January 30, 2011 – 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Zeph 2:3, 3:12-13 1 Cor 1:26-31 Mt 5:1-12

Count your blessings! I am sure that we have heard this expression countless times, especially when we hear about misfortune. When we hear “count your blessings” I wonder how many of us say to ourselves, “Okay. My blessings include being out of work, having poor health, and being looked down on.” Hardly! No, we usually start listing everything that is going well in our lives.

When Jesus started listing who was blessed, He included people that we don’t normally see as blessed: He included the poor, those grieving, the despised and the hungry. He seems to have chosen the very ones that we might think of as having misfortune, bad luck or being cursed. They hardly sound blessed. If we take time to ponder the beatitudes further we can do mental gymnastics trying to make sense of these blessings called “beatitudes.”

Even if we bothered to do the mental gymnastics required to understand them, we probably wouldn’t really understand what Jesus meant in the beatitudes. No, understanding Jesus’ social context is crucial to understanding the gospel. So, let’s look at the beatitudes. Two that I’d like to focus our attention on this Sunday are the ones that say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Mourning and fasting were signs of social protest in Jesus’ day. Like those who march on the capitol or line up along our streets with signs to protest various inequities, social protest was and is a powerful way of using strength in numbers while denouncing social evils. In first century Israel, people protested by fasting and weeping publicly, demonstrating their unhappiness with social evils. Jesus proclaimed such protesters worthy of esteem. As a matter of fact, He proclaims that God will comfort these protesters and deliver justice to them, even if society refuses to address the injustices the protesters point out. Now that’s powerful!

Jesus is clearly promoting social protest. While some among us would hardly think protest is revolutionary, others would find public action nearly impossible to do. I recall some students of mine admiring protesters on the streets of Riverside one year, but when they were invited to join the protest, these same students backed away saying, “I couldn’t be seen protesting.” The impact was clear to them: their reputations would be affected and they didn’t want to chance losing their good name or their friends in case they disagreed with the cause. Public protest immediately divides people. It can divide families and friends, too. When Jesus called protesters blessed or esteemed, valued by God, His listeners would have understood the risk his beatitude involved.

Following Jesus and His teachings was never easy. In the first century as it is now, really doing what Jesus calls us to – in this case, social protest – is hard! It means taking a stand. It means taking the risk that relationships can be broken or strained when we take a position against social injustice. For example, those who realize the fact that our governments and industries have backed away from addressing the causes of climate change know that social protest is an important and necessary tool to unmask the perpetrators of climate change and the inaction of governments. While hundreds of thousands have marched on the capitol for civil rights, we do not see so many people ready to protest the inaction of politicians in the field of environmental justice. The cost of demanding change in the area of climate damage will be sacrifice for everyone. But the cost of saying nothing is even greater. The loss of land, the loss of lives and of species, and looming worldwide famine are just the tip of the climate-change iceberg if we fail to act!

Jesus calls us beyond our fears into social protest. He calls us to stand up for the value of all life in our stand against climate change. He does not say that it will be easy. He only promises that God will comfort us and deliver justice if we do our part. The only question that remains is, will you and I be counted among the blessed who engaged in social protest?