerful do not deserve to be powerful. We can't judge outward appearances to determine God's favor. In part, that's because God's favor rests upon every human being, and in equal quantities. Our worldly fate does not reflect God's favor.

Luke has great interest in proclaiming God's justice. He sees justice taking hold in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God has acted in a wholly new way to liberate people and to establish justice. In the first chapter of his gospel, Luke has two beautiful songs, which the Church says every day, the touchstones of morning and evening prayer. At morning prayer, we say the Benedictus, a song about God's tender mercy, about how he delivers us from bondage and sin and keeps his promises to us. At evening prayer, we say the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, which is all about God re-ordering life: "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent away empty." The upside-down world is going to be set right-side up. Jesus has good news for those who are poor, those who are hungry, those who weep, those who are despised. Their fortune is going to be reversed. That is the reality of God's Kingdom. That is the future.

Our city knows all about who's in and who's out. Sometimes it's the left; sometimes it's the right. But neither left nor right are really interested in real reversal. For the most part the political left and right are mirror images of the same thing. To get power, worldly power, in this city, you can't be humble and meek. No one gives it to you because you're deserving. Worldly power is never given away; it's achieved; it's wrested away from people . And the humble and meek and poor and dispirited aren't going to achieve it; they aren't going to win it, much less even fight for it. God's reversal is of a wholly different order, and it should set us on edge.

One of the great things about our country is our fierce egalitarianism. We almost assume an innate understanding that all people are of equal value to God. But that's naive. We don't live up to our ideals, and I don't expect that we ever will. We should not have any illusions of our innate snobbery; hard-wired snobbery is part of Original Sin. We have to rise above our natural selves, above our animal instincts, to be moral, to try to treat all people honorably and charitably.

That's what God has wanted from his people from the beginning. The Old Testament is full of law and exhortations for the wealthy and powerful to treat the poor and weak well. The Jewish law in the Old Testament allows the poor to eat from another's field or orchard to satisfy hunger. (Dt 23:24) Our law calls that stealing. The Jewish law requires the poor to receive loans free of interest. (Ex 22:25) We'd call that charity, or a loss; it is a clear violation of the principles of capitalism. The Jewish law demands that the land a poor person sells to pay a debt is returned to the seller in the year of jubilee. (Lev 25) That would not be very popular in our country. Again, it's not in keeping with capitalism. The Jewish law sought to prevent economic exploitation and to remind people that ownership of the land is vested in God, not in human beings. The Jewish law sought to give the poor an economic footing because some economic means are essential not only to have a living, but also to have a degree of personal freedom. The poor have less freedom than the rich. That is not just. The Jewish law states: "You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you." (Dt 15:15) In other words, all wealth, all power, all satisfaction is God's. We don't deserve to be anything more than slaves. Everything that we receive is a gift. ⁽¹⁾

Besides its prevalence in the Old Testament, this theme is prominent throughout Luke's gospel. Only Luke's gospel includes the parable of the rich fool, who possesses so much that he has to rip downs his barns and build larger barns to store all of his goods. God said to him: "Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" (Lk 12:13-21) Fool! Luke alone tells the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man lived luxuriously in this life, but upon his death he went to torment in Hades; Lazarus was a miserable beggar in this life, but upon his death he went to Abraham's bosom. And remember that Lazarus could not so much as give the rich man a drop of water to cool his tongue as he anguished in flames. (Lk 16:19-31) Luke alone tells the story of Zaccheus, the rich tax collector, who gave away half of his wealth to the poor, and Jesus declared to him: "Salvation has come to thy house." The point is that those with wealth and power - and that would include just about everyone of us here - that we must acknowledge that it belongs to God, that we hold it in trust, that we must use it to care for the poor, that we must use it to build up the Church, that we must use it to God's glory, not to our gratification. ⁽²⁾

Through Jesus Christ, each one of us has hope of a future in which there is no want, no hunger, no mourning, no hatred, a future where there is no snobbery, but we are all united in love. That hope is a great gift God has given us. We should respond to God's generosity by working and praying to make that future a reality now, working and praying to let more people experience the love and care of God.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. The scriptural examples in this paragraph and the linkage of wealth and personal freedom are from David Holwerda, The Lectionary Commentary: Gospels, ed. Roger E. Van Harn, Eerdmans (2001), p. 333.

2. The three Lucan examples are mentioned by Holwerda, pp. 332-33.