When giving blessings, priests and deacons often begin by quoting Psalm 124: “Our help is in the name of the Lord.” To which the one(s) receiving the blessing, along with everyone else present, responds with, “Who made heaven and earth.”1 More than a throwaway line, this is meant to acknowledge God’s goodness and power before conveying His blessing.
This is a gentler way of saying what the prophet Jeremiah, says in our first reading, when he insists that the person who puts his trust human beings is cursed while calling blessed the one who puts her trust in God. It is so easy to get caught up in human affairs that the Kingdom of God, which Jesus came to inaugurate and will return to fully establish, becomes something of an abstract idea instead of the concrete reality it should be for Christians. Our mission is to make the Kingdom present in the here and now even as we wait in joyful hope for Christ's return.
Our Gospel today, taking its name from the part of the passage that tells us Jesus “stood on a stretch of level ground,” is Luke’s Sermon on the Plain.2 Quite obviously, this is a parallel passage to Saint Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Not only is the ground more level, what Jesus teaches in Luke is a bit more plain.
There is no way to get around the difficulty of either our reading from Jeremiah or our Gospel. God’s kingdom as taught by Jesus seems like something of a bizarro world to us, that is a backwards world, the world turned upside down. Blessedness, according to Jesus, has nothing to do with worldly success. Rather, worldly success often endangers blessedness.
Who were the false prophets to whom Jesus referred? These were the ones who were the opposite of Jeremiah and the true prophets. False prophets told the people and those in power what they wanted to hear, not what they needed to hear. “All is well,” they said, while insisting nothing needed to change, embracing the status quo.
Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel, by Michelangelo. Yorck Project, 2002. Public domain Wikipedia Commons.
Prophets called Israel back to fidelity to its covenant with God. As you might imagine, this often did not go down well. Jeremiah, born into a priestly family, was called by God to his prophetic ministry at a young age. His prophetic career spanned five decades. Over the course of that time, he was repeatedly persecuted.
Jeremiah’s prophetic message centered around calling out Israel’s idolatry, social injustices, and moral decay. It was part and parcel of the message of every true prophet to stand up for the poor and powerless to the rich and powerful. Jeremiah learned from a young age to trust in God, not in man. He learned this through many trials.
Members of Jeremiah’s family tried to kill him because he prophesied against idolatrous shrines. When he complained to God, the Lord told him, "Don't worry, it will get worse." As a result of resistance to his message and persecution, more than once, Jeremiah threatened to quit being a prophet. He was also beaten, imprisoned, and put in the stockade. Finally, Jeremiah was exiled to Egypt against his own will, where he likely spent the rest of his life.
Jesus himself was arrested, subjected to a sham trial, stripped, beaten, and crucified. In other words, being the prophet par excellence, Jesus experienced the treatment of a prophet, of one who challenged human power not only in the name of God but as true God from true God. His message is consistent with that of the Old Testament prophets, both major and minor, who challenged the status quo and the misplaced priorities of religious and political leaders.
What is the takeaway for us from all this? As Christians, we serve the poor and dispossessed and are committed to helping end their destitution. We feed the hungry, which is one of the corporal works of mercy. We both suffer with (that is what the word compassion means) and comfort those who weep, those who are scared, suffering, distraught.
While, according to Jesus, being despised on account of God’s Kingdom is a cause for rejoicing, if we read a bit further on in the same chapter of Luke, several verses beyond our Gospel passage, Jesus nonetheless teaches: “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”3
We’ve heard a lot bit lately about the so-called ordo amoris, the order of love, which is set forth by Saint Augustine.4 In his recent letter to the U.S. bishops, rather than getting bogged down in a precise interpretation of an extra-biblical theological concept, Pope Francis insisted: “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ which is also found in Luke, “that is,” the Holy Father continues, “by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”5
In a world torn by strife and rife with human division, this remains a prophetic message. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a masterclass in love of neighbor. The man beaten, robbed, and left for dead is presumably a devout Jew, though this is not made explicit. It is safe to say that Jews despised Samaritans more than Samaritans despised Jews. Yet, Jesus made a Samaritan, who he sets in opposition to very devout Jews, perhaps only concerned with their own ritual purity, who cross the road to avoid the man beaten bloody, the protagonist.
Jesus taught this parable in answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” He ends this teaching by saying, “Go and do likewise," saying in effect, “Go and do like this Samaritan.” I think it's hard for us to imagine how humbling, perhaps even humiliating, this would sound to Jesus’ interlocutors. Hence, meditating deeply on this parable is precisely what will guide you to a rightly ordered love of neighbor, which, in the end, according to Jesus, is what truly matters.
1 Psalm 124:8.↩
2 Luke 6:17.↩
3 Luke 6:27-28.↩
4 Saint Augustine. City of God, Book XV, 22.↩
5 See Luke 10:25-37; Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America, sec. 6.↩