BLESSED
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February 15, 2025“Am I blessed or am I cursed? When will I say I have more blessings than curses in life?
The First Reading from the Book of the prophet Jeremiah(17:5-8) contains both a blessing and a curse, a contrast
between the one who trusts and hopes in the Lord and the one whose heart turns away from the Lord. The Responsorial Psalm echoes the same thought,- the one who follows the ways of the Lord is like a tree that planted in the streams of water, it prospers and bears fruits, whereas, the wicked is like chaff which the wind drives away. Similarly,our Gospel this 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time presents these‘blessings’ and ‘woes’.
If the Gospel of Matthew has the beatitudes or the Sermon on the Mount, Luke’s Gospel has its Sermon on the Plain,a parallel of the beatitudes but was presented in a shorter form which contains four ‘blessings’ and four ‘woes’ (Luke 6:17, 20-26). One of the best comparisons perhaps that Iread in reflecting this part of the Gospel of Luke is that, the blessings and woes are series of roses and thorns.
Jesus identifies the poor, the hungry, the weeping and those persecuted as being in the side of the roses, they are blessed. At first glance, these seem not to be blessings atall, but being blessed does not only refer in relation to being happy or fortunate. Being blessed goes beyond material sufficiency, its Greek origin, makarios is related more closely with being united with God in righteousness and right relationship with Him. The struggles that come with being blessed: poor being part of the Kingdom of God,the hungry will be filled, the weeping will have time to laugh and those persecuted being rewarded in heaven.
Remember the Sermon on the Plain: Jesus is grounded in the realities of life, His words are plain and concrete and on the level of our day to day experiences and struggles. He confronts us with our responsibility to share and respond to these struggles, to be part of His mission with compassion and love, to see the needs of those around us the way Jesus sees them and be the instruments and possibly, the source of blessings. He invites us to be the roses and not the thorns, not the woes.
The Kingdom of God is not about our accomplishments and successes. Jesus invites us to set aside our own thinking of being blessed. The roses and thorns in His teachings dare us to look at our personal life and the world we live in the way God treats it. The beatitudes calls us to better understand how the reign of God looks like and to look at the world as God’s looks at it as blessed and beloved.
Blessed is the one who is able to accept and be part in the upside down world of God for he/she allows the Kingdom of God to be revealed but woe to the one who misses this opportunity and turns away and rejects the invitation of God to be part of it.
