Luke 6:17, 20-26: Jesus Gives Advice on How to Make a Community Prosper

6th Sunday, Year C
16 February 2025

Luke 6:17, 20-26: Jesus Gives Advice on How to Make a Community Prosper
If we are honest, this gospel is an annoyance. Jesus predicts to his disciples and thus to the Christian community a future in which they will experience poverty, hatred, slander, and persecution. And he also demands that they be happy about it. Isn't that—sorry—perverse? Is Christianity perhaps the religion that produces all kinds of psychological distortions?

At the same time, the text is so central that we cannot avoid the questions it poses to us. So, what is it about?

Luke is not interested in throwing a stone between the rich and the poor. For him, poverty and wealth are not ideals of life, as we often hear in many sermons. For Luke, both poverty and richness can be a curse. He does not focus on poverty itself, but rather on the poor, the hungry, the grieving, and the crying. When Jesus or the evangelist Luke takes the side of the economically and socially poor, it is to preserve community life—so that rich and poor can meet on equal terms in the name of Christ. The goal is always the life of the community!

In Luke's eyes, economic and social status must not lead to division within the community of believers in Jesus. The gap between rich and poor members of the community is a challenge for all involved (cf. Gal 3:26-28), especially since poverty as such is not an ideal.

Luke tries to motivate his socially and financially better-off community members to contribute to a solidarity-based "gathering together" among those baptized into Christ. His gospel serves as a means of raising awareness and persuading those with possessions to act responsibly toward those without, toward those who weep and those who are hungry—fulfilling the teaching that "it is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35).

Anyone who reads the Beatitudes will think that the world we know is turned upside down (G.K. Chesterton). And that is exactly how it is—God's world is different; it serves as a correction to ours. Amid our discomfort with worries, problems, and needs, we need a different, corrective perspective. Through Jesus Christ, God wants to open our eyes to a new vision and invite us into His world.

Because: Our happiness is Jesus' heart's desire. He gets to the point in the Beatitudes, because they re-evaluate our reality.

Anyone who thinks that happiness is always about success, joy, beauty, health, and wealth is mistaken and will become unhappy. This is probably what Jesus meant with his cries of woe. Woe to those who derive their security only from material things, who live complacently or only self-centered.

Life includes the ability to reinterpret difficult, stressful, and unbearable experiences so that they become easier, more bearable, and, above all, meaningful. This enables us to recognize the healing in failure—because life is more than just success.

The Holy Year 2025 describes us Christians as "pilgrims of hope." This also means that we should not keep the hope that sustains us to ourselves but pass it on to those who have none. Our motto is not "me first" … and then, maybe—when I have the time and the desire—others too.

Have a wonderful Sunday.
Fr. Joseph Lam (PhD STD)