Fourth Sunday of Epiphany

Who wants to be blessed if it means being reviled, persecuted, hungry and powerless? Blessed a word used to describe those whom God favoured. Micah 6:1-8 describes a people who are desperate to get God’s blessing. But, because they understand blessing to be about stuff, they give God stuff in the hope that he will give them more in return.

Micah disappoints them: God does not want your thousands of rams or your rivers of oil. Instead, God wants you to live lives of justice and mercy. God, it turns out is not transactional. God is relational: Yet we persist in thinking of God as some divine balancer of the books.

So, when it comes to the beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-12, where the blessed are described as the poor, the meek and those who suffer, we tend to read them in a spiritual way: blessed are those who suffer in this life because God will compensate them in the next life. Nope! The beatitudes too are about relationship: that between those who mourn and those who comfort them; those who are hungry and those who feed them; those who suffer injustice and those who fight for justice. None of us are ever on one side or the other: at times we will need comfort, at times we will be able to offer it. The beatitudes tell us not that suffering is good but that relationship is good, community is good, connectedness is good. What do we need to be blessed? We need one another.