Sunday Meditation: The Sermon of the Great Reversal

 

No, the Sermon of the Great Reversal is not something you have missed in your learning of the New Testament.  It’s my renaming of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, Luke’s version of the Beatitudes.  On the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, we are presented with Jesus’s great sermon of Blessedness.  I call it the Sermon of the Great Reversal because Jesus reverses the values of the world and presents us the values of the Kingdom of God.

 

Jesus came down with the Twelve

and stood on a stretch of level ground

with a great crowd of his disciples

and a large number of the people

from all Judea and Jerusalem

and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon.

And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said:

            “Blessed are you who are poor,

                        for the kingdom of God is yours.

            Blessed are you who are now hungry,

                        for you will be satisfied.

            Blessed are you who are now weeping,

                        for you will laugh.

            Blessed are you when people hate you,

                        and when they exclude and insult you,

                        and denounce your name as evil

                        on account of the Son of Man.

Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!

Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.

For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.

            But woe to you who are rich,

                        for you have received your consolation.

            Woe to you who are filled now,

                        for you will be hungry.

            Woe to you who laugh now,

                        for you will grieve and weep.

            Woe to you when all speak well of you,

                        for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.”

~Lk 6:17, 20-26

 

Fr. Geoffrey Plant instructs us on the language intricacies of this passage, and then enlightens us to the Great Reversal.

This is going to seem odd that Dr. Brant Pitre is going to provide the pastoral explanation of the passage, but he does.  In his explanation of the passage, he connects it with the carrying of our daily crosses.

 

Where you find happiness is through the detachment of earthly goods.  Does Luke mean to imply a spiritual detachment or an actual detachment?  This might be more controversial, but I think he means actual detachment, actual poverty, actual hunger, actual mourning, and actual rejection.  After all, isn’t that Christ’s life?

 

Sunday Meditation: “Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.”

 

John Michael Talbot’s “The Beatitudes” is the proper hymn here.