---

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

February 17, 2019

Luke 6:17, 20-26

Next weekend there is tough news for us, and there is no way to coat it with sugar. People who seem to have everything going for them live in great peril. Security blinds people to the need of surrender and letting go to make room for the ever-surprising presence and action of God. We are the rich and we are the powerful. Even though many are burdened with debt, it happens because we have credit, and credit allows us to buy more and more. There are some who do not even have the power of plastic. The culture of the consumer and the power of the borrower continues to neglect the really “dirt poor” among us, keeps them silent and invisible. In a nation that watches the rich get richer and the poor grow in more desperate numbers, this Gospel is serious business. It confronts us with the difficulty of being a good person in the absence of a good society. I would propose that the Beatitudes offer those who would follow Jesus with Luke’s Gospel a kind of “guidance system” to correct the distortions of attitude, behavior and values of contemporary culture whether it is the affluent culture of Luke’s time or our own. Luke and the Jesus he proclaims reverses the assumption that blessedness lies in riches, pleasure, comfort and happiness, and asserts that the fulfillment of every need and desire is found in God and in God’s ways.

Fr. Tom Boyer