6th Sunday Year C 2022

 

6^th. Sunday of Year (C)

(Jeremiah 17:5-8; 1^st. Corinthians 15:12, 16-20; St. Luke 6:17, 20-26)

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Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, whose heart turns away from the Lord.

Jeremiah had a great deal of experience with duplicitous men: kings and religious authorities, ordinary people of faith or no faith; and his judgement of ‘human beings’ generally was based on that experience.  But his judgement was based even more on his awareness of the blessings that God had already given Israel and was preparing to bestow a yet greater one on them (Jeremiah 31:33):

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be My people.  

However, though the Law was, indeed, in their minds, written on their parchments, and meant to be written on their hearts, many of the children of Israel had, in Jesus’ days ‘turned away from the Lord’, so that when He came among them to be their Saviour and make them children of God, He was crucified.  And we heard in our second reading Saint Paul -- Jesus’ specially chosen one to proclaim His Gospel to the nations -- berating some members of the Church he had founded in Jesus’ name in the Greek city of Corinth, using words not unlike those of Jeremiah:

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ we are the most pitiable people of all.

Paul said that because certain individuals were saying that there was no resurrection of the dead!  Obviously, they did not rightly understand Jesus as the Christ, perhaps because they were Christian converts of Sadducee origin' indeed, even former members of the synagogue in Corinth, where Paul had first proclaimed Jesus as the Christ, before going on to found a Christian Church there; for St. Luke tells us in his Gospel that Sadducees had opposed Jesus towards the end of His public ministry:

Sadducees approached Jesus saying that there is no resurrection.

They had then tried to confound Jesus with a trick question about seven brothers, one wife, and the Law of Moses, but to their imagined conundrum Jesus answered:

You are misled because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God.  Have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?  He is not the God of the dead but of the living.  (Matthew 22: 29-32)

Dear People of God, the Old Testament dispensation and its Scriptures had been given to show God’s Chosen People, to teach them of the fact and about the nature, of sin in men’s lives: that sin separates sinners from the one true God Who is the All Holy One, as it had alienated Israel from the Father Who had deliberately chosen them for His own People by calling them out of the slavery of Egypt and giving them their own land flowing with milk and honey.  Correspondingly, the whole purpose and aim of the new dispensation  which Jeremiah prophesied -- the new and eternal covenant to be offered by God to Israel and through Israel to the whole world -- would bring not only forgiveness of sins, but also the sanctification of all who would believe in the Good News of Jesus Christ, which was able to purify and free mankind from their primordial slavery to sin by the Gift of most His Holy Spirit Who would enable them to rejoice as children of God, new-born in Jesus Christ as members of His mystical Body, for the praise and eternal glory of the Father of all.   

You are aware that St. Matthew tells us of Jesus’ celebrated Sermon on the Mount; possibly, scholars say, reported, presented in that way, by Matthew for his Jewish-Christian Church congregation, because of their life-long familiarity with the Law of God given on Mount Sinai to Moses.  Today, however, St. Luke’s Gospel gives us a like sermon of Jesus but presents it as His Sermon on the Plain or Plateau, that is, a sermon given at the people’s level to the people actually with Jesus and hearing Him, an account shorter and less Jewish in character than St. Matthew’s presentation of it as a sermon given to Moses alone on the very top of Mount Sinai

Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount begins with the words, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’, rather impersonal and legal, whereas Luke’s Sermon on the Plain begins:

Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of Heaven is yours; blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.                              

That crowd gathered around Jesus on the Plain had come far and wide to hear Jesus and to learn from Him: they were poor, in need of Jesus’ help, ‘hungry’ for His teaching and truth, they were actually weeping for their sins, because they had come to a prophet Who called on them to repent and actually enabled and inspired them to do just that.   Above all however those people were to be made aware of what awaited Jesus Himself and how they themselves might be called upon to share in it with Him as true disciples:

Blessed are you when people hate, exclude, insult, and denounce you, on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!  Your reward will be great in heaven!

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ St. Luke’s Sermon on the Plain is directed to us Catholics and Christians living today, in times of pandemic and resurgent paganism, where millions, far from seeking out Jesus for the true wisdom of life, are deliberately turning their hearts away from the One True God and the Christ Whom He has sent, and rejoicing in what they foolishly consider as their new-found freedom: to do what they want, as and when they will; to enjoy their own chosen pleasures as and how they will; to flourish before men, secure in their power, popularity, and possessions; and eventually, to contentedly anticipate -- if not exactly a well-earned rest -- but certainly a gentle entry into the restful peace of untouchable oblivion.

BUT! our Gospel recalls to our minds once again the spirit of those words of Jeremiah, ‘Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, whose heart turns away from the Lord’, by continuing further with Jesus’ own words of warning (not cursing):

Woe to you who are rich, who are filled, who laugh now; woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.

Yes indeed, woe to all who turn their hearts away from the Lord in their search for the good things and comforts the god of this world offers to all who will – as Jesus would not -- bow down and serve, worship, him; woe because:

You justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts.  For what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God. (Luke 16:15)