Wednesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 439

A prayer for 9/11

“Blessed are you who are poor,
for the Kingdom of God is yours….

But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.

Both of today’s readings reflect the traditional understanding of the “two ways” – good and evil. The gospel adds a most unexpected twist: the poor are blessed and the wealthy are not.

Neither of today's readings imagines a middle way, economically or morally. The Roman world could not imagine a majority of people living in a middle way between wealth and poverty. That must be a perpetually unstable condition -- like nuclear fusion -- maintained only with enormous dedication and continual tinkering. The “middle class,” as we understand it, is sustained with democratic institutions, insurance programs of every imaginable sort, an enormous health care industry, a deep commitment to ongoing educational opportunities for everyone, and entitlements. It also requires enormous virtue. If enough people do the right thing, they can make it seem as natural as riding a bicycle.

There was no middle class in Jesus’ day. There were two classes, rich and poor, envied and enviers. All agreed it is better to be rich than poor, everyone wanted more money. This state of affairs might not be the natural one which God intended, but it inevitably appears in a sinful world. I believe the existence of a majority middle class is the direct result of our Christian teaching, especially under the impact of Saint Francis and the mendicant movements.

The mendicant orders (Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinians, Carmelites and Servites) appeared in Europe as the old order of feudalism was beginning to disintegrate. They ministered to the poor, founded universities to promote learning and preached repentance for sin. Unlike the monks, who were often scions of aristocratic families, mendicant friars were merchants accustomed to travel, finance and the promise of upward mobility. They would reassure a skeptical Church that lending at low interest could work to everyone’s advantage; that the world should be explored; that science should be promoted and everyone should be educated.  Mendicants also experimented with democratic government; they voted for their leaders who were given limited authority and brief terms of office.

Eventually those experiments would lead to the grandest experiment of all, the United States of America – a middle class nation governed by popularly elected officials under a constitutional form of government. So long as it retains the high principles of its Christian origins it survives.

But Jesus and his disciples knew nothing of what would happen two millennia later. Saint Luke’s gospel reflects a profound pessimism about the fate of the wealthy. They are rich because they are greedy; their greed becomes more rapacious as they accumulate more. They do not and cannot aspire to salvation. 

Only the poor, despairing of prosperity or security in this world, find comfort in faith. 

We pray that our middle class way of life does not fall under the curse of the rich. It is certainly in our best interest to shun the temptation of greed and relieve the insult of poverty. This experiment, to prove itself worthy of God's favor, must prefer the poor over the wealthy and show favor to those without.