Luke 6:20-31

The Paradox of the Saints 
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Today we light candles. We light them today, because we bear in our hearts a memory of a loved one and the church has given us a special day to relive it, in the stillness of a few quiet moments.
 
That day, of course, is All Saints’ Day, always November 1, but always observed in our church on the nearest Sunday. 
 
To light a candle for our loved one on All Saints’ Day is a symbolic gesture.
 
The flame recalls to us a face, a story, a life lived. And we will watch as the light grows and as the flames of each candle join to emit a gentle radiance.
 
Candle light is always fragile. It flickers and it’s easily snuffed out. It reminds us of the wisdom of James, that life appears for a little while and then vanishes (4:14).
 
For God has created us from dust and to dust we shall return. And yet, even so, a single flame can scatter the darkness. And flames joined in rows remind us of the children of God who shine like stars in the universe.
 
“Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). 
 
Let us ponder for a moment these words from the First Letter of John.
 
For they are appropriate to All Saints’ Day, which reinforces the twofold truth contained in them: what we are now as children of God and what we shall be when Christ appears
 
It speaks about what we are now. Or rather, it allows Jesus to speak about what we are now.
 
To this end, it directs us to the teaching of Jesus on the Sermon on the Plain, Luke’s more compact version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.
 
There Jesus sorts people under categories that confer on them the status of “blessed.”
 
Parenthetically, it is worth noting that in the Catholic Church the name “blessed” is awarded to those who are on their way to “sainthood.”
That makes sense. For how can we imagine anyone as a saint who does not first have the blessing of God?
 
But what exactly is a “saint”? A spiritual athlete, capable of long periods of fasting, all-night prayer vigils, and constant victories over the temptations of the flesh?
 
Or perhaps even a spiritual superhero, who has traversed distant foreign lands, at great personal cost, to win souls for Christ?
 
There may be saints among such as these, but these exploits do not in themselves make someone a saint, or even blessed.
 
Let us listen to Jesus, to learn about the ones he considers “blessed.” First, he considers those who are poor now to be blessed.
 
When reflecting on how to title our meditation today, the word “paradox” came to mind. By “paradox” I mean an apparent contradiction between two states of affairs that we must hold together in tension and affirm both as true.
 
For example, how is it that we are to hold together both “poor” and “blessed” and affirm both as true at one and the same time? I mean, you are either “poor” or “blessed” as it seems to me. The one necessarily cancels out the other. 
 
Do we not sometimes hear people use the language of “blessed” when referring to a financial windfall?
 
Some even say: “The Lord has really blessed us this year.”
 
Conversely, we almost never hear anyone say of the poor: “The Lord has really blessed them.”
 
On the contrary, would we not rather be tempted to say of them that they are cursed, that they do not have the favor of God on their lives?
 
But not Jesus. He calls them blessed. And his speech is performative here. That is the seminary professor’s way of saying that Jesus’ word creates the reality that he announces.
 
You see, in the beatitudes or “blessing sayings” Jesus is not just describing a blessed life, he is bestowing it. He’s not just naming reality, he’s defining it.
 
James, whose epistle has been described as a commentary on the teaching of Jesus in these “sermons,” instructs us as follows:
 
“Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?” (James 2:5).
 
The poor are those who are also hungry, who weep, and are hated, insulted, and excluded.
 
They are one and the same, since from poverty flows a whole host of miseries, as those of us who mingle with the poor here in Ionia can attest.
 
Jesus is close to them. Luke does not hesitate to draw our attention to this fact again and again.
 
And Jesus calls them blessed, not because of what they possess, but because of who possesses them. They belong to God. And God is pleased to give them a kingdom.
 
Perhaps here a point of clarification is in order. We must not assume that Jesus is teaching that the disciple must choose to be poor and hungry and sorrowful to be blessed.
 
Nor is he saying that the disciple must choose to be rejected and ridiculed in order to qualify for the divine blessing.
 
Self-flagellation is a symptom of pathology, not a mark of sanctity.
 
Much less is he saying that the disciple is to seek to be rich, to be insensitive to the needs of others while living his best life not.
 
Nor is he saying that the disciple must strive to be well-liked by everyone at all costs.
 
The blessing rather consists in the disciple’s relationship with Jesus—to be where he is, to go where he goes. No greater blessing can be conceived by the disciple.
 
You know, Steve was pointing this out last week in adult Sunday school class when calling our attention to the example of Ruth in the Old Testament.
 
You may remember the story.
 
Ruth was a Moabitess, who married the son of Naomi, a Jewish woman. Then tragedy struck. Naomi lost both her husband and her two sons, leaving both herself and Ruth widows.
 
Naomi was about to return home to Israel, but urged Ruth to stay in Moab.
 
Ruth had every reason to stay back in her homeland, where life was familiar, predictable.
 
But she replied: “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried” (Ruth 1:6-7).
 
Disciples want to be where Jesus is. Where he goes, they want to go. They find their security in him.
 
And they find comfort in his promises, which will anchor them when the bad times come.
 
Insofar as they experience poverty, hunger, grief, and rejection, because they are disciples who belong to Jesus, so far are they blessed.
 
They are blessed now. But let’s be clear. They also will be blessed.
The disciples are blessed not only because they belong to Jesus, but also because they will experience the “great reversal” when the kingdom of God is realized at the end of the age.
 
