Luke 6:17-26
17 He came down with them and
stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great
multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.
18 They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who
were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19 And all in the crowd were
trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. 20
Then he looked up at his disciples and said: "Blessed are you who are
poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 21 Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 22
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you,
and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23 Rejoice in that day and leap
for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their
ancestors did to the prophets. 24 "But woe to you who are rich, for you
have received your consolation. 25 Woe to you who are full now, for you will be
hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26 Woe to
you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the
false prophets."
Bill and Jo Patterson were a
couple who were members of the church as long as most folks could remember,
though it had been several years since Bill had been able to attend services.
The entire time I served as their pastor, Bill had been homebound, unable to
walk much further than the distance from his hospital bed in the living room to
the bathroom down the hall or a chair in the kitchen. “It’s his heart,” Jo
would tell me every time I came to visit them in their home in the cul-de-sac.
Of course, Jo wasn’t in spectacular health herself; she had smoked a lot in her
younger years, and by the time I knew her she was tethered to an oxygen tank or
to what seemed like miles of clear tubing that ran all over her house. She was
a sweet woman who loved her husband and her family. It didn’t come as a
surprise to me when Jo called me one day to tell me Bill had died. Between
gasping breaths, she told me about how he had gone the way he would have
wanted, at home, with her and their family. She asked if I would do his
funeral, and of course I said yes. When the day came, we held the funeral at
the funeral home chapel. There was nothing too out of the ordinary; I prayed,
read Scripture, put a few words together to say for Bill’s family, all with a
few recorded hymns woven in. Afterwards, we processed to the cemetery, and it
was there that I made a mistake I felt bad about for weeks afterwards.
In case you don’t know, I have
trouble with names. Seriously, if I ask you your name, it’s not because I don’t
know you or like you, it’s because I have a genuinely difficult time
remembering names. It seems to be worse whenever I have to remember couples,
especially if the two people in that couple have names that are similar or
perhaps easily confused—like Bill and Jo. I had trouble with that when I first
met Bill and Jo, but I had thought I was over it, but then we came to Bill’s
graveside service, where I repeatedly said things like, “Today, we lay Jo’s
body in the ground,” or “Jo’s death is only a temporary absence,” each time
saying Jo’s name instead of Bill’s. I bet I told myself a thousand times not to
switch the two, but I did every time, and I felt awful.
You ever do something like that? Mix your words up and wind up saying the
right opposite of what you actually meant to say? I do. I did, and I am
beginning to think Jesus did too, or at least folks like Luke did when they
were writing all this stuff down, a generation after Jesus said it. I mean,
that would make sense to me; after all, it’s hard to get all the facts
straight, all the quotes exactly right forty or fifty years later. Think about
those stories you hear people in your family tell every year around the
Thanksgiving table, those stories that make you want to hold your hand up,
clear your throat and say, “Well now, I don’t remember it like that at all!”
Yeah, I could understand if Luke got it twisted a bit, but Luke sets out in the
opening lines of his gospel to tell us that he’s done his research, spoken with
eye witnesses, and was likely palling around with Paul, coming into contact
with some of the apostles themselves, so I really doubt Luke got his words
mixed up.
So maybe Jesus misspoke, got his words crossed. I can’t blame him if he
did. If you read the chapters and verses leading up to our passage this
morning, you’ll see a full itinerary for Jesus, with little time to rest and
absolutely zero cups of coffee! After his baptism and trials in the desert,
Jesus begins a teaching ministry that begins in Galilee in chapter four,
returning back to his home in Nazareth (where they almost throw him off a
cliff), then back to the synagogues in Judea, followed by the lake-side lecture
we heard about last week before the miraculous catch of fish, then Jesus
answers questions about fasting and the sabbath…that’s a lot of teaching, a lot
of answering questions, a lot of time and energy going towards telling people
about the kingdom of God. That alone might be enough to cause someone to have a
slip of the tongue, but Jesus is up to more than just teaching.
Jesus is also healing a number people: he cast out an unclean spirit in a
man in Capernaum, healed Simon’s mother-in-law from a dangerous fever and while
he was there, “all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of
diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured
them”[1]
too, along with casting out a few demons before he left! After the miraculous
catch of fish, Jesus cleanses a leper, heals a paralytic, a man with a withered
hand, and in the first verses of our text “[many] had come to hear him and to be
healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were
cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from
him and healed all of them.”
That too is enough to wear you out, to knock your tongue loose, but Jesus
does still even more, because in the midst of this teaching, healing, and
exorcising, he calls his disciples. No, I wouldn’t blame Jesus one bit if he
got his words crossed up, if he said one thing but meant another. Honestly, I
sort of hope that’s what happened. Otherwise, I’ll have to deal with what Luke
tells us Jesus says in this passage, and honestly, it just doesn’t make any
sense to me. It seems backwards, upside-down, inside-out: “Blessed are you who are poor…blessed
are you who are hungry now…Blessed are you who weep now…Blessed are you when
people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on
account of the Son of Man…woe to you who are rich…Woe to you who are full now…Woe
to you who are laughing now…Woe to you when all speak well of you…”
See? Sounds backwards right?
