4th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 29 January 2023
It is not an uncommon story to hear people who have visited countries where poverty is visibly overwhelming, coming home and saying how happy the people whom they encountered. It confuses us. How can people who have so little, have so much? How can we who have so much, through our systems of education, health and law, have such little happiness? Our thinking identifies happiness with what we have, with what we have achieved; and yet, often enough, it seems that those who have very little are the happiest people in the world. How can it be that happiness seems to be in proportion to what one doesn’t have?
These kinds of questions were just as alive for the people of Jesus’ own time, since in Jewish culture they were considered blest those who had all the indications of security. However, it is this assumption that is now brought into question by the teaching that starts the ministry of Jesus. Jesus announces that our happiness is based on something altogether different from what we have. Happy are the poor; happy are those who mourn; happy are those who are searching.
This paradox leads us to a question that lays at the centre of the charter which we now call the Beatitudes – the sayings we have just heard. At base, it is the question about power: What is power? Who has power? How is power to be exercised. For Jesus, this is a particularly raw question. He grows up under the weight of Roman power. Daily, he sees the effects of power as it is exercised militarily and politically. Think for a moment how it must have been for Jesus as a young man experiencing the might of Roman occupation, the brutality of the conquerors – for brutality was the way in which the Romans sought to maintain control. Jesus’ ministry and teaching sets itself in a different way than what he sees around him.
Perhaps the very place still commemorated as the site at which Jesus first preached the Beatitudes is very helpful in helping us understand his intention. When I was there some years ago the geography provided me a new insight into the meaning of the Beatitudes. From the Mount of the Beatitudes you look down the Sea of Galilee to the ancient city of Tiberias, the capital of Roman power in Galilee. From the hilltop from which he preaches, Jesus looks over this bastion of Roman power and announces something so radically different from the premises upon which Tiberias is founded and functions. Scholars think that Jesus never enters the city of Tiberias. Curiously, he keeps away from it. It is not far from Nazareth, and it is situated between Nazareth and Capernaum, but there is no mention in the texts that Jesus exercised his ministry in Tiberias. The absence of any mention of the city is very telling. In fact, Jesus is preaching in the Beatitudes a power of an altogether different nature than that exercised by the Romans. He is pleading to us: Do not go the way of the Romans. Do not get trapped into their understanding of power. Do not think of power as domination and control. Do not think of power as something that makes some winners, and others losers.
Indeed, when Jesus invites us to follow him, he puts before us a child. He says to us, “Be like this child.” This is extraordinary, because in first century Palestine the child is utterly without power. Unlike today, children then had no status, no rights. They were not counted. And Jesus is saying to us, be like this. But in an even more shocking way, he says to us, “if you want to follow me, you must take up your cross.” The Cross, as we know, is at the centre of our Christian understanding. Yet, it is the most confronting image of absolute powerlessness. Jesus puts the Cross before us the Way because to enter its logic is to allow ourselves to be stripped of our illusions, our pretences, our masks. In the humiliation of the Cross we see ourselves just as we are. We see ourselves as hungry, as needy. For our truth lies in that we are people who hunger, who do mourn and who do yearn for what is right. We are people who experience a sense of alienation in ourselves, to each other and to God, and who yearn to overcome the sense of separateness. We are people who so desperately long for a gentle, balanced life in which we know we are accepted without accusation and shame. We are people who search for a sense of our own selves in a world in which we very often feel as victims in one way or another, unable to be who we intuit ourselves to be.
It is when we are come to this deep awareness of our self – the truth of our self – that we also realise we are not as self-sufficient, and autonomous as we thought. We see ourselves as needing one another. Then, our hearts become open to identify another power – not the power of domination, of control, but the power of companionship, of tenderness – the power of intimacy which gives us stability, confidence and possibility even in our darkest experiences.
We will never discover the power that Jesus wishes us to have unless we are first prepared to be powerless. And this is the extraordinary paradox at the heart of the Gospel, and enunciated in the charter given us in the Beatitudes we proclaim in today’s Gospel. Jesus redefines power. He sees the destructiveness of power understood as strength, domination and control. He opens for us a new understanding of power, This power alone will redeem the world and save us.
So, let us love, and then we will be powerful.
