Sixth Sunday of the Year 2007
I have been hearing confessions for 38 years now and in all that time I have never had anyone confess to me that they fail to rejoice and be glad when they had been vilified by others!!
Now these three readings and very deep and can be taken together this week as one piece. the first thing that comes to mind when we stop and really listen to what they are saying is that they fly in the face of common sense. You can't make sense of them and try as you might to do mental contortions and make a rational teaching from them is pretty impossible.
I suggest therefore that really they function rather like a Buddhist koan. These are not riddles that you can work out an answer to in the normal level of consciousness but rather they are there to knock you clean out of the ivory tower of your rational thinking. They are NOT what you think!
So now go back to the texts again:
Jeremiah 17:5-8 warns against things of the flesh whose eyes do not see and who ends like a dry scrub in a wasteland... can we see here the injunction against conventional thinking. look at the metaphor of the tree . It gets its life from the underground into the stream of wisdom that is below the surface.
Then Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:12 and 16:20 talks this foolishness of resurrection. Now what sort of sense is that When you are dead you are dead and that's it! To know the truth of reality we have to go into our own innermost being (the tomb?) and discover there our immortality not as an explainable event but as a deep intuition
In Luke 6:17, 20-26 we have his version of the Beatitudes and what do we make of them We could give some sort of surface interpretation and end up like those who publish a book of answers to the koans.
So what we need to do is to allow ourselves to be immersed in the questions they raise to sit with them and actually become the paradox or rather the contradiction. We are to become a sign of contradiction with its transforming power. It it is in leaving all our efforts to figure it out that we our overtaken with the quality of hope that Paul speaks about. Like Paul we have to be knocked clear off our high horse to grovel in blindness on the ground until our eyes are opened. and as Marvin Gaye says "I can see clearly now" or as the title of Robert Barron's book in the words of the healed blind man "I was blind and now I can see"
Seeing this will provide an outrageous experience of hope and that will make the difference between existing and living life to the full. It will release the knowledge of our true nature and it will unlock the doors of compassion in our hearts that we will touch with gentleness and love all who we meet without even thinking about it.
