January 30, 2011

4th Sunday after the Epiphany

1st Corinthians 1:18-31, Matthew 5:1-12

 

          The Beatitudes describe the world as we do not know it.  They are reversals of what we normally see, and also of how we normally think.  Usually we see assertiveness as a model of straightforward grown-up behavior, and we do not often respect the undemanding nature of those who are meek. To our shame, we may even despise the poor in spirit, who are so lacking that they can do nothing out of their own strength.  We tend to evade signs of such poverty within ourselves.  Those who want righteousness so much that they hunger and thirst for it are likely to be in dire straits, usually as a result of injustice.  Their very plight is what makes them so focused and hungry.  We do not often see them satisfied.  Usually we think with what St. Paul calls ‘the wisdom of the world’, but as he writes to the Corinthian Christians, ‘God has made foolish this wisdom, and has chosen what is weak in order to shame the strong’.  The Beatitudes depict life as it is made possible through Christ; this is why Jesus teaches them to his disciples.

          This morning I’d like to focus on the two beatitudes that seem to me the most surprising: Blessed are the poor in spirit, and blessed are those who mourn.  The Greek for ‘poor’ in the first of these conveys abject poverty, destitution as experienced by very few in the developed world, but understood by the victims of an earthquake or a flood.  When our spirits are very poor in this way we know ourselves unable to act from our own strength.  We do not ordinarily aspire to poverty of spirit.  We try to be capable and self-confident not only in order to do well, but sometimes so as simply to carry on functioning.  Usually it takes extreme circumstances, or exhaustion, or illness for people to realize that there is nothing they can do on their own.  It is therefore surprising that Jesus calls such a state ‘happy’ for blessed can be translated ‘happy’.

          Likewise with mourning: The Greek word used in the Beatitudes for ‘mourning’ conveys intense grief – which is certainly an unhappy state.  Earlier in his Gospel Matthew quotes from Jeremiah to tell about the mothers whose infants have been slaughtered by Herod: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, lamenting and weeping bitterly; Rachel is weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, for they are no more’.  Those who mourn intensely cannot accept comfort, for comfort would seem like a denial of their sorrow and a betrayal of their loved ones.  Those who are in deep mourning are terribly sad.  How perverse it seems to say that they are happy, to say that they are blessed.

          One can understand why Jesus hails the merciful, the peacemakers, those who yearn for righteousness, and those who endure persecution, for in them we can see qualities of character that belong to the kingdom he is proclaiming.  But why the mourners and why those who are depleted in spirit?  They too must have some qualities of character that reflect the life of the kingdom.

          Reversals of thought are being asked of us: that we do not regard mourning as a misfortune that will pass with time, as something that we need to ‘get over’; and that we do not try to eradicate poverty of spirit from ourselves or others.  On the contrary, if these conditions can also be qualities of character on the same plane as mercy giving and peacemaking, they are qualities that we can cultivate within and among us.

          Admittedly it is more obvious with some of the Beatitudes than with others that we can nurture them in one another.  We learn mercy by receiving mercy, and we pass it on.  We learn to be peaceable by being treated peaceably.  In these ways, we have a responsibility for one another’s character, and for the character of the communities in which we live.  It is perhaps less clear that poverty of spirit and the quality of mourning can also be learned from one another.  Indeed it is often thought that these particular beatitudes are solely about the individual’s relationship to God – as though that could be separated from our relationship to one another.  Yet the state of our spirit is tied up with the state of our brothers and sisters, and the capacity to mourn embraces the entire world.

          Those among us who are poor in spirit, show us that in fact we are all poor in spirit.  This is why Paul tells the Christians in Corinth to learn from the poor and lowly among them.  Beau Stevenson, a former mental health chaplain, tells about a time when he was celebrating the Eucharist in the chapel of the hospital where he worked, and became aware that something was amiss; someone was standing there with no clothes on.  Beau asked the man to put his clothes back on, but he said he would not until he had received communion.  The rest of the congregation did not mind.  Only the organist found it funny – because the offertory hymn was ‘Just as I am’.  The rest of the congregation did not mind, perhaps, because they accepted the truth of the man’s actions: that all we can do is place ourselves, just as we are, in God’s hands.  And Beau repeats this story, and I am passing it on, because it teaches us also to see the truth about ourselves as utterly dependant on God.

          The opposite of a poor soul is a proud soul – one locked in self-sufficiency.  St. Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth century bishop whose writings have informed much of Christian thought, described the soul as the mirror of God.  A proud soul he saw as being like a blank wall, because it is enclosed in self-regard and unable to mirror God.  Such a soul may appear to be calm and in control but is in fact cracked and chaotic.  On the other hand, when we feel cracked and chaotic, our sense of self-sufficiency loses its hold and room is made for the image of God’s character and strength to shine through.  ‘God chose what is low and despised in the world’, Paul wrote, ‘to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no-one might boast in the presence of God.’

          Mourning, like poverty of spirit, is a quality that moves one’s self from the centre of one’s concerns.  It is true that when we grieve, we grieve partly for ourselves.  But grieving can also enlarge our hearts.  It hollows out a space within us, puts us in solidarity with others who suffer, and it can even expand our compassion till we feel that we share in the very sadness of God.  Such mourning takes in the plight of strangers, the suffering of fellow creatures, and indeed of the whole of creation.  I expect many have felt this in relation to the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – mourning for the harm done to our planet.

          We mourn most expansively when our suffering and sadness lead us beyond a sorrow for ourselves and for others, and into sharing the sadness of God – when this sorrow turns us towards Christ in a longing for our reconciliation and the reconciliation of the whole world.

          The historian Margaret Spufford expresses such mourning and its relation to poverty of spirit when she describes what it is like for her to attend the Eucharist as the mother of a very sick child while she herself is suffering from an excruciating bone disease.  For Dr. Spufford the Eucharist focuses the agony of Christ and with it the agony of the world, ‘drawing together all those screams I have heard, all those broken branches and bruised flowers, all those fossils in the Grand Canyon, and all the rears I have for my own future of cumulative fractures.  There is nothing, ultimately, that I can do of myself to transform all this pain…  All I can do is offer the pain…  Then the action moves from Crucifixion to Transformation and Resurrection.  Easter is less comprehensible than Good Friday.  Joy has to be silent’

          There are perhaps a few things we can say on the way to such unutterable joy.  We can perhaps speak of the relief of shedding our outer shell, knowing that we are known, and discovering that we do not act out of our own strength and that God’s strength can work in us.  We can speak of the pleasure of thinking not about oneself, of transcending one’s own concerns, and engaging with the rest of reality (albeit a pained reality).  And we can speak of the hope of reconciliation which is also the faith that in the end all will be well.  But ultimately as St. Thomas Aquinas discovered after a lifetime spent producing words, the beatific vision leaves one speechless.  We grow, Spufford says, through ‘our own discovery that events which stretch us to the limit and then beyond what we think we are capable of, these times of acute suffering can bring with them an insight into joy beyond our rational comprehension.’  Amen.