In his compelling shift from words of blessing to words of woe in today’s Gospel, Jesus acknowledges that there’s an unavoidable distinction between the “haves” and the “have nots” in this world, but he warns that guarding our “having” to the exclusion of helping those who “have not” means that our present sense of earthly blessing will ultimately collapse into the ashes of woe.
Back in 2018 on a mission trip to Haiti, I saw this played out in a small but compelling way by a couple of the kids at the home for sick children run by the Missionaries of Charity where our group was serving. I was sitting with a quiet little 3-year-old in my lap on the porch along with some other volunteers who were doing the same with other children, all of us enjoying the shade while watching the healthier children out on the playground.
There was a big 5-year-old who I’d nicknamed Boomer who was hanging out in the nearby breezeway where the sisters have their storeroom and office. While he appeared quite nonchalant, it was no secret to him and all the other children that the sisters kept special snacks nearby. He eventually went in and engaged the sisters and was rewarded with a bag of cheese puffs. Instead of staying inside out of sight to enjoy his bounty, Boomer came outside to the porch. After eating the first of his puffs, Boomer walked down the line of us on the porch, handing each child in our lap a cheese puff as he passed.
We adults looked at each other with that “How sweet!” look grownups do around kids. After he’d given each of the children a treat, Boomer could have retired to consume the rest of the bag himself, and we all would have remained taken with what a sweet and generous kid he was. But no, he ate one more puff himself, then repeated his rounds with a look of peace on his face.
When he came to the very last puff in the bag, he pulled it out, regarded it thoughtfully, and broke it in two, giving the larger piece to the little girl in my lap before eating the smaller one himself with that same look of contentment on his face.
We then noticed that another child had also scored a bag of cheese puffs from Sister, but this one was having a very different experience. While she didn’t attempt to hang back and hide her good fortune from the other children, she clearly wanted nothing more than to have the whole bag to herself. She was constantly on the move along the periphery of the courtyard, protecting her puffs from the other children who wanted some. While she was managing to eat most of the bag herself, she was crying and frustrated that the others were wanting her to share.
That evening in the volunteer quarters, we looked back with a laugh, but also saw the deep lesson these two beautiful, innocent children had taught us, and we eventually came to call it the Parable of the Cheese Puffs. If we think about it, all of us can see how this parable plays out in ways large and small across the world and in our daily lives. It’s not a matter of what we as individuals or a society have or don’t have, it’s a matter of what we do or don’t do with our circumstances.
The “Blessed are you” formulation in the Beatitudes is familiar to most Christians, and we all can tend to instinctively — and in a heartfelt way — bow our heads to acknowledge the poor and the hungry and the weeping and the hated and give them respect accompanied by a kind of spiritual “Yay! God will take care of you!” cheer. But that’s the thing. Yes. God will take care of them. But that doesn’t excuse us from our very real role in taking care of them too in the here and now.
That’s really brought home by the way that Luke, in a departure from the Beatitudes in Matthew, contrasts the blessings with woes. Through a purely unacademic internet search of Latin translation, I propose the woes could be called the Veatitudes, the root there being sorrow or pain (vea) as opposed to the root “good” (bea) used in the word Beatitudes.
Placing Jesus in the context of these “veatitudes” can be instructive. We might see them as some kind of condemnation of regular old me living my regular old life. Through hard work, I’m financially sound (if not “rich”) and I get enough to eat each day. Through my good (God-given, I might add!) nature, I’m prone to laughing with the people in my life and feeling that the people around me like me. Is Jesus saying these things are wrong? Of course not! Jesus himself found himself in our place. He just didn’t make that place his home, nor should we.
Jesus says “Woe to you who are rich.” While we know that Jesus himself was born poor and lived poor, the Gospel of Luke tells us that Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, helped along with others to provide for Jesus and his disciples on their evangelical journeys. Joanna, by any measure of the time, would be regarded as rich. Really rich. Jesus could have taken his relationship with Joanna and very easily parlayed it into his entrée to the royal court and lived his life in luxury. But instead he stayed on the dusty path, but embraced Joanna and her own path, letting her give of herself and her own resources to further the mission.
Jesus himself was the guest at many meals and surely must have been filled at those tables. But his “Woe to you who are filled now” would have fallen upon himself only had he abandoned his mission of salvation so that he could pursue the next (and the next and the next…) banquet which surely would’ve been provided to him by all the status seekers in the land.
Jesus said “Woe to you who laugh now.” For anyone who has walked distances with others, done work alongside others, shared hardships with others, we know that laughter is a wonderfully inevitable part of those times. While there’s no specific scripture passage that says “Jesus laughed,” his fullness of humanity makes it, I daresay, impossible that he didn’t laugh. His woe would’ve fallen upon himself only if he’d made himself some kind of Falstaff who pursued mirth and levity to the exclusion of caring about the state of others.
We hear in the Gospel of Luke that at one point “all spoke highly” of Jesus and “were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Didn’t Jesus just say, “Woe to you when all speak well of you”? That woe would’ve fallen upon Jesus himself only had he aspired to remain in that moment in Nazareth where he knew his hearers were entranced by him and strove to preserve that high opinion by not speaking another word that might have upset those immediate admirers.
We know that in all these things, Jesus embraced the good that is inherent in the desire to provide for oneself and one’s family, in nurturing our bodies, in happy camaraderie and living in an upright way that might lead others to regard us well. He does not disdain or condemn them. He just doesn’t want us to make them the end goal of our life. If they are our goals, they’re achievable for sure, but that’s as far as it goes. We can fill our bank account and our belly and have a laugh track on endless loop and be deafened by applause, but then what?
There was a man who could have been rich beyond any human imagining. The endless feasts he could’ve thrown would’ve garnered a thousand Michelin stars. His wit and wisdom could’ve toppled us over in laughter and made us swoon in admiration for eternity. And yet this man chose to be born in the humblest of circumstances, chose to live in working class obscurity, and chose to reveal himself to the world for the single purpose of redeeming it.
That man is Jesus, the God who humbled himself to share in our humanity and who comes to us in the Eucharist that we receive. He did not come to earth to be served but to serve, and he calls us to follow his path. We are absolutely free to respond to his call in whatever way we want. Blessed are we that he gives us the grace to respond in beatitude. May we always be open to receiving and acting upon that grace.
Image: Adobe Stock. By conzorb.
Deacon Steve O’Neill was ordained for service to the Archdiocese of Washington in June 2013 and serves at St. Andrew Apostle in suburban Maryland. After four years in the Marine Corps and three years at the University of Maryland (where met Traci, now his wife of 30+ years, and earned a degree in English), he has worked as an analyst with the Federal government. Deacon Steve and Traci have two sons and two daughters and three grandchildren.
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