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VI Sunday of Ordinary Time

Blessed are you ...

2/15/2025
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Dear brothers and sisters, Fiat!

In today's Gospel, Luke speaks of four Beatitudes and four curses. He presents the teaching of Jesus in a progressive manner. At the beginning, Luke says that Jesus teaches people, but he does not describe the content of the teaching. Now, after having informed that Jesus has realized that the multitude is eager to hear the word of God, Luke reports the first great speech that begins with the exclamations: "Blessed are you poor!" And "Woe to you, rich!" . Some call this discourse the "Sermon on the Plain", because according to Luke, Jesus came down from the mountain and stopped on the plain and here He spoke His speech. It is shorter and more radical than the Beatitudes of the Gospel of Matthew. There are four Beatitudes and four curses. They are addressed to communities of Greek origin that were made up of rich and poor people.

Looking at the disciples, Jesus says: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God!" This declaration identifies the social category of Jesus’ disciples. They are poor! Jesus promises them: "The Kingdom is yours!" It is not a promise for the future. The verb is in the present tense. The Kingdom already belongs to them. The disciples are blessed right now. Like Jesus, they do not want to accumulate, but they assume their poverty and with Jesus, they struggle for a more just cohabitation, where there is fraternity and sharing of goods, without discrimination.

In the second and third Beatitude, Jesus says: " Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied! Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh! "A part of the sentences is with the verb in the present tense and the other is in the future tense. What we experience and suffer is not definitive. It’s the Kingdom that we build today with the power of the Spirit of Jesus that is definitive. Building the Kingdom supposes suffering and persecution, but one thing is certain: the Kingdom will come, and "you will be satisfied and you will laugh".

The fourth beatitude refers to the future: "Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets." Through these words of Jesus, Luke encourages the communities that were persecuted in his time. Suffering is not a death rattle, but a pain of childbirth. It is a source of hope! The persecution was a sign that the future that was announced by Jesus was coming. The communities were on the right path.

After the four beatitudes in favor of the poor and the excluded, there are four threats or curses against the rich, those to whom all is well and those who are praised by all. We find these threats in the Gospel of Luke and not in that of Matthew. Luke is more radical in the denunciation of injustice.
Before Jesus, there are no rich in the plain. There are only poor and sick people, coming from all sides (Lk 6, 17-19). But Jesus says: "Woe to you who are rich!". Luke, saying these words of Jesus, is thinking of the communities of his time. In those communities there were rich and poor, and there was discrimination of the poor by the rich, the same that marked the structure of the Roman Empire. Jesus criticizes harshly and directly: You have already received your comfort! Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry! Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep! This means that for Jesus poverty is not a fatality, nor is it the result of prejudices, but it is the result of unjust enrichment on the part of others.

What is announced and proclaimed is the irruption of the kingdom of God in the history of men. According to the Gospel, poverty becomes an advantage. And not an advantage because the poverty of which the Gospel speaks is a virtue; The Gospel of Luke does not speak of the virtue of poverty, that is, of a chosen poverty, freely for the love of God or for service to others. No, it speaks of poverty, simply as a condition of deprivation. So, Why are the poor blessed? Simply because God is the defender of the poor and where He finds a condition of misery, of need, God is not indifferent. Where there is a man who needs life, joy and forgiveness, God is not indifferent, but He intervenes. So blessed are you who experience weakness, need, because God who comes to reign will answer you.

The irruption of the Kingdom of God upsets every worldly and human reality, to manifest the divine life that is shared by men throughout Jesus.

On January 27, 1927, Jesus explained to Luisa that in the Kingdom of the Divine Will, poverty and unhappiness will be banished. When the Kingdom of the Divine Will will have Its dominion on earth in the midst of creatures, also on earth there will be perfect and beautiful order. Then Jesus will have three Kingdoms – one in the Celestial Fatherland, another in the Creation, and the third among creatures – and each one will be the echo of the other, each one the reflection of the other. All created things have their place of honor, and while they are all ordered and in harmony among themselves, one has no need of the other, because each one of them not only abounds, but overabounds in the goods with which God endowed it in creating it.

In fact, having been created by a Being who is happy and immensely rich, and whose riches never decrease by giving them, all created things carry the mark of happiness and the abundance of goods of their Creator. Just as all created things, so will all the children of the Kingdom of the Supreme Fiat have their place of honor, of decorum and of dominion; and while possessing the order of heaven and, more than celestial spheres, being in perfect harmony among themselves, the abundance of goods which each one will possess will be such and so great, that one will never have need of the other – each one will have within himself the source of the goods of his Creator and of His perennial happiness. Therefore, poverty, unhappiness, needs and evils will be banished from the children of the Divine Will. It would not be decorous for God’s Will, so immensely rich and happy, to have children who would lack something, and would not enjoy all the opulence of Its goods which arise continuously.

If the children of the Divine Will will not abound with everything, one could say that the Divine Will is poor and does not have the Power to make the children of Its Kingdom happy – which will never be. On the contrary, because It will be the image of the Kingdom which the Divine Will has in the Creation, just as the heavens extend everywhere and abound with stars, and the sun abounds with light, the air with birds, the sea with fish, the earth with plants and flowers, in the same way, since the Kingdom of the Supreme Fiat echoes the Creation, the children of God’s Kingdom will be happy and will abound with everything. Each one will possess the fullness of goods and full happiness in the place in which the Supreme Will has placed him; whatever the condition and the office they will occupy, all will be happy of their destiny.

 

don Marco
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