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Wednesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Col 3:1-11; Ps 145:2-13; Lk 6:20-26

Daily we discourse of the glory of the Kingdom of God.  We seek to make know to men the might and glorious splendor of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is a Kingdom for all ages and his dominion endures through all generations.  Praise fills our days because the greatness of the Lord Our God is unsearchable.  We are not caught up in darkness and gloom; we are caught up in the brightness and glory of the Kingdom for all ages.  Even among those nations where there is representative government and elected officials; even among those peoples who have no king or queen never have and never will have a monarch.  Especially among such as we are we can only make more room in our hearts for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  As Saint Paul tells us when Christ our King, our life, appears then we, too, will appear with him in glory.  Such is the dignity of those who are poor in spirit.  As Saint Luke relates we are those blessed ones to whom belong the Kingdom of God.  Notice the Lord Jesus says that this is ours now.  The Kingdom of Christ Our God is here and now for where the Eucharist King Jesus reigns there is the Kingdom of God.

 

We have been raised with Christ therefore we seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  To seek what is above, Saint Paul teaches, we must think of what is above, not of what is on earth.  He goes on to explain that such heavenly seeking means that we put to death that which holds us here immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry.  We only need Christ; everything else is lust.  Any desire that does not bring us closer to Christ is truly death.  There is no room for anger, fury, malice, slander, obscene language, and lying in our lives.  Once we have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self in the image of our Creator then we find that Christ is all in all. To have anything and everything in Christ is to truly possess it and not be possessed by it.  This is the conversion from death to life.  This is the only way to live a fully human life, a Christ-like life.  Such is the life long process of growing in holiness to which we have been committed from Baptism.  Such is the new covenant that we renew here at every Eucharist.

 

Christ Our Lord and King raises his eyes toward his disciples and teaches us what the world cannot teach.  This is the wisdom of our God.  From the Divine Teacher we hear about what is truly blessed, and we learn about what is truly woe.  It is truly a blessing to be poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, insulted, denounced on account of the Son of Man.  This is what causes our hearts to rejoice and our spirits to leap for joy. Indeed we live in the midst of future glory here and now.  We are treated as Jesus was treated.  Our contemporaries treat us in the same manner in which our ancestors treated the prophets.  Because of our Baptism we share in the kingly, priestly, and prophetic role of Christ the Lord.  To be rich, filled, laughing, well spoken of is to be treated exactly the same way our ancestors treated the false prophets.  This would be a life spent limited by the only glory that the world can give.  It has an end, a dead end.  This would be a life of woe leading to an eternity of woe for all who seek and embrace it.  For our liberation the Son of God became the Son of Man and died and rose so that we might know true blessedness now and for ever and ever.