The Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain

A Reflection for the Feast of All Saints

Every year on the Feast of All Saints, the Church gives us the Beatitudes — those strange, tender, and unsettling blessings of Jesus.  Most years, we hear them from Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus goes up the mountain to speak. But in Year C, as we do this year, we hear Luke’s version — where Jesus comes down and speaks “on a level place.”

That detail is no accident.

Matthew gives us the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus speaks from the heights — the thin air of vision and imagination.  There, the Beatitudes are like a dream of the world as it could be. Luke, however, gives us the Sermon on the Plain, and in Luke, Jesus stands right in the midst of the crowd — eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder, standing on the same dirt as everyone else.

Luke’s Jesus doesn’t bless the “poor in spirit.”
He blesses the poor.
He doesn’t comfort an idea — he comforts the hungry, the grieving, the hated, and the forgotten.

And that changes everything.

Because to stand on the plain with Jesus is to stand where the world’s pain is not abstract.  It’s to face the ache of reality: the families who have lost everything to hurricane winds in Jamacia and the Caribbean; asylum seekers and children caught in injustice; children and seniors who will go hungry in a never ending government shutdown; widows and orphans who eek by in a never-ending cloud of loneliness and isolation, sisters and brothers who live in constant pain, suffering, or chronic illness—you know, all the quiet suffering that lives behind polite smiles and Sunday clothes.

To see suffering on the flat and level place is to know that Jesus is speaking directly to us — to this corner of the vineyard, to this parish, to this moment. His words are not distant ideals but living truth, spoken again into our weary world.

And that’s where the Sermon on the Plain asks something of us — something hard and holy.  It asks that we drop our pretenses and our swords.  It asks us to stop trying to win, to stop clutching so tightly to our rightness, to stop measuring our worth or others’ worth by the world’s tired standards of success, victory, or dominion. 

The plain is where we learn that following Jesus is not about triumph or control, but about presence and mercy.  It’s about letting go of the illusion that we are self-made, and standing instead in the humble awareness that everything we have is a gift.

But for the grace of God — the sheer randomness of our nationality and birthplace, the encouragement of family and friends, the generosity of teachers and mentors, the labor of public servants and service workers — we might well have been the ones left hungry, or grieving, or forgotten.

And because we have received so much, we are called to use what we have in the service of others.  That’s what it means to stand on the plain: to live in gratitude instead of entitlement, to respond with mercy instead of judgment, to act not from fear but from compassion.

Jesus doesn’t tell us to escape the pain of the plain. He meets us there. He blesses us there. He calls us to remain there — not as victims of the world’s sorrow but as participants in God’s mercy.

To stand on the plain is to feel the wind of grief and injustice blow straight into your face, and to stay anyway.  To keep loving anyway.  To keep blessing anyway.  To be the hands and feet of Jesus in that level place—to testify to the hope that Christ alone provides those hoping for releif.

When we face the pain of the plain, we are reminded that holiness does not look like escape. It looks like a presence.

The presence that calls a friend out of the blue to ask how they’re holding up.
The presence that notices the person sitting alone at church and chooses to sit beside them.  Presence that smiles big and makes eye contact as we thank the barista, the teacher, the public servant, the nurse, and the janitor — all those who make our lives possible.

The Sermon on the Mount inspires us to imagine heaven—good and Holy. 
The Sermon on the Plain teaches us how to live it out — in the dust, in the noise, in the heartbreak and the hope of the everyday.

And maybe that’s what the sainthood we celebrate on this feast really is: not climbing higher, but learning to stay.  Staying with those who suffer, staying when it’s uncomfortable, staying until love has the last word.

Blessed are you when you face the pain of the plain.
Blessed are you when you refuse to look away.
Blessed are you when you keep loving, keep showing up, and keep believing that even here — especially here — the kingdom of God draws near.

See you on the plain.

Pax et Bonum!

Fr. Ben +