Bible Study Notes: St Luke's Gospel
Session 18 Chapter 6: 17 - 22
The Sermon on the Plain: The Four Sources of Christian Happiness
Coming down off the mountain with them, Jesus stood on
a plain surrounded by disciples, and was soon joined by a huge congregation
from all over Judea and Jerusalem, even from the seaside towns of Tyre
and Sidon. They had come both to hear him and to be cured of their ailments.
Those disturbed by evil spirits were healed. Everyone was trying to touch
him - so much energy surging from him, so many people healed! Then he
spoke:
You're blessed when you've lost it all.
God's kingdom is there for the finding.
You're blessed when you're ravenously hungry.
Then you're ready for the Messianic meal.
You're blessed when the tears flow freely.
Joy comes with the morning.
© The
Message
The best known of Christ's sermons is the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, chapters 5-7. Actually, that is a collection of Christ's wise teachings about covenant love and moral guidelines taken from the numerous sermons he preached and put in one place in an orderly arrangement.
To a great extent the Sermon on the Mount was Christ's explanation of the Ten Commandments, which he interpreted in the light of covenant love between God and the people. He broke open each commandment's spiritual meaning and showed his listeners what inner love attitude made it possible to fulfil the purpose of the commandment. Fidelity forestalls adultery. Love makes the world safe for life. Community trust protects property. Truth makes people free.
Luke provides a much shorter version of Matthew's account in his Sermon on the Plain. In Matthew, Jesus gives his sermon on a mountain, like Moses giving the law from Sinai. In Luke, Jesus gives his sermon in a valley, like a friend who says he is our support in life's daily struggle.
At Sinai, God first invited the people to a union of love. The divine-human love affair is the best assurance of human happiness. Only then did he entrust to them the commandments that showed them how to stay in love with him. In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus began his sermon with a love song called "The Beatitudes," a description of the sources of human happiness. The melody is the same in both gospels. Though the approach differs, Jesus outlines in both cases his Christian dream of love, which says that permanent human happiness always includes union with God. All the rules that follow are simply ways to stay in love with self, others, and God.
In Luke's account, Jesus spoke of four sources of happiness: poverty of spirit, a hunger for God, the gift of grieving, and the positive uses of rejection. Each source deserves a brief reflection.
(1) Poverty of Spirit
Jesus said the poor in spirit are happy because they experience the kingdom of Heaven. People who are too filled with themselves (the "rich") miss this joy. Material poverty is simply a symbol of spiritual poverty. Whether we are actually materially poor, or ranked among the rich and famous, our true and lasting happiness comes only from spiritual poverty.
The only people who experience this are those who have an awareness of their inner life. Those who take a journey within the self will one day arrive at a boundary they cannot seem to cross. Like a jogger who hits a "wall" and believes he or she cannot go further, inner searchers also run up against a frustrating block. No political power, muscular strength, or fat bank accounts help here. The person may be as brilliant as Einstein, ingenious as Michelangelo or logical as Aristotle. None of these talents can move the person through the inside wall. Brains and money falter at this inner boundary.
Only poverty of spirit will move us through it. This is the poverty that moves us to acknowledge we have no resources of our own to go further. We will not like this challenge. It will make us feel hostile, stubborn, and uneasy. It is hard to stop being god. We must confront ourselves as honestly as we ever did before.
No one wants to abandon the illusion that we are presumably independent of God, even ostensibly religious people, especially those who bravely set out on the journey of faith. Even though circumstances may force us to depend on others in this world, we live by the myth that we can make it on our own in the inner journey. Religious as we think we are, we bristle at depending on God. After all, should not adults be self-determining?
In this sacred space - our personal inner limit - Christ offers us the cross. Jesus asks us to accept our own finiteness, our boundary, and our limit. He is not trying to make us feel inadequate nor is he "putting us in our place." Jesus is excited that we have come to the turn in the road where we could begin to experience resurrection. All we need to do is stretch out our hesitant hands of faith and honestly pick up our limits, own them, rest in dependence on the Lord, and wait for the miracle of divine response. That is when Jesus takes us across the river of death and into the kingdom of resurrection. Then we lose our own limits and walls. Because of Jesus we walk in a free, bigger inner world. Jesus enriches our consciousness with happiness and surprising new strength.
