1st Saturday of Lent (March 15). A RIGHT-SIDE-UP WORLD

Prepare to Listen.  My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.
 
Prayerfully Read Luke 6:17, 20-23
17He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.
20Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
   for yours is the kingdom of God.
21‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
   for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
   for you will laugh.
22‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.  23Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
 
Prayerfully Wonder and Reflect
If you’re more familiar with Matthew’s version of the beatitudes, what caught your attention or surprised you in Luke’s version?
 
The Reign Jesus inaugurates is different to what the world practices.  It involves a new code of living that Jesus introduces in these verses.  Unlike the Mosaic code of blessings and curses (or woes)[1] that were contingent on obedience, Jesus’ code isn’t.  These aren’t commands to be obeyed, and they up-end the world as we know it.  Of this new code, Wright states, “It’s an upside-down code, or perhaps (Jesus might have said) a right-way-up code instead of the upside-down ones people had been following.  God is doing something quite new.”[2]
 
Jesus’ emphasis on the poor and needy shouldn’t surprise us.  When the pregnant Mary sang her Magnificat, she predicted that her son would bring “down the powerful from their thrones” and lift up the lowly; fill the hungry with good things and “send the rich away empty” (Lk. 1:52f).  When Jesus read from Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue about Messiah proclaiming good news to the poor, he also claimed, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”[3]  It was a warning he’d come to turn the world right-side up.  Everything was about to change.  His four “blessed are,” followed by four “woe to you who are” (which we’ll reflect on tomorrow), turn the world right-side up.
 
Unlike Matthew, who emphasized a spiritual aspect, Luke doesn’t—blessed are the poor, the hungry, period.  Not the poor in spirit, or those who hunger for righteousness.  Who are the poor, hungry, weeping, rejected in your society?  They are the ones who are blessed, and we’re blessed when we support and welcome them.
 
Prayerfully Respond
Today, O Lord, I pray for the poor, hungry, weeping, rejected.  Come to them give them your blessing, a new experience of your new world that turns this world right-side up.  Amen.
 
Live obediently.  Join Jesus’ right-side-up way and protect the poor and distressed.
[1] Deuteronomy 11:26-28.  [2] Wright 2001, p. 71.
[3] Luke 4:21; see devotion for Thursday after Ash Wednesday.