Sixth Sunday In Ordinary Time, Cycle C, Feb.11,2007

Scripture: Jeremiah 17:5-8; Psalm 1; I Corinthians 15:12,16-20. Luke
6:17.20-26.

Life is made up of many exciting experiences. Maybe you even have noticed
that on a given day you can have a series of ups and downs or contrasts in
your choices or even in your personal moods. Our human experiences are
often a mixture of such contrasts and the Scriptures help us to see that
this is part of the normal human journey of life--even our life with God.
We love life and fear death. We enjoy a good birthday party or a wedding
invitation but we also from time to time are shocked by the death and
funeral of a relative or a friend. Today's readings show us that the
Prophet Jeremiah, the Psalmist, Paul, and Jesus are telling us about the
contrasts in life. Jeremiah starts us off with the need for our absolute
trust in God so that we are like a watered tree near abundant fresh flowing
waters; the contrast is a dried up bush in the wilderness or the desert.
This same analogy and image is found in the first Psalm one. It is so
similar to what Jeremiah has saide; this makes me conjecture that the
Psalmist took this opening to the whole psalter from Jeremiah. We are to
meditate and ponder over the law of the Lord so as to be a tree which is
flourishing and whose leaves are not withering and whose fruit is rich and
ripe. Otherwise we are like chaff or straw driven by the
winds--tumbleweeds rolling around on the plains. Paul then shows us that
the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruit of his Paschal Mystery of
death, suffering, and dying. If we do not have this faith in the
resurrections then we Christians are the most pitiable of peoples who
really have based our lives on an empty promise. But Paul assures us we
are given the gift of faith and it is resurrection faith. He constrasts our
hope and joy in this mystery as compared to what we would be without it.
Thus when we read Luke's version of the beatitudes we see that he, like
Jeremiah, gives us a prophetic interpretation of them. The four beatitudes
are contrasted with the woes and thereby this shows us once again how the
Scriptures mirror our daily lives and are worth living out as we face the
ups and downs of the days, weeks, and months of our lives. Amen.