Homily

We can call this Sunday the "Sunday of the beatitudes and of joy" because of the Gospel passage taken from the well-known sermon. Jesus was in a rather delicate moment: he needed to organize that small group that he had gathered around him. We could say that he needs to transform it into a true and new community with people who were aware of it and accepted its spirit. Jesus spent the night in prayer. Besides, he did not come to do his will but that of the Father, and he did not only have to organize that group, but, rather, edify the community according to his Father’s will. We could assume that he had already spoken various times with his disciples about his mission and the task he was going to entrust to them involving them in his work. Jesus descended from the mountain and found himself before a large crowd of people. They all wanted to hear him, touch him, sense that he was close. The evangelist notes, with a degree of surprise, that also those "who were troubled with unclean spirits" had come to be freed. The crowd was extremely mixed, even disparate, but they were in agreement about one thing: they were waiting for a different, new life, better than the one they were leading, and they were hoping to be able to find it through the teacher who had come from Nazareth "for power came out from him and healed all of them."
Upon seeing the crowd, Jesus decided to inaugurate a new phase in his mission by preaching one of his most jolting sermons, the sermon of the Beatitudes. In Luke’s Gospel, differing from Matthew’s, Jesus preaches from a level place, as if to stay at the level of the people, of those tired, weary, ill, desperate people. He does not speak abstract words or with the tone of a manifesto for some new ideology; even less so is it an exhortation to an elite group of heroes. He directs his words to the poor, the sick, the weeping, the insulted and rejected, to those begging for a word for themselves, to those seeking to touch at least the hem of the prophet’s cloak with their own hands.
But the beatitude was not born out of the condition of misery and disease in which they were living: it would be cruel to assert as such. The beatitude consisted in the fact that God had chosen to be concerned about them first before the others. This was the new time Jesus came to open: God gave bread to the hungry, transformed the weeping of the afflicted into joy and the despair of the desperate into happiness. The kingdom is of the poor, from now on, because God is with them. The Gospel does not afford itself an easy and superficial moralizing of the "good poor," as if their difficult condition rendered them morally better than others. No. The poor are like all of us, good and bad. The beatitude comes from having God close because of condition of poverty. This is how it is for the sick and weak, for the prisoners and incarcerated. In their predicament and suffering, they no longer have to despair: God has chosen them as his friends and upon them God abundantly pours out his mercy. All is deeply human. Doesn’t a mother devote more time to her gravely ill child rather than to the other who is well?
It is also true that the poor feel more than the rich the need of asking for help, of begging, of raising their voices for invoking help. For those who are rich and satisfied, it is difficult to expect a radical change in their life, difficult for them to sense their limits and profound weakness. Rather, it is all too easy for them to think that they are not in need of anyone. We know this all too well from our own personal experience. Therefore, the Gospel, by way of contrast, adds to the four beatitudes ("blessed are you") four woes ("woe to you"): woe to you who are rich, woe to you who have your fill, woe to you who laugh, woe to you when people speak well of you. "Woe" because in these moments it is easier to feel self-sufficient and not in need of anything, not even God. The rich person, who is in each one of us, risks being totally turned in on himself or herself to the point of being imprisoned. "Woe to us" when we let the rich person, who is in us, prevail. Jesus does not want to exalt poverty or condemn richness per se. Salvation does not depend on our given state, but on feeling, or even better being children of God. If we, the rich, draw nearer to God, then the poor will be blessed because, together with the Lord, we will have them close to us as their brothers and sisters.