Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
This past Wednesday at our school Mass, we celebrated the Feast of Conversion of St. Paul. And in my homily I was talking about how God chose St. Paul, even though he had started out persecuting Christians, and trying to arrest them. And in part of the homily I referenced both what we heard in our second reading today, as well as when St. Paul says that he was given a thorn in his flesh, but God assured St. Paul that God’s power is made manifest in weakness. To illustrate the point between being strong and weak, I asked one of our eighth grade students to come forward (he didn’t know he was going to be called forward, either). This was one of our students who plays football and basketball, and is pretty athletic. Once he was forward, I asked him to flex. He looked at me for a second, turned a little red with embarrassment, but then flexed and showed off his guns (that’s how some young men talk about their muscles). And I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize how strong he was! After Mass he told me that he benches 200 lbs. I can barely add any weights to the bar, so I was the demonstration of one who is weak.
St. Paul reminds us today that we don’t have to be the wisest, we don’t have to be the most powerful, we don’t have to be nobly born in order to follow Jesus. God so often chooses those who are not considered strong or powerful or wise to be the vessels of His power. That’s the way our God works. More often than not, God’s choices don’t make sense in our modern understanding, whether modern is in the time of Jesus, the first millennium, the second millennium, or even now in the third millennium since the birth of Christ.
As strange as Jesus’ teaching sounds to us, it probably sounded as weird for the people listening to Jesus. Now, as then, we don’t tend to think of the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who desire righteousness, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness as people who are blessed. Those people, in fact, seem like the ones who are the victims of society, and those who get run over by everybody. But Jesus calls them blessed.
How are they blessed? They are attentive to God and His will, rather than the will of the world. They are the ones who spend their attention and energy on serving God and bringing about His reign, rather than trying to hoard money, grab after power, cheat people, seek after vengeance, or look for and act on the desires of lust.
And though Jesus taught on the mount in Galilee some 2,000 years ago, those words still apply to us today. If we want to be blessed we have to rely on God, work for justice and peace, be meek and merciful, and be clean of heart. Clean of heart may be one of the hardest in today’s world. There are so many groups that make purity difficult: every second over $3,000 is being spent on lewd web pages. Lack of purity can lead to addictions, can rewire the brains of our youth not to appreciate what is truly good and truly beautiful, can destroy marriages and families, and promote human trafficking. It is an enslaving force in general. But Jesus desires us to be free. He wants to unshackle us from this uncleanness, so that we can live in true blessedness. If you or someone you know struggles with lack of purity, like pornography, the Diocese of Lansing website has resources on its Marriage and Family Life webpage.
No matter what beatitude strikes you as the most difficult, being weak is not a problem. God chooses “the weak to shame the strong,” as St. Paul reminds us in our second reading. All of us have weaknesses. And so all of us can be chosen by God to show that God does great things, not by human accomplishment, but by His grace.