(2) Hunger for God
The second source of happiness is hunger for God. Those who empty themselves with self-preoccupations will be filled with Christ's happiness. Those who are too filled with there selves will feel spiritually empty. Most people pass their days satisfying their various hungers. Some of this is legitimate and necessary, such as taking care of one's family, health, and needs for a decent way of life.
But as one's inner life develops, there are hungers that should be let go so that one may be empty enough to be filled with God. What are some of these passionate desires? Some invest their hopes of self-fulfilment totally in their career and profession. Some crave recognition from peers and employers. Others collect affirmation to the point where no amount of it is enough. A few are sympathy gatherers, adopting a mournful face and slumped shoulders to obtain a deluge of solicited compassion.
Now it is healthy for a person to have received a reasonable measure of self-fulfilment, recognition, affirmation, and sympathy. The problem arises when the person hungers too much for such satisfactions and wants to fill up the self with these daily strokes. Jesus noted that the people who are "rich" with such fillings are spiritually empty. Only when they are willing to let go of such longings will they feel a hunger for God and lasting love. Only when the native human appetite is redirected away from self and toward the Holy Spirit of love, can there be a filling of the soul by divine and permanent satisfaction. We get what we hunger for. If we hunger for what will make empty, that is what happens. If we hunger for lasting love, we will receive it.
(3) The Grieving Shall Laugh
Mourning is a healing event in the face of personal loos due to some tragedy. Not just death-generate, it is often a ‘separation’ experience of some sort a good laugh. In the night of sorrow we sow our till we rejoice in the dawn.
Jesus agrees as he cites his third source of happiness. "Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh" (verse 21) Jesus took this well-known fact about grief and applied it to the comment of spiritual happiness. Our inner journey is a process of letting go. We shed a lot of heavy baggage. Each time we let go there is a jolt, a small death of loss and pain. We cannot help grieving but the outcome can become the cause of new joy.
The biblical Abraham left home, let go of friends; familiar surroundings and all those cultural ties that meant so much to him, He left the warm, familiar surroundings of his home. He grieved. The biblical narrative shows him going through many more wrenching separations. Yet after Abraham found joy. His is the experience of the psalmist, they go forth weeping ... they shall come back rejoicing" This has to be done in faith. Abraham's faith grew so deeply that he is still celebrated as the father of faith thousands of years later.
We have the same call. We may not like leaving the "home” of those aspects of self that diminish our ability to love and believe. The prospect of grieving distresses us; yet the results are worth the effort as they enable us to grow and mature. All the faith journeys in the Bible and church history tell us how effective this process is; Jesus wants us to be happy even when he cautions us, "First, you cry”.
(4) Let People Reject You
Christ's fourth source of happiness is acceptance of rejection when it occurs because we stand up for him. It has often been said we live in the "post-Christian era."' that the standards of the cultures where Christianity was ca dominant force no longer prevail. Some speak of the new standards as those of secular humanism. Whatever the term the reality is here.
A disciple of Christ today will often need to be counter-cultural. The disciple risks being rejected and insulted because of this but will come away from the experience with soul intact and preserved.
Our post-Christian culture can cause our Christianity to be watered down with a series of small compromises. Each compromise wears a hole in the rock of our faith in Christ. Loss of the good opinion of others scares us. Popular acclaim means too much to us. We abandon our hero journey. Like fish we swallow the hook, line and lead sinker of popular approval. We wriggle helplessly, mouth open, for a few more crumbs of fame and fortune. It is never enough and it never satisfies.
Yet Jesus patiently invites us to real happiness. To be despised for
being morally courageous far outweighs craven compromise with an anti-Christian
standard. To be insulted for standing up for the cause of love surpasses
praise for supporting self-destructive behaviour. To be denounced for
loving Jesus will do more good for people than collaborating with those
who dismiss Jesus, his church, and his teachings.
© Fr Michael Fuller: March 2009