Sixth Sunday of the Year, C -- February 15, 2004

            Few Gospel passages are better known than the Beatitudes, where Jesus pronounces those blessed who are of a certain quality of person, or who are persons going through certain experiences.  But on the surface of it, these blessings make little sense.  Why is it that someone who is poor seemingly automatically attains to the Kingdom of God?  Why is it that because someone weeps now, he is assured of laughing tomorrow?  Why do those who are hated deserve a great reward?   If only the poor inherit the Kingdom, then most of us here have a lot of things to get rid of.  And then there is no room for any laughter now lest we only weep tomorrow.  Or is this what our Lord means?

            I don’t think so, not for a minute.  Implicit all through today’s readings is the theme of something, if we are careful to consider it, that will throw light upon this seeming problem.  That theme is hope.  The great virtue of hope.  But this is no easy subject to comprehend, because the word, the very idea, of hope has become so confused in modern times. 

            The true biblical understanding of hope has little room in contemporary religion that has little room for God.  God is the one subject that many clerics whom I have been around never talk about.  Sermons or homilies hardly mention Him.  “God” often appears in a sentence in the form of some expletive, but seldom otherwise.  Many of the hymns today sung in churches assiduously avoid mentioning this three-letter word.  Modern religion is all about me.  Religion has to do with making me comfortable with me.  Occasionally present-day religion will get up enough nerve to talk about being nice to others, as if that were some great virtue. 

            But religion, true religion, is all about God.  And the virtue of hope sets its sights on God and what He promises.  The first sentence of today’s first reading says, “Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord.”  And St. Paul repeats that idea in today’s second reading:  “If our hopes in Christ are limited to this life only, we are the most pitiable of men.”  Most pitiable.  Strong words.  A strong warning, especially to us in our day and time, when religion has become a means of getting along better in this life only. 

            Speaking of such a “comfort religion,” C.S. Lewis said that if we seek for comfort only, we will never know the truth and will despair; if we seek the truth -- which ultimately is God Himself -- we will know Him and the most heavenly of comforts, consolation indescribable.  And hope, that great potential habit of thought and behavior given to us by God in baptism, is what helps us keep our eyes fixed on that which is our true goal -- God. 

            Here then is the context of our Lord’s words in today’s gospel.  There is nothing necessarily virtuous about being poor, or being hungry, or being sad, or being hated.  But there is something seriously wrong with being rich because we have made money the highest aim of our life.  There is something ultimately damning about being full because we have made food and pleasure our god, while others around us go without.  There is something frighteningly serious about laughing now when we may need to spend time weeping over our sins and sharing in the grief of others.  And there is something especially dangerous -- damningly dangerous -- about being well-spoken of because we have, like the false prophets of old, flattered and compromised and told people what we think they wanted to hear.  “Woe to you when all speak well of you.  Their fathers treated the false prophets in just this way.”  Woe to bishops and priests who hunger and thirst not for righteousness and holiness and for the salvation of God’s people but instead for mere, passing popularity.  False prophets.

            These are not my words, my thoughts, but those of Jesus Christ Himself.  I apply them first to myself and tremble just a bit.  And I speak them to you because He, the Lord, would have me do so.  But Jesus did not speak these woes just to frighten us, but that we might hope.  Hope in God, not in money, pleasure, or a fleeting, temporary happiness or in some short-lived popularity.  Hope in God, who is the giver of every good gift.  Hope in God, who is still there when disaster strikes, when sorrows close in, when death inevitably approaches.  Hope in God who does not let us down, but takes us through this life with a sense of purpose, so that we know how to live with wealth or without it, so that we know how to truly laugh from the joy of a peaceful heart and how to comfort others in their sorrow, so that we know whom to thank for the banquets we enjoy and whom to serve in the poor around us; so that we know that even at the end of our life on this earth, there’s more, so very much more, yet to come.  Hope in God.

            Let me illustrate this.  Years ago, while I was in a parish in a big city, I received an emergency phone call from the hospital chaplain.  A man, still conscious and breathing his last had urgently requested – against the wishes of his non-Catholic family – the presence of a priest.  He had asked to be put on a kind of ventilator so that he could hang on for two things:  for the arrival from out of town of one of his daughter and for confession.  When I walked into the room he looked at me with eyes full of fear, fear of death, and then, as I took off my overcoat, he saw my collar, and relief spread over his face.  I prayed for him, reminded him of the goodness and mercy of God and heard his confession and anointed him.  We talked for a bit.  He could barely speak but he told me enough to let me know he was no longer afraid.  Where would hope be if it were all “limited to this life only” (as St. Paul described it)?  This dear man would have been among the most pitiable of men.  But his hope, in the end, proved to be elsewhere, in God.  And so he was truly blessed.  Blessed was this man who has wept now, for now he laughs.  Because his hope was in God.