26th Sunday Reflection: The Great Reversal as the Way To Love
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage – The Great Reversal As The Way To Love – 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time – (Luke 16:19-31)
How can we be in a relationship with God or with any other person while we ‘see’ them through the distortion of our ego with all its inherent vanity, fear, desire, and competition. These are all in opposition to Truth and the vulnerability of Love, blinding us the ‘seeing’ others, blinding us to the needs of others. These bar the way to giving and receiving forgiveness. These impede us from expressing gratitude and love becoming fully human and sharing in the gifts of the Divine.
This is the theme of our Gospel parable reflecting society in the persons of Dives, a rich man, who is completely oblivious to the existence of the poor man, Lazarus, who has been laid at his gate. This indifference blocks relationships. The parable neither extols poverty as a virtue, nor does it give any fuel to our many prosperity cults that idealise wealth, beauty and success as blessings and a reward from God for our personal endeavours.
Hunger, insecurity, loneliness, being overlooked, weakness, the rejected outsiders, neglected… unseen… these are the little humble ones that know their great need and must stand on the sidelines to wait for compassion, wait for mercy. This is the same humility needed to open our hearts to Mercy and to Love. The rich, the powerful, and the ‘just’ find it very difficult to be humbly open to God because they are full of confidence in their own treasures and securities.
As human beings, we are radically weak and constantly try to cover up our weakness by finding security in power, wealth and status. The only way to salvation is to recognise one’s weakness before God and to find one’s security in God alone.
To humble oneself does not only mean lowliness and misery, but also a willing acceptance of this misery as an act of service.
Jesus affirms the great Reversal that is the theme of the Gospel of Luke as contained in the Beatitudes. A theme that begins with the Mother of Jesus, a young girl-child given in marriage, without any legal voice, rights or protection, classed together with the other marginal workers of society as slaves and animals. It is from her mouth that we hear the heralding of a new dispensation… the Way of the Kingdom of God.
God has looked upon my lowliness.
God has dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart.
God has unseated the rulers and lifted up the lowly.
The hungry God has filled with good things and now the rich are sent away empty.
We need the eyes of compassion and love to understand this prophecy of the great reversal. The Kingdom of God does not come about by replacing one contingent of indifferent wealthy overlords with the underdogs and repeating the cycle of domination.
This is not to be understood as some great cosmic ‘payback’ for the suffering of this world by consigning the indifferent rich to the eternal torment of Dante’s Inferno. ‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich’. (2 Cor 8:9) This was the chosen path of God to form a relationship with all of us God’s children and family.
As a human person, we live in a community, in society. With the community we share hunger, thirst, sickness and misery and all the deficiencies that are our communal suffering, the universal dimension of injustice and evil.
Our Franciscan tradition has a history of overcoming poverty, not only by combating societal or economic structures which throw people into a state of deprivation and debt, but also and especially by entering into a spiritual relationship with the poor and with poverty itself. In this relationship we will hopefully find our own form of Franciscan poverty and restricted use relevant to today.
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