St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker at the Cathedral Eucharist on the Last Sunday after Epiphany, The Sixth Sunday of the Year, 14 February 2010, in St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

This past week I was privileged to visit Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. The looming power of the Old Fort and the dehumanizing brutality of the notorious prisons located there have been remarkably transformed. On that bleak landscape, watered with the blood and tears of the heroes of our struggle, now stands the Court whose purpose is to protect the very rights which that place of horror denied. Built of the bricks of our darkest oppression, the Constitutional Court stands as a symbol of our noblest ideals. Unlike courtrooms elsewhere, where the judges are elevated and the public is relegated to the far rear of the room, there is nothing hierarchical about our Constitutional Court. Built in the round, with clear glass walls, the architecture places the judges and the public on the same level. Open to the outside, transparent in intent and plan, democratic in design and purpose, the Constitutional Court is a People's Court, where justice and the people meet. Here justice is not from on high, but from the midst of the people. On level ground.

I thought about the Court as I reflected on the Gospel for today. In it Luke presents Jesus as he teaches for the first time. Whereas Matthew has given us the Sermon on the Mount, with Jesus speaking the new law from the mountain top, the new Moses on the new Sinai, Luke gives as the Sermon on the Plain. Matthew wants to establish the authority of Jesus as a lawgiver in the tradition of Moses. Luke has a different agenda.

Luke chooses a different geography to highlight his different theological purpose. Mountains do feature in Luke's Gospel; for him the mountain is the place of piety and worship, the place to which Jesus retreated to pray, the locus of his encounter with God. Luke tells us that Jesus went up the mountain to pray, remained there in prayer throughout the night and then came down to a level place. Luke anchors our Lord's actions in prayerful communion with God, while radically identifying Jesus with the crowd in a level place, on the level of ordinary, everyday human existence. For Luke the issue is not authority as it is for Matthew, but the implications of the Christ's Gospel for everyday life. Prayer and spirituality are essential to Jesus ministry as Luke's describes it, they are the recurring source of God's presence in his work, but the message of the Christ's Gospel and the arena of our Lord's work is the level place where the crowds are milling. This is a central theme in Luke's Gospel.

The crowd that Luke describes as having gathered to listen to Jesus is itself revealing. There was “a great crowd of his disciples,” Luke tells us. This no doubt included the Twelve, but the focus is not specifically on them. Along with the crowd of disciples there is also “a great multitude of people” from Judea and Jerusalem to the south as well as from the Phoenician territory - Tyre and Sidon to the northwest. Luke wants us to know that this is a mixed race crowd, including both Jews and Gentiles. Luke's reference to the Gentile towns of Tyre and Sidon bears notice. Much later in his Gospel Luke will again refer to this pair of towns, contrasting them with the Jewish towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida where the people failed to respond to Jesus.

It is Matthew's Sermon on the Mount that is loved and quoted. Matthew's beatitudes address our world and inspire our devotion: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” “Blessed are those who mourn” and “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.” These are beautiful words, affirming general goodness and integrity. We easily find ourselves among Matthew's catalogue of the blessed. Sometime or another all of us have felt 'poor in spirit' or have found ourselves 'hungering and thirsting for righteousness.' Many of us have 'mourned' and been 'persecuted' for choosing what is right and good and true. We find ourselves in these blessings and feel comforted, welcomed and reassured.

Luke casts his Beatitudes is a completely different register: “Blessed are you who are poor,” Jesus says, “Blessed are you who hunger now,” “Blessed are you who weep now,” “Blessed are you when people hate you.” There is nothing abstract or general about Luke's Beatitudes. They are not generalizations about the poor or the hungry or those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. There is something urgently direct, immediate and personal, radically challenging about them. We are being addressed in these Beatitudes, it to us that these words are being spoken. But they are harsh words that divide and separate – those who are poor now from those who are not, those who are hungry now from those who are not, those who weep now from those who do not, those who are hated now from those who are not. To emphasize this critical division, in Luke's account Jesus does not only speak Beatitudes but also a series of corresponding Woes: “Woe to you who are rich …, Woe to you who are full now …, woe to you who are laughing now …, woe to you when all speak well of you.'

The good news Christ brings make a difference, Luke is saying. It is not an all-purpose message for the general good. Christ's Gospel ushers in a radical new way of being in the world, an uncompromising way of breaking away from the status quo to choose a new way of life. Only those who choose poverty over luxury are truly blessed. Only those whose hearts ache now and whose tears flow now are truly blessed. Only those who risk all, abandon all, surrender all for what is right and good and true, only they are truly blessed.

These are hard words indeed. I tremble and quake before them. I love the Lord, hear his voice and seek to answer his call faithfully. But my desire for comfort prevents me from choosing poverty – sometimes it is lack of comfort that I cannot choose, sometimes it is the loss of dignity I cannot bear, sometimes it is the insult I cannot suffer, sometimes it is the last word I cannot give up. In all these things it is hard for me to choose the blessedness of being poor now. Is it hard for you too?

And yet these are life-giving words, the only life-giving words. Unless we become people who choose the poverty to which Christ calls us, we shall never be rich – not as a people, nor as a nation, nor as global community. Unless we become a people keenly aware of the pain and suffering that grip people everywhere – in Haiti and in Gugulethu, in Darfur and in Balfour, in Baghdad and De Doorns, unless our hearts ache and our tears flow, we shall never, ever laugh. Unless we become people utterly dedicated to the new world Christ inaugurates, ready to give all, expend ourselves, all that we are and have, we shall never be truly blessed.

On the Last Sunday of Epiphany, three days before Ash Wednesday and our earnest commitment to self-examination and repentance, Jesus comes down from the mountain to meet us on the level plain of life as we know it and live it. Full of compassion, understanding our weaknesses and aware of the temptations that threaten to derail us, Jesus invites us to join him as he turns the world upside down, making all things new, ushering in a new way of being human in the world. Do we dare to take his hand, you and I? Do we dare to walk with him into a new future that costs no less than everything but promises more than we can ask or imagine?

As I hear Jesus pronounce these Beatitudes and declaim the Woes that accompany them, I think of him teaching that mixed-race crowd on that level plain and I think of our Constitutional Court and something stirs deep within me. 'Hope,' wrote Emily Dickinson, 'is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words.' Perhaps, here where Jesus meets me on level ground, I can find a way to abandon pride and arrogance, perhaps on the level plain where Jesus meets me I can weep when others weep and shape my choices to their tears, perhaps I can find myself here, with him on this level plain.

Words from a poem by Wendell Berry, American academic, cultural and economic critic and farmer, speak of that place and of that thing with feathers perching in the soul:

A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.
 
      from The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry

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