Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC
Epiphany 4 A - Sunday, January 29, 2023
Lord Jesus Christ, through the gift of your Spirit and sacraments, grant us pure hearts and enlightened minds, that we may see God and be transfigured at the sight and help transfigure the world. Amen.
Simone de Beauvoir once said, “It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.” And Vladimir Nabokov once said, “Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.”
If you took Metro-North down into the city and were to stand on any busy street corner and ask passersby, “what is your idea of a blessed life,” you would probably hear something like… “a blessed life means having more than enough;” or “being able to vacation at your place of choice…whenever you want.” Perhaps you might hear, “a blessed life is freedom from sickness and disease and from war and oppression.” What you probably wouldn’t hear would be… “a blessed life is to be poor, to suffer, or to have a loved one pass away.” Neither would you likely hear… “a blessed life is to be persecuted and shamed for being who you are and doing the right thing.” Yet, this, shockingly, is precisely what Jesus is inferring here in the Beatitudes. How are we to make sense of this?
For St. Matthew, Jesus is a new and fully realized Moses…a prophet who makes known the Word of God. Like Moses, Jesus ascends a mountain and speaks forth divine revelation and makes the heart of God known. Like all of Israel’s prophets from Moses through John the Baptist, Jesus’ message is one which seeks to reunite God’s people back to God in a bond of covenant fidelity. Throughout the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Prophets, the heart of God is wrenched because of Israel’s infidelity and propensity to seek refuge in other gods.
Yet, Yahweh never gives up on the ones he has chosen to be his own and relentlessly pursues them. Micah writes of a divine judicial case where Yahweh’s “controversy” with Israel is stirred, where Yahweh “contends” with his chosen for her lack of fidelity even after having experienced his saving power time and time again. “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” There is only one hope for restoration, as far as Micah is concerned…not the offering of sacrifices but only the offering of one’s total life in doing justice, in loving kindness, and in walking humbly with God. Micah, like all of the prophets, is highly sensitized to the many ways in which Israel evaded her call to covenant fidelity. Hiding behind acts of worship had become one of the most egregious of all evasions. Hiding behind the law would become another.
But what Jesus, the prophet of the new covenant, and Paul, the great explicator of the new covenant after him, would both proclaim with unmistakable clarity and force was that neither sacrifice nor obedience to the law, nor anything else for that matter, is really the object of God’s desire…only the human heart and the totality of one’s life. But if there is one thing that humankind has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt is that we, as a human family, are utterly incapable of remaining faithful to God and persist in our evasions. A question, then, hangs over every page of the Hebrew Scriptures…where is the ability to be true to God without evasion or compromise to come if it is not in ourselves? The answer was given emphatically…not by any human being but by God…and not in a text but in a living, breathing person…Jesus the Christ!…who showed us that doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God was, in fact, possible…which brings us back to the Beatitudes.
The new law that Jesus preaches up on the mountaintop is, you can say, a honing in of the commandments of God previously given by Moses that would effectively eliminate all human efforts at evasion once and for all. With this law, there is no place to hide, to justify oneself, or to don a mask. Neither is there any room for complacency or compromise. It is a call to a way of life free from the deceits of the ego and the ambitions of the false self. It is, finally, a way to live fully alive in the presence of God’s fiery love—far distant from the deadening effects of the wisdom of the world.
This wisdom, the wisdom that comes from God, keeps us supple and ready, eager to give, fervent to love. Yet, it comes only at a great cost—the stripping away of our selfish wills and the humbling of our false selves…and hence why we expend every effort at evasion and devise every method conceivable at its maintenance. Yet, God’s “controversy” is stirred, and God “contends” with us and wrestles us to the ground…and thank God for this contending! That our God cares enough to demand everything of us and sometimes makes us miserable until we finally surrender!
As I see it, the Beatitudes, and the whole Sermon on the Mount which follows…this call to be perfect just as God is perfect…is utterly impossible. The power to soar to these heights is not within us and the expectations and demands of the kingdom is a burden too heavy to bear. But this is precisely the gift of God’s demand. It is what helps us cut through the illusions of our self-sufficiency and helps us embrace our own indigence and poverty. And this alone is the place of truth and liberation. The comfort that leads to complacency is one of the greatest traps that the enemy uses to deprive us of God’s abundant life. And there are really only two ways out of the spiritual malaise which all too soon has us all walking around like soulless zombies.
One is the moment of crisis which rattles us from our spiritual slumber, and the other is the voluntary submission of our will based on the conviction that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” Whether one or the other, both have the ability to shatter the illusions we gradually begin to believe about ourselves and our lives in this world and enlarge the heart. They awaken us to the fact that our good is never good enough and that our vocation is not to being content but to being ecstatically alive. This is precisely what the original founders of the monastic movement were convinced of…complacency leads to spiritual death, voluntary death to self leads to fullness of life. And so off to the desert they went.
We here too follow their lead and their wisdom. It is a wisdom in stark opposition to the best the world has to offer and a sure path to a truly blessed life… a life of beatitude. Particularly here in the Order of the Holy Cross…we who are consecrated to the foolishness of the cross and a crucified Messiah…we, here, are called to be a prophetic witness of life alive from the dead where the complacent state of mind is shattered to pieces and where the illusions of the good give way to the reality of the sublime.
Blessed are the voluntary poor, the meek, the just, the merciful, and those who freely choose lives of purity and peace in service to one another and to all who seek refuge in the shelter of this tent, for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.
Amen.
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