Looking Up

One of my best friends got engaged this weekend, and I could not be happier for his fiancée and him. In a call the day after the romantic endeavor had transpired I could still hear in his voice a joy that might have very well lifted them a few inches off the ground. The night before my buddy had sent me some photos from the engagement, which included one of the couple with a picturesque, autumnal valley somewhere in Virginia as the backdrop. I commented on our phone call about that shot in particular, and his response caught me off guard. He said, “It was a bad shot of us. The angle of the pic was from above, so we look weird.” I laughed, but keep thinking about this.

Another one of my friends stands six feet, seven inches tall. He has to bend over to give me hugs, which typically makes me smile and at least laugh inside my head when it happens. On a hiking trip we took I asked him to take a picture of me with another valley somewhere in Utah as the backdrop. I never liked how the photo turned out. The viewpoint of the shot seemed rather off, and I felt like I was smaller in the photo than I feel like I am in real life. As I kept talking to my friend, the one who had just gotten engaged, I wondered in my heart and mind about the juxtaposition of feeling so huge and so small at the same time. 

“Jesus looked up at his disciples,” is the way that the Gospel reading for All Saints’ Day begins. This might be a insignificantly small detail, but considering the words that follow I hesitate to overlook the picture that Luke’s Gospel account paints for us, especially when the words that follow are the Lukan Beatitudes. In a moment when Jesus says blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the hated for they will become rich, full, joyful, and heavenly the posture from which Jesus speaks matters. In this person God came to dwell as fully human and fully divine, but coming to recognize this as truth sometimes makes me feel more off-putting than looking at a picture of myself from an odd aspect. Still somehow imaging Jesus revealing the counter-cultural truths of the Beatitudes makes complete sense when we see the one through whom all things were made crouching down in a stance of servanthood.

Even more so than in Matthew’s version, Luke’s Beatitudes at the Sermon on the Plains provide this magnificent mix of paradox that would seemingly fit better with Matthew’s Emmanuel, that is God with us. This is to say the first shall be last and last shall be first message of the Beatitudes comes across all the more strongly in Luke’s telling in part because Jesus, the King of kings delivers them while stooped down, and yet there is more. Luke’s version flows straightway from blessings to woes, which are split up in Matthew’s Gospel account. Woe to the rich, the full, the laughing, and the well respected, for they will experience their comeuppance! Even in this moment of warning I imagine Jesus crouching down, and maybe his voice even quieted, so that the disciples would lean in closer to hear his words. God incarnate in man stoops down to lift up the lowly and humble the exalted ones. This is the lovely, counter-cultural, upside-down beauty of the Good News of Jesus.

This strange paradox we see when we look upon Jesus dumbfounds me sometimes though. In this one person we believe we are looking upon someone who is all God and all human. Perhaps the helpful thing as we look towards All Saints’ Day is that he was not alone in pointing to this truth. Jesus may have been the Beatitudes incarnate, and yet, there were, are, and will be hundreds and thousands of witnesses who pointed, point, and will point to this strange truth of God’s love. This week we will celebrate all the saints, the ones formally recognized by the Church and the ones who we alone may know. As you are going through this week look at the saints in your life. They may not look like spiritual giants, pro athletes, movie stars, or celebrities, but even if the angle looks weird if you look closer you will see that paradoxical truth that even in regular old humans God still chooses to dwell!