For the arrival of God’s kingdom marks the time when God sets an upside-down world right side up.
 
Those who are poor now will possess the treasures of the kingdom of God then. Those who are hungry now will be satisfied then. Those who weep now will laugh then. And those who suffer at the hands of others now because of their commitment to Christ will receive their reward then.
 
These are the promises that anchor the disciples. Not that suffering is good, but that God is faithful. “Weeping may remain for the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5).
 
Now to each of the blessings there corresponds a woe. What distinguishes the sorts of people on whom Jesus pronounces a woe is lack of a relationship with him.
 
They do not want to be where he is. They do not find their security in him. They find their security in their wealth. People who have great wealth see no reason to depend on God to provide for their needs.
 
Of course, we are generalizing here. There are wealthy people who do see God as the source of their wealth and give generously.
 
But there are fewer of these than we may think. Wealth is a spiritual danger about which Luke repeatedly warns us.
 
Later in Luke, Jesus warns a man to be on his guard against all kinds of greed, because a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions (12:15).
 
And then there is his familiar statement that it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (18:25).
 
The rich that Jesus has in mind here seem to be concerned only for themselves and for the present moment.
 
The rich people accumulate wealth for themselves even at the expense of others.
 
The rich are evidently interested in their comfort now. And there is comfort in wealth—but let’s be sure that we see it in proper perspective. As the Apostle Paul reminds us, “We brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it” (1 Timothy 6:7).
 
Jesus assures the rich that comfort will indeed be granted to them now, but at the high price of their own future.
 
You see, we can, as so many do, devote all our time and energy to securing our lives against the troubles and hardships that threaten us from the future.
 
Now, granted, prudence is a virtue; there is wisdom in preparing for what lies ahead.
 
But there comes a point when prudence turns into anxiety, when preparing for a rainy day becomes the obsessive fear that enough will never be enough.
 
And then we must ask: does living like that really amount to any kind of life at all?
 
Listen. The source of life is not wealth. That is what our culture wants you and me to believe. The source of life is Christ. This is what the disciples discovered. And in this realization they found security, comfort and hope for the future.
 
All Saints’ Day provides us an occasion to remember those to whom Jesus promised blessing, those who in this life lived as his faithful disciples, as we already mentioned.
 
Of course, there are the outstanding saints, examples of the faith, people who have walked with God throughout the ages, at great personal cost, even to the point of sacrificing their very lives. We do well to learn about them in books, podcasts, and documentaries.
 
But to restrict the term “saint” exclusively to them is to define the term too narrowly.
 
There are saints who have not been canonized by the church, whose holiness is known only to God, and who have never been publicly recognized as saints on earth.
 
These are the ordinary people who have lived out their faith, inspired by a vision for the future found in the teaching of Jesus—these also are included in the great number of saints that we honor on All Saints’ Day. On this day especially we are made aware that to God they are not ordinary. 
 
The saying that virtue is its own reward is no doubt true. The saints who have gone before us probably did not think of themselves as possessing extraordinary virtue.
 
How could they? Virtue is disguised from those who focus not on themselves but on their family, on their church, and on their community, doing to others as they would have them do to them.
 
But the fulfillment they found in this focus reflects the reality that the blessing of the kingdom is experienced already now, even though the kingdom has not yet fully appeared.
 
Their blessing is but a prelude to the blessings promised in the future: the hungry will be satisfied, the mourners will be comforted, and the rejected will be embraced. Complete satisfaction, the fullness of joy, occurs in the celebration of God’s banquet table (Luke 14:15–24), where God will prepare a feast for all peoples. On that day, God will right every wrong.
 
In a few moments, we will light candles. As we do, we will recall those whose lives have borne witness to the light of Christ.
 
Each flame declares that darkness does not have the last word, as we have already mentioned.
 
And as the lights from the flames grow, we will see a sign of the great communion that unites the saints on earth with the saints in heaven—the living with those who have entered into eternal life—the communion of saints.
 
We’re not alone in the race we are running down here. The grandstands of heaven are filled with the departed saints all the way up to the highest bleacher seats.
 
They endured the hardships and struggle that attend the life of faith, they crossed the finish line, and now they wait for us to join them, encouraging us in our struggle. 
 
After our candles are lit, after our prayers of remembrance are said, we will come to the Lord’s Table.
 
For what we do there completes what we begin here. The lighted candles remind us of the saints; our eucharistic liturgy unite us with them, just as we acknowledge at the end of the Communion prayer, before we sing the Sanctus.
 
The table of the Lord joins time and eternity, earth and heaven, the church militant and the church triumphant, those who weep now and those who already rejoice.
 
At this table, all the promises of Jesus to his disciples are summed up and embodied in ordinary bread and wine, which become for us the sacrament of his body and blood.
 
At this table, we receive a foretaste of that great banquet where, as Revelation tells us, “God himself will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
 
At this table, faith anticipates sight, when love is perfected in communion, and we together, with all the saints, become like our Lord, for we shall see him as he is.
 
So let us light our candles in hope, and come to the table in thanksgiving.
 
For blessed are you who are poor, who hunger, who weep, who suffer in this life. Blessed are you because you belong to Jesus, both now and forever. Amen. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 


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