Blessed, Not Indulged

Is poverty solved by transferring material possessions around? Is hatred solved by passing a law against hatred? What if being poor and being hated is a blessing?

At the recent Prayer Service after the new president‘s inauguration, an Episcopalian bishop asked the new president to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.” The bishop went on to ask for mercy for those who are immigrants, and those who are less fortunate.

Some reacted with anger at her words, and others praised her for “speaking truth to powser.”

But both reactions miss a deeper reality.

While it is never wrong, nor can it be wrong, to encouraged mercy as the response to any person created in God’s image, it is also short sighted to pretend that same mercy has no deeper purpose but to leave people in the state we find them.

Some may say that Jesus would always respond with mercy and then others will remind those that Jesus also commanded them to “go and sin no more.” There seems to be no end to the back and forth of these ideological responses to arrive at any true path to peace.

But the problems aren’t merely linguistic differences, they are much deeper. What we need is to be blessed, not indulged.

The answer between the two responses is to wrestle truly with our need for humility and love towards those who are considered the fringe or the outcasts and to say to us all, we need God’s blessings to transform our poverty and our struggles into the blessings they really are. In coming to that place, my challenges are transformed into invitations to true transformation!

Look at our lesson today in Luke 6:17-23:

At that time, Jesus stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came forth from him and healed them all. And he lifted up his eyes on His disciples, and said: “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven.”

Jesus stands on a “level place” to teach the people those famous “Beatitudes” (“Blessed are you…”). He sees a cross-section of the local population who came to hear Him AND to heal their diseases.

What drove these people to Christ was His reputation for healing, and they desired healing for their bodies.

But what they found in Christ was Someone Who not only healed their physical brokenness, but also He insisted they face and heal their spiritual illnesses as well. He confronts them with this challenge because physical healings are always temporary, but true, deep, and eternal healings always include the soul!

No wonder He announces, “Blessed are you…” as His way of revealing what truly matters.

Our poverty is a blessing.

Our hunger is a blessing.

Our weeping and mourning is a blessing.

Even being hated is a blessing!

In other words, our human desire for justice or equality has to be found not in a set of legislation, political philosophy, or ideology but in the Person of Jesus Christ.

He is our answer to injustice, inequality, and brokenness. He is the Source of freedom that is true freedom and not the fantasy of freedom that is really just another form of slavery. If our society is going to escape the fractured tribalism of our day, we are going to have to bring society to Jesus Christ. That means we who say we follow Christ will have to get serious about being proactive disciples of Jesus and live out the “Blessed” revelation of true freedom and equality.

And look what that means to you and me.

First, we must stop looking for answers to our own brokenness or our society’s brokenness in other places that aren’t Jesus. We Orthodox have such a rich treasure house of spiritual insight and wisdom laid at our feet by the saints, the liturgy, and the spiritual disciplines of the Faith (like confession, generosity, and fasting) that if we simply have the courage to actively know these sources and be humble enough to embrace them and practice them, we will see our own lives healed and blessed at a level deep enough to affect all around us.

Next, we have to have our desires matured and disciplined. We have to escape the spirit of the age where we define freedom and equality in merely economic terms. This small-mindedness always devolves into fantasy, delusion, revenge, and a fractured society. It creates the “us vs. them” mentality that actually destroys freedom and substitutes one tyranny with another. We who say we follow Christ have to become a “light” that shows the rest of society how to live, and that starts with the maturity and peace of our local parishes! Our parish communities are called to be the example of heaven on earth and communities that share and extend the blessings of Christ to all.

Finally, we have to embrace a lifestyle of generosity and repentance. We cannot be examples to the world if we still maintain the prideful arrogance of exclusive communities that only belong to our ancestral tribes! That’s just one more delusionary slavery that perpetuates the sickness of our human race. We have to become persons rather than individuals. We have to seek Him, Who IS the True Human among us in His Church, and invite all around us to become by grace what Christ is by nature. And that means we have to perpetually allow the Holy Spirit to confront us with our wrong thinking and subsequent wrong actions. We have to LIVE repentance and SHARE that healing and blessing with everyone.

St. Ephraim the Syrian was born around 306 in the city of Nisibis in Mesapotamia. Ephraim was the disciple of one of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, St. James the Biship of Nisibis. St. Ephraim practiced a very disciplined form of asceticism and was renowned for his holiness and fidelity to the theology of the Church. He regularly defended the Faith against many heresies of his day. During a war in his area, St. Ephraim moved to the city of Edessa. Once, there was a terrible famine in the city and St. Ephraim came out of his monastic cell and publically rebuked the rich of the city for not sharing their food with the poor. The people responded to the saint that they could not find anyone trustworthy enough to administer their charity without taking advantage of both the rich and the poor! St. Ephraim looked at them and asked “What do you think of me?” The wealthy then turned over their bounty to the saint and he made sure the poor were cared for fairly and with love and mercy.

Today, are you willing to come to Christ “on a level place” and allow Him to heal you at your deepest brokenness? Are you humble enough to stop reducing others to some arbitrary tag and making excuses as to why you aren’t serving your neighbor? Are you willing to finally see your poverty as the blessing it is and allow the grace of God to transform you into a Normal Orthodox Chrsistian!

P.S. With the rivers of your tears, you have made the barren desert fertile. Through sighs of sorrow from deep within you, your labors have borne fruit a hundred-fold. By your miracles you have become a light, shining upon the world. O Ephraim, our Holy Father, pray to Christ our God, to save our souls.

Fr. Barnabas Powell is the parish priest at Sts. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene Greek Orthodox Church in Cumming, GA. He is also the founder of Faith Encouraged Ministries and produces the Faith Encouraged Daily Devotional on Substack. Watch the Faith Encouraged YouTube Channel here - https://www.youtube.com/@FaithEncouragedTV