Here, see if this doesn’t sound better, more natural: “Woe to you who are poor…who are hungry now…Woe
to you who weep now…Woe to you when people hate you, and when they exclude you,
revile you, and defame you…blessed are you who are rich…blessed are you who are
full now…blessed are you who are laughing now…blessed are you when all speak
well of you…” Better, right? Makes a lot more sense that way doesn’t it? I
mean, of course we’d more likely say “Woe” to those who are poor and hungry, because
they’ve probably done something to put themselves in that position right? Maybe
they’re lazy, maybe they’re not good with their money, or maybe they just make
bad decisions all the time and wind up with growling stomachs and empty accounts.
“Woe to them,” right?
Of course, we’d say “Woe to those who weep now” too, because you’ve been
to those funerals just like I have. You know the ones, where folks are just
falling all over each other, crying and carrying on, covering the church
parking lot in cigarette buts and snuff spit. The whole thing seems like a big
put on, a production, an emotionally overdrawn show! Woe to them, because they
don’t know how to act now that momma’s gone, right? Woe to them because they
ought not to be crying if they know they’re loved one is dead and gone to
heaven, right? Woe to those who weep now, because if they had just stayed out
of trouble, paid their bills on time, did what was right from the start, they’d
have nothing to weep about, right?
Woe to those who are hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed, because it
sure is awful to be them! After all, no one hates another person simply because
of some characteristic they have no control over, right? No one hates another
person because of something as involuntary as the color of their skin, the
place of their birth, the language they speak, or their very biology, right? No
one has ever been excluded because of who they are, reviled on account of
things beyond their control, defamed or turned away because they were seeking
to do something good, something right, something just, something from a place
of love, were they?
Were they…? Maybe the revised blessings make a bit more sense. After all,
I’ve come to learn that people prefer to be told positive things over negative
things anyhow.
“Blessed are the rich;” now that makes sense, right? I mean, you work
hard, earn a good living, buy some nice things, save up some money, invest, get
rich. Wealth is a blessing, right? It’s not like folks get rich by exploiting
those with little to give, right? It’s not like some of the richest people in
the world keep all their money while millions of other people starve, right?
Even so, those aren’t the rich Jesus would be talking about anyway. Surely he’d
have to be talking about those rich folks who do good things, who give some of
their money to charity, those rich folks who only own two homes and four cars
and only go on three vacations a year and pay their employees just enough to
let them work a second job—blessed are the good
rich, right?
“Blessed are those who are full now,” well that just makes all kinds of
sense doesn’t it? I mean, I like food and I like to be full of food. There are
few things in this world quite as nice as a good meal that fills you up just
right. I was right in the middle of a good blessing like that a few weeks ago.
I was coming back home from Atlanta, from a week-long writing workshop, when I
decided to stop at a Chic-Fil-A for lunch. I have to say, if a fast-food place
can be blessed, that place sure is: it was after 2:30 their time, and there was
still a line of cars wrapped around that building, and inside there were three
lines at the counter. I ordered my food, got my drink, and sat down, waiting
for my blessing to come to my table. That’s when I saw her—actually, I saw her
get out of the car in front of me as I pulled in the parking lot. She was an
older woman, dressed in a dark sort of dress, and she sort of wobbled as she
walked. I remember seeing a piece of paper in her hand. As I sat at that table
waiting for my chicken sandwich, I watched her walk up to folks in line,
showing them the piece of paper, each one shook their head, ignored her, or
just shrugged their shoulders. I overheard the women behind the counter say
something about calling the police, but the woman had slipped out the door and
was heading for the Burger King across the street. I heard one man, whom she
had approached, say, “I doubt she can even speak English, because she sure
couldn’t write it good,” (the irony was lost on him) “she ought to go find a
mosque or something if she’s really hungry. Let them give her some food!” I
guess she assumed she was Muslim because of her dark dress. Oh well, “blessed
are those who are full now”…right?
You know, now that I think about it, maybe Jesus didn’t have a slip of
the tongue. Maybe he really did mean it when he said, “Blessed are you who are poor…who
are hungry now… you who weep now…Blessed are you when people hate you, and when
they exclude you, revile you, and defame you,” because those folks have
nothing left to hold on to but God, no one left to feed them, to dry their
tears, to love them, include them, hold them up, and cherish them but God.
Maybe Jesus actually meant it when he said, “woe to you who are rich… who are full now…
who are laughing now…Woe to you when all speak well of you…” because
far too often those who are rich get that way because they hold too tightly to
what they have, while seeking more from those who have less, because far too
often those who are full don’t want to know where their food comes from and who
might actually be starving for the food they throw away, because far too often
those who are laughing don’t get that the joke is on someone else, that their
comfort is at the expense of someone else, that when other speak well of you
they will just as sure speak ill of you the moment you do or say one thing out
of line with their way of thinking. Woe to them, because the only one they have
left to feed them, to dry their tears, to love them is themselves.
Maybe Jesus didn’t get his words mixed up. Maybe we got our worlds mixed
up. Amen.
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