Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Epiphany 6 C - Sunday, February 13, 2022
The invitation to us in those weeks is to attend, imagine, and ponder. Those are beautiful and important responses to those kinds of stories. The temptation is that we are lulled into becoming mere spectators, safe in an abstract distance from the events which seem not to have much to say to our lives directly. Even as Jesus begins his ministry, we are still observers in the narrative as Jesus upbraids the hard-hearted hearers in the synagogue about their disdain for Gentiles and admire from a distance the boldness of the first disciples who saw miracles and were moved to leave everything and follow.
Today the narrative camera lens shifts. We have heard the various reactions to the coming of the Messiah - from angels, Mary, Joseph, Simeon, Anna, disciples, and even demons. There is a term in acting called “breaking the fourth wall”. The fourth wall is broken when the actor addresses or looks at the audience or the camera. It can be an unnerving moment for the audience or viewer because our assumptions about a boundary between performer and spectator is crossed and we are suddenly participants. I remember the effect of this technique on me while watching two movies about Jesus. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” ends with the Great Commission and Jesus looking directly into the camera at the words “Don’t be afraid. I am with you every day, ‘till the end of time.” And in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”, Mary Magdalene, cradling the dead Christ at the foot of the cross, her face streaked with dirt and tears, stares into the camera with eyes which have had their hope wrung out of them. So today’s reading is the startling experience of suddenly being seen, of no longer gazing at events outside ourselves, but being addressed directly.
Having captured our attention, Jesus will surely announce some grand solution to the crushing injustice and oppression of his day or at least give us some easy and practical advice for living a happy life. If that is the kind of oracle we are waiting for, we will be waiting for a long time. Instead, what Jesus does is describe the way things actually are. Not how they appear to be, not how we have been taught to interpret things, but how they really are. He states that the assumptions, the givens, by which the culture of his day operated - that the rich were blessed by God and the poor have been made poor by God - is not true. It is possible to be materially poor, but in fact be blessed and filled. It is possible to be materially rich and filled, but in fact be poor and empty. Appearances can be, and often are, deceptive and deceiving. Do not build a theology on how you want things to be, Jesus says, it leads to nothing but trouble.
As the Lord begins to describe kingdom life and to invite us into its paradoxical life-is-death and death-is-life world, he must help the crowds, disciples - us - to be liberated from our attachment to labels of identity and value that choke the growth of the seed of the kingdom in our hearts. These labels limit the possibility of something new and surprising, of a world that actually changes, of discovering our cherished beliefs about ourselves and our neighbors are inadequate. Jesus announces that the unimaginable has indeed come - open your perception and welcome it in.
The reading is not asking us to align with the blessed for joy and fullness and avoid the “woes” that portend danger and suffering. This is prophetic speech that is much deeper than mere moral reform or trying to be better people. Jesus is speaking to the very nature of a social system that has organized itself and labeled each other along a metric of worthy and unworthy, welcomed and excluded, blessed and forsaken. This system was created and perpetuated because the implications of covenant life were too good to be true. Rather than choose to live in trust and neighborliness, celebration and welcome, it was easier, safer, more understandable and controllable, to classify and rate each other on their cleanness and conformity to the rules. Jesus is moving beyond speaking to the poor as poor and the rich as rich, but unraveling and exposing as empty, unjust, and evil the very nature of the categories themselves. The poor who have the kingdom are no longer poor. The rich who no longer have riches are no longer rich. What are they if they cannot play their part, fit into their box any longer because it is not only meaningless, but gone.
It is in exactly the moment when we do not know who we are anymore and do not know what is right that we are most ready to enter a trust in Jesus that is beyond appearances, better than the ways we have defined ourselves, certain whatever the circumstances that come our way. Trusting God does not always spring from what we know what we do not know. It is rooted and grows in the unsettling discomfort of the realization that our thoughts about God are not God - our thoughts about ourselves are not ourselves. How could Jesus possibly communicate the kingdom to the poor and hungry who did not believe they were worthy of God’s favor and to the rich and comfortable who believed they already had it? Expose the ridiculousness of the system, upend the agreements, cross the boundaries, model and point to a way of being so much better and more beautiful and more amazing than can be imagined and then insist that it is true and possible and invites Jew, Gentile, men, women, slave, free, rich, poor, hungry, full - all of them - and all of us.
So, my fellow fourth-wall dwellers. We are in the story now. What is, how things are, what is true, has been unveiled and named for us. Now we blessed poor and hungry, who in the kingdom are rich and filled in the very act of knowing we are dependent on God and everything is a gift, get to be unsettled and uncomfortable together - thanks be to God! Thanks be to God that the barriers and divisions we thought defined and ordered our world and which we love so much are not real, appearances are not reality. If we recoil from trusting the author of this mysterious truth, big trouble awaits us. Lies are weights on our ankles as we traverse the waters of life and we will sink into the dark abyss all the while claiming we know, we are right. But that need not ever be so as long as our hope is fixed on the source of our identity - the very one who made us and loves us. In that assurance we are ready to see ourselves and one another as we really are - brother, sister, beloved.
Amen.
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