This is the homily given at St. John’s,
Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday November 3, 2019.
“WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH…”
(Homily
text: Luke 6: 20-31)
Perhaps
most of us could finish this saying: “When the going gets tough….”
The
second phrase completes the first: “The tough get going.”
I’m
not sure where that phrase came from, but it is a good way for us - on this All
Saints’ Sunday - to enter into thinking about the saints of God. We could amend
the saying this way: “When the going gets tough, the saints get going.”
It
isn’t easy being a saint. For one thing, it means swimming against the tide of
the everyday world’s values and ways of living. For another, it means holding
always in view the reality of God and God’s will for the saints and for the
world….keeping God in our hearts and in our thinking means that living like a
saint involves “marching to a different drummer.”
Jesus
captures the reality of the difficulty of being a saint in His collection of
sayings which is called the Beatitudes. In this lectionary cycle, Year C, we
hear the version offered to us by Luke.[1] (In Year
A, we hear the more familiar offering of Matthew, from chapter five of his
Gospel account.)
Luke’s
version of the Beatitudes begins as Matthew’s does, or at least part of the
saying that Jesus offered does….The first four sayings begin with the word
“Blessed,” which is where the name “Beatitudes” comes from, from the Latin.
Luke
tells us that Jesus offered four blessings: To those who are poor, to those are
hungry, to those who weep, and to those who are hated.
But
then Luke tells us that Jesus also pronounced four woes: To those who are rich
in this world, to those who are full, to those who laugh now, and to those who
are well spoken of.
Notice
that the four woes reverse the four blessings. Whenever we read Luke’s Gospel account,
we should look for signs of a reversal of roles, for Luke loves to pass along
to us the Lord’s teachings which turn the normal order of things on its head.
Here is an excellent example of that theme.
“When
the going gets tough, the saints get going….”
It’s
easy to live by the world’s expectations. The four woes that Jesus pronounced
address values that the world embraces: to be rich or well off, to have enough
to eat, to laugh and be merry, and to be liked (or loved) by others. In order
to have these things, sometimes it’s necessary for those who crave them to set
their convictions of what God would want them to do aside in order to blend
into the world’s ways….Put another way, people who crave what the world offers have
to be willing, oftentimes, to “Go along to get along.” Sometimes, godly values
get pushed aside in the process.
As
we look down through time, in many instances the great figures of the faith
that we call “Saints” were those who “bucked” the system in some way or
another. Take St. Francis of Assisi as a good example: At a time when the
Church was in love with wealth and with worldly power, Francis embraced extreme
poverty and took a vow to serve the Lord by serving the poor. The contrast
between the values that the Church was living in in the early 13th
century couldn’t be further apart from the ways of God that Francis held to.
Francis is remembered fondly today because of his totally counterculture sense
of the values that God had made known. Francis challenged the status quo of
things in his day and time. He lived out the principal that, “when the going
got tough, St. Francis got going.”
May
it be so with us, by the help of the Holy Spirit.
[1]
Scholars have pondered why Luke’s version of the Beatitudes differs from
Matthew’s. Perhaps one reason for the difference might lie in the possibility that
Jesus offered this teaching on more than one occasion. Just about every
preacher who’s been at the business of preaching and teaching for any length of
time will find him/herself repeating some material, but in a slightly different
format and with slightly different content. It would be easy to imagine that
our Lord did the same thing, depending on His audience and on the circumstances
at hand.
