GOSPEL REFLCTION, WEDNESDAY, 23RD WEEK IN  ORDINARY TIME, 10 SEPTEMBER 2025

Luke 6:20-26.  In Ch. 6 of Luke’s gospel, Jesus has just chosen his twelve disciples to learn from him the ways of the Kingdom.  They are very ordinary men, one of whom was a rascal, a tax collector who collected money for the Romans (and some – a lot? -- for himself, to the detriment of those who paid), a traitor and a renegade.  Another (Simon the Zealot) was a rabid nationalist sworn to assassinate every traitor and every Roman official possible.  Not one of them was very wealthy, famous, or influential.  They were an odd mixture, so it  is amazing they could all learn to live together in peace for the most part, although one of them Juda Iscariot would in the end betray Jesus.  He notably chose them as his “friends.”  This odd company must have been a challenge for the Pharisees to understand, or for the Pharisees among us today.  Despite all their differences the disciples  continue to learn together from him and will eventually be sent out as his apostles with a mission to proclaim the Kingdom just as Jesus did.  In Luke’s gospel, immediately after the choosing of the twelve disciples, he gives them an important teaching,  “The Sermon on the Plain,” a parallel to the Sermon on the Mount in other gospels.  The Sermon on the Plain is addressed to these disciples as key elements of Jesus’ teaching of the Kingdom.

Luke’s version of the Sermon is short, consisting of four Beatitudes, and four “woes.”  The “woes” are sorrowful lamentations and warnings to those who do not accept the Beatitudes.  The sermon is radical, revolutionary, advocating the very reverse of how  society was at the time and envisioning the bliss of the Kingdom in its fullness.  The Sermon cannot be sentimentalised, as I think we may have done at times: they are calls for a radically different of being with each other and with God.  We may well have forgotten just how revolutionary Jesus’ prophetic teaching was.  They took the ways of the world, their values and understandings, and turned them upside down.  No wonder the Pharisees and others were scandalised!

We learn to live the Beatitudes by practicing them with God’s grace; as human acts alone, without God’s grace they may be so difficult as to fail.  The Sermon speaks to his first disciples, and to us, about the eternal blessedness guaranteed for us in Christ.