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Blessed are you who are poor… woe to you who are rich. (Luke 6: 20, 24)

Regular readers of Restoration know Catherine Doherty to be a woman of passionate intensity and spiritual depth. She was for the most part a serious woman with a serious message to give, delivered usually in a pretty se­rious tone.

Less well-known is her whimsical, playful side, her sense of humor, which for the most part, alas, doesn’t show up in her published writings.

I’m thinking of something she used to say about the par­ousia, the final coming of Christ, and the establishing of the kingdom in its full­ness, that in a sense is a comi­cal paraphrase of the Gospel for the 6th Sunday of the year, Luke 6:20-26, the Beatitudes according to Luke.

Catherine was a woman of generous proportions, and she held to a certain Eastern Eu­ropean aesthetic regarding the proper size, shape, and weight one should be. The idea that you could never be too thin was def­initely foreign to her.

So she would say, from time to time, that “In the parousia, all you fat ones will be thin, you thin ones will be fat, and those of you who are just right… well, that’s just too bad for you!”

Allowing for differences of tone and content, that’s more or less Luke’s version of the Be­atitudes. They’re very different from the more familiar Beati­tudes in Matthew 5.

There, Jesus is laying out the fundamental ethos of the Kingdom of God, the heights and depths of the way of life to which we are all called: poor in spirit, meek, peace-makers, pure in heart, hungering for righteousness… well, we all know the list, or should.

In Luke, a very similar list of Beatitudes takes on a very different meaning. Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weep­ing, the hated… for they shall be rich, full, rejoicing and reward­ed. Woe to the rich, the over-full, the laughing, the spoken-well-of… for they shall be poor and hungry, weeping and re­buked.

It’s simply the great rever­sal, and Jesus is making it very clear to all and sundry that, no matter what your current state of affairs is here in this world, it’s all going to be upside-down, inside-out, and topsy-turvy in the next.

The fat will be thin, the thin will be fat, so nobody take any of it too seriously, eh?

Take seriously, that is, the current state of affairs. The Lord, in this iteration of the Beatitudes, signals to us that everything we know now about “how life is,” everything we know about “how the world works,” everything we know about “who we are, and what our lives are about,” … well, all of that is going to be radically, utterly different, then.

It’s about the now and the then, and the complete rever­sal of fortune from the one to the other.

It’s not a question (at least, I don’t think it is), of having to be wildly ashamed and guilty about having possessions and food and rollicking good times and hu­man respect. It is most certainly a question of not being attached to any of those things, for the simple reason that none of them is lasting.

It’s also not a question of be­ing bitterly resentful or envious or contemptuous if we find our­selves on the other end of the spectrum—poor and hungry and all that.

“Yeah, look at all you rich guys—you’re all going to get it in the end! You’ll be sorry!”

No, that’s not quite the spirit of Christ there, eh?

So what is it a matter of, then? The Lord goes on in Luke 6 to lay out the fundamental ethos of Christian life—love of ene­mies—giving to everyone, do­ing unto others, being merciful as God is merciful, not judging, building our life on the rock of Christ and our faithful obedi­ence to him.

It seems to me that Luke 6 taken all together gives us a pretty clear message. Name­ly, everything in this world is subject to change—the rich and poor, the thin and fat, the laughing and weeping, the re­spected and reviled. All of it—all of us—will be radically re­configured in the life of the kingdom.

So don’t get caught up in all those twists and turns of for­tune. None of them last. Fo­cus your whole energy and at­tention on one thing and one thing only: following Jesus on the path of merciful love and generous care for others.

Now of course, if each and all embrace that ethos, then of course the rich and the well-fed will give, give, give to the poor and the hungry, to the point of personal cost to themselves and to the point where maybe the poor won’t be quite so hun­gry any more, right? In other words, we don’t have to wait for the parousia for at least some of this to happen.

But here and now, on this Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time, when we simply sit at Jesus’ feet and hear these strange, challenging words—blessed are you poor, you hungry … woe to you who are rich, who are full—the in­vitation is to reflect on how utterly meaningless all these social and economic class dis­tinctions are, all the ways we measure who is up and who is down, who’s in and who’s out, the thin and the fat, if you will.

No, all of it means precisely nothing. And all this means is that everything is the quality of our love, our mercy, our gen­erosity, our service, and funda­mentally our obedience to the Lord and his Gospel.

Those are the things that will endure in the Kingdom of God. The rest is passing show and the dross that burns away when that kingdom dawns upon us in light and glory that endures forever.s

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