You Are Not Your Pain: The Beatitudes Give Us What 'Welcoming' and 'Inclusivity' Cannot

4th Sunday of the Year

We are given an image of Christian reality in today’s Gospel. We have Christ, which is to say, we have God. We have the disciples, which is to say, we have the Church. And we have the crowds, which is to say that we have everyone in the world who does not know Christ—not yet, not really. We have Christ, we have the Church, and we have those who are outside of the Church. What happens in the Gospel? Christ gives to the disciples (he gives to the Church) a teaching that needs to be given to those who do not know God. The disciples are the middle term, the connective tissue, who in the years to come will bind together Christ and the crowds. The work of binding together those who do not know God with Christ, that is the work of the Church.

What is the teaching that Christ gives to the disciples? He tells them that the circumstances in which we find ourselves in life do not need to define us. Your suffering and your poverty and your mourning and the absence of righteousness and peace in your life and the persecution that you experience—none of those realities need to define you. You are not your hardship, and you are not your pain. Christ teaches the disciples that because we can know Christ (let’s say more: because we can become bound up with Christ) in the midst of our suffering and pain, our lives become blessed. Maybe a better translation is ‘fortunate.’ Our lives become blessed and fortunate in the midst of our suffering. The circumstances of our lives do not define us.

The teaching that Christ gives the disciples we might call ‘the logic of the Cross.’ What is the logic of the Cross? It is the reversal of worldly standards for good living. No one explains the logic of the Cross better than St. Paul, who in our second reading says to us:

Consider your own calling, brothers and sisters.
Not many of you were wise by human standards,
not many were powerful [by human standards],
not many were of noble birth [by human standards].
Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise,
and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong,
and God chose the lowly and despised of the world,
those who count for nothing,
to reduce to nothing those who are something,
so that no human being might boast before God.

The Christian no longer lives by the standards of the world. Through Christ we are given wisdom; through Christ we are given power; through Christ we are given nobility of birth. Through Christ, foolishness and weakness and lowliness become the tools of sanctification and redemption. “The message of the cross,” says St. Paul, “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). The circumstances of our lives do not define us. Christ defines us, and Christ gives us a logic of his own.

Yesterday morning, a friend sent me small reflection from Bishop Barron on the continuing Synod process for our Church. Bishop Barron explains that much good is coming from these conversations, but there is a recurring problem with the use of the words ‘welcoming’ and ‘inclusivity.’ The claim made by many is that we need to create a Church that is more welcoming and inclusive, and so to create that kind of Church, certain teachings of our faith need to be changed, or maybe set to the side. There is nothing new here, nothing that we have not heard before. The tension between moral truth and inclusivity, between right living and the call for a faith that is more ‘welcoming,’ is a constant point of contention in the Church today. The challenges that Bishop Barron describes are challenges that we all know for ourselves. And the challenges that Bishop Barron describes are much on my mind as well, as we work together on an urban initiative for the Church in the City of Baltimore that is perpetually caught up with talk of ‘welcoming’ and ‘inclusivity.’

Here is my response to the claim that we must change the teaching of the Church, or forget parts of it, to create a faith that is more welcoming and inclusive: you are denying the logic of the Cross. Christ teaches us in the Beatitudes that the circumstances of our lives do not need to define us. Blessedness, good fortune, is possible for the Christian despite the pain and suffering of life. The giving of the Beatitudes is a rejection of the standards of the world. Those who call for the Church to change or forget teaching for the sake of a more ‘inclusive’ and ‘welcoming’ faith claim exactly the opposite: now the circumstances of life define us. Now the circumstances of life define us so thoroughly that not even Christ can cause our lives to be blessed and fortunate in the midst of suffering. Now there is no escape from the pain and suffering unless you make the suffering go away. And what will make the pain and suffering go away? Well, in at least some cases, we are told, the pain and the suffering will go away when the truth of Christ given through the Church is changed or forgotten. The logic of the Cross is rejected. Christ is rejected. No longer is the Cross foolish to those who are perishing, but just another form of therapy that comes free of charge—no co-pays, no deductibles, easy prescriptions.

There is an important clarification I need to make: suffering is not good, and I would not want anyone to leave the church today thinking that we ought to want suffering or cherish suffering. Suffering is a consequence of an original sin that corrupted the whole of reality. We reject sin, and so we ought to reject the consequences of sin. The teaching of the Beatitudes is not that we Christians need to suffer to live good lives. We do not. We shouldn’t want to suffer. The teaching of the Beatitudes is that the suffering that comes to us in life does not need to define us. You are not your hardship, and you are not your pain. The foolishness of the Cross—the logic of the Cross—gives us a gift that is beyond measure: freedom. Real, authentic Christian freedom from the circumstances of life that would cripple us, limit us, and define us. “Blessed are you,” Christ says. Fortunate are you.

My guess is that most people in the Church today think that when we fight about what is right and what is wrong, or about what is good and what is evil, that we are fighting about moral truth. I wish that our fights in the Church today were so limited in scope. Fighting about some moral truths would be much easier if the stakes were not so high. But sometimes the stakes of our moral disagreements are very high. And so it goes with our conversations about changing teaching for the sake of ‘welcoming’ and ‘inclusivity.’ The stakes are very high. Here is the reality: these fights about what is right and what is wrong, about what is good and what is evil, are really fights about Christ. What can Christ do for us? What can’t Christ do for us? Do the circumstances of life define us, or is authentic freedom given through the logic of the Cross? The answer to these questions is given to us by St. Paul, who preaches the logic of the Cross with perfect clarity: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13).

Homily preached January 28th/29th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary