A New Perspective

Luke 6:17-26

Sunday, February 11, 2007

The Rev. Dr. David A. Van Dyke

The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time  

Prayer: In the quietness of these moments, O God, startle us by your presence. Silence in us any voice but your own.  As we open your word, teach us what we need to know and show us what we need to do, in order to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Jesus had been preaching and healing and causing quite a stir.  The text says he came down from the mountain where he’d gone to pray, in order to speak to the assembling crowd.  And Luke notes that he spoke from a level place, as if to say, “I want to level with you.” 

And this is the message: 

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 

And blessed are you when people hate you, revile you, exclude you and defame you on account of the Son of Man.  Blessed are you when those things happen—rejoice in that day for great will be your reward.   

In Matthew’s gospel, in what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes are mitigated by modifiers.  “Blessed are the poor…in spirit.  Blessed are those who hunger…for righteousness.  And in a way, that makes them easier to hear.  Because at times we are all poor in spirit.  We all know what it is to hunger and thirst for righteousness. 

But according to Luke, it’s “Blessed are you poor.”  Period.  “Blessed are you who are hungry now.” Period.  And I would propose that at least in an initial hearing of this, it doesn’t sound like good news for those of us who are well-fed, well thought of and well off.  Given the way in which this world is arranged, we are not the poor.  We are not the hungry.  Given the way the system works for us, most of us are not outsiders.   

And then comes an added punch—something altogether missing in Matthew’s version. Jesus adds a list of woes that correspond to those blessings. 

Woe to you who are rich, for you already have your reward.

Woe to you who are full, for you will be hungry.

Woe to you who laughing now, for you will weep.  

Sometimes the beatitudes sneak up on us because we tend to hear them the way we want to hear them—as soft, religious platitudes offering comfort to those who mourn and high-minded talk about the meek inheriting the earth.  But there is a real revolutionary current running through theses beatitudes and it sneaks up on us—particularly on us, because if the peacemakers are blessed, then what does that say about the warriors?   If the poor are blessed, then what about us?

God, it seems, shows partiality to the poor.  And I just don’t see how you can get around that.  It’s not some spin put on things by liberal social theorists who dragged their agenda into the conversation.  Jesus did that.  Jesus said it.   And I’ve got to believe that he said it because he looked around at the world and at what he saw, and it troubled him, the way it should trouble us.  The statistics concerning the poor are truly alarming. 

There are 6.5 billion people on the planet with over 5 billion of them living in parts of the world that are still developing, and over 1 billion of them live on less than one dollar a day.  854 million people in the world are hungry. 16,000 children die each day from starvation—almost one child every five seconds.  That means that in the hour we’ll be in worship, roughly 700 of this world’s children will have starved to death (statistics from Bread for the World). 

Sometimes it’s all so overwhelming. And sometimes we act as if we don’t know what the answer is. It’s no secret, however, what starving people need.  It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out what the people dying from preventable, treatable diseases need. It’s not a mystery when it comes to what works in public education.  All you have to do is go to places like Greenwich, Connecticut, or to Grosse Point, Michigan to see what works.  

So in the face of needs so great, and in a world that is arranged the way it is, is it any wonder that God favors the poor?  “Blessed are you poor,” Jesus says, and I get that.  But when it comes to, “Woe to you who are rich,” I struggle over what to do with that.       

What I don’t believe is that Jesus was categorically condemning all rich people.  He was not claming that there is an intrinsic value in being hungry and poor.  What I think Jesus was doing, however, was changing the perspective—changing the way in which people thought—thought about themselves and the world.    

In proclaiming that it’s the poor in this world who are blessed, Jesus was radically changing the debate—offering a new perspective.  And he was offering hope in the midst of people’s current situations. 

Jesus was talking to the disciples and not just to the twelve, but to all who heard him that day.  And all who heard him that day would have been considered poor.  We tend to hear it through our own understanding of rich and poor, in that there are distinguishable degrees to being poor.  We view the poor from our own context, which includes a large middle class, albeit a shrinking middle class. 

In the first century, however, there was no real middle class, most everyone was poor and only a handful of people were rich.  Jesus was not preaching that day to comfortable, middleclass people who had driven in from the suburbs to hear good music and preaching.   He was preaching to people who were poor, who had been excluded and who were worried about where their next meal was coming from. 

And if God shows favoritism toward the poor, if Jesus was drawn to them and they to him, in large numbers, perhaps it’s because the poor have a way of understanding better than the rich, something of their own need.   

When Jesus said it’s harder for the rich to enter the kingdom of God than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, it was because the rich tend to be so self-sufficient, that their own need isn’t always apparent to them.  When your concern in this life is only for your own comfort and security, it’s easy to overlook your neighbor’s discomfort and insecurity.  When you become insulated in a world that on the outside seems to be pristine and perfect, it’s hard for your heart to break over the things in this world that should shatter it to pieces, and therefore to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn.    

On another occasion, Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician.”  And too often, the rich, those who have bought into the lie that they really do control their own destiny, find they have little need of a savior.

So Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor.” 

It’s a message that stands in stark contrast to the popular misconceptions about what it means to be blessed that you hear today.  You hear it all the time—rich people who chalk up their good fortune by saying, “We’re so blessed.”  And then there are the TV preachers with a prosperity gospel, proclaiming that God wants you to be rich and that if you’re not rich, something is wrong with you.  Your faith is lacking or maybe your prayer life is weak.

Well, Jesus was speaking in a world that wasn’t all that different.  He was speaking in a world in which people believed that God was in the business of doling out blessings and curses.  Good people were rewarded and bad people were punished, all by divine decree.  That disease, physical deformities and even death were the punishments for sins that must have been committed.  Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson still think that, by the way.  They are wrong.   But that’s the kind of world in which Jesus lived and taught. 

“Who sinned, Jesus, this man or his parents that he should be born blind?” 

Sometimes in this life bad things happen to seemingly good people while seemingly good things happen to the less deserving.  And sometimes slimy people seem to make out like bandits while good, honest hard working people can’t seem to get ahead.      

That’s life and that’s reality, but might I suggest that it’s only one kind of reality.  And it’s in the midst of those perceptions of reality that Jesus said, “Blessed are you who are poor and woe to you rich.”    

And what Jesus did by contrasting the blessings over and against the woes, was to introduce a whole new perspective on the way in which this world is truly ordered.  He offered a new perspective on our lives, and on what it means to be blessed. That the way in which this world is most often arranged is not correct, it’s not healthy, it’s not life giving and it’s not sustainable.  That money has nothing to do with it.  That being comfortable and well liked have nothing to do with being blessed.  And that actually, your not having a care in the world is a cause for you to worry about your own soul rather than it is an occasion to consider yourself blessed.  

There is no intrinsic virtue in being poor or hungry or despised, but there are real dangers in being so rich and comfortable that you are unaware even of your own need.

Another way of saying it is that if you are alive to the world around you and its trappings, its deceptions about power and success and the things that produce happiness—if you are alive to that world, which is dying away, you cannot be alive to the kingdom of God that is springing up around you.  If you are alive only to the ways of this world and its formulas for success and its recipes for fulfillment, you are probably dying already and don’t even know it. 

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” 

In other words,

Blessed are those of you who know your own need. 

Blessed are you if you are not hungering for what this world claims to offer.  Blessed are those who are not preoccupied with gaining favor or status in the world’s eyes, or who measure their wealth in terms of a financial statement. 

And blessed are you if you are honest enough—alive enough to yourself to acknowledge your own need for a savior.   

Because ultimately for us, the Christian life is not summed up in an air tight, systematic theology, it’s not a blueprint for morality or a set of simple, easy steps for a guaranteed happy life.  For Christians, life is a strange tale told not by idiots, but by people whose lives have undergone real transformation, allowing them to know what it is to be rich while being dirt poor, and to be filled while being hungry. 

It enables us to remain strong in whatever we face.  Christianity is a story told by those who have faced the chaos that has visited them and who have not let that chaos rob them of hope.  It’s told by those whose lives bear witness to something greater than themselves, something beyond this world and certainly beyond their current circumstances, and who are able to stand strong in the knowledge that the weeping that is overcoming you now will not always overcome you.

People of God, blessed are you in whatever you face.  And woe to us if we turn our backs on the hope, the joy and the promise of God’s good and gracious future.

Amen.     

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