“Blessed Are You…”
Jeremiah 17:1-5; Luke 6:17-26
February 11, 2007
The Rev. Dr. Catherine Taylor
“The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse – who can understand it?” says Jeremiah. The point being that God is the only one who is to be trusted wholeheartedly.
It does seem to be true that Valentine’s Day is a day that causes dread in the hearts of many. People who are half of a couple tiptoe around buying Valentine cards and gifts hoping that whatever they do will be acceptable to their beloved. One man told me he buys his wife three cards – one funny, one sentimental, and one in between, just to cover all the bases.
People who are not part of a couple may dread Valentine’s Day even more. It is a day for glorifying love in its most traditional forms, and if you happen to be without a partner it can be a day of reminder that the blessings of having another person in your life are, for whatever reason, not yours.
Our culture is very concrete in its understanding of what blessings are: a significant relationship, a job, a family, good health, a sense of security about tomorrow. Some who might be thought of as really and truly blessed may have a good job, a loving family, excellent health, a big income, and a fat retirement fund. But superlative or not, these things are the things that come to mind when we sit down to “count our blessings.”
Another blessing, I have been reminded this past week, is freedom. My husband received a jury summons and wants to serve, although it may not be possible as he is the only adult psychiatrist on the unit at the local hospital.
I served on a jury in a criminal case. We decided amidst much anguish that we simply could not convict the defendant, who had been charged with shooting another man. Most of us felt he may well have done it; a few were sure. But there was not enough evidence under the rules of law to convict him. He might not have done it and so we said “not guilty.” When the verdict was read in open court, the defendant first threw his arms around his attorney, then sat down with his head on the table in front of him and wept. Guilty or not, his freedom had been restored, and he valued it enough to weep openly at such a blessing.
Other kinds of blessings don’t receive much attention anymore, but they are still real and necessary. Who is there who has not longed for the blessing of his or her parents? Parents who manage to convey to a child the sense that he or she is acceptable and loved as they are give the greatest of all possible gifts.
Children who grow up without a sense of their parents’ blessing may spend an entire lifetime trying to achieve an inner approval, and waste many years seeking something that has been withheld.
Because we think of blessings in such a concrete way, we are puzzled when we come to the beatitudes in which Jesus turns our understanding of blessing on its head, and announces unlimited and extravagant blessings on people our society labels in every sense as poor. How can the poor be blessed?
“We do not really know Jesus if we do not know him as (the)…partisan of the poor” wrote Karl Barth(1), Swiss pastor and theologian, admitting that these are [quote] “dangerous words.” Partisan is certainly not a word we like to associate with Jesus. It sounds so political, since a partisan is one who takes the part of or strongly supports a side, a party, or another person. We think of partisans as unreasoning, emotional adherents; people who are blindly or unreasonably devoted.(2) But, “We do not really know Jesus,” Barth insists, “if we do not know him as (the)…partisan of the poor.”
By the time we reach Luke’s version of the beatitudes in Luke 6, Jesus has preached, taught, and healed many people, and his reputation has spread throughout the countryside. His ministry began with his reading of the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue, and his announcement that he had been appointed “to bring good news to the poor.”
The opening words of the beatitudes as Matthew would have them are different: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” words we used today in the Prayer of Confession. But in Luke we have “Blessed are you who are poor.” Right off the bat we can see that Barth was right. We are in dangerous territory. Luke is giving us the straight stuff, words that are probably closer to Jesus’ original saying than Matthew’s version is.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit” versus “Blessed are you who are poor?” Your have to wonder if Matthew purposefully softened the words. In Matthew the people who are being blessed are a vague group, a group we can finagle a way into. Aren’t we poor in spirit sometimes? Doesn’t everybody weep now and then?
But Luke’s version allows no such finagling. In Luke’s beatitudes, after a brief introduction to set the scene, there are four blessings and four woes, all perfectly balanced.
Blessed are the poor, the hungry (read “poor”), those who weep (read “poor”), and those who are not accepted because they follow Jesus. This last is the only group that might be larger, that might have in it people in addition to the ones who are despised and despairing, and on the edge of what the society rewards when it is handing out prizes.
After the four blessings come four “woes.” Woe to the rich, the full (read “rich”), those who laugh now (read “rich”), and those who are accepted wherever they go (read “rich”).
The word for “laugh” does not mean people who are merry or having a good time. It means those who “laugh like fools.” And the people who are accepted and praised wherever they go are the ones with the money to get in the door while everyone else waits in line.
No wonder we don’t know Luke’s beatitudes as well as we know the version in Matthew. Who wants woes with their helping of blessings.
In Matthew the beatitudes form the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. The whole discourse is about four times longer than Luke’s version. In Luke there is no mount. Instead, there is a plain, a level place, and what follows is called the Sermon on the Plain.
The mountains in Luke are the place where Jesus goes to get away from the crowds and pray. While he is still on the mountain, immediately before what we read today, he chooses from his followers a group of twelve. He calls them the apostles. That matters, because among the people on the plain who have come from far and wide to hear Jesus are many “disciples” of Jesus.
Luke makes a point of telling us that everyone who is there has come to “hear.” These are the sympathetic listeners, the ones who want to be there, people who know that Jesus has the power to heal. In other words, they are the church on any Sunday morning, we who come to hear what we know to be the Word of God for us.
At the end of the first part of the Luke version is the amazing statement that “All in the crowd were trying to touch him.” Everyone – all – from surrounding regions that are named. “For power came out from him and healed all of them.” All of them. No one is left out. Then he looked up at “his disciples,” the whole crowd of them, and spoke the blessings and the woes.
I am lining all this out for us because what it says to me is that the blessings and the woes are both for us, the disciples. It isn’t that poor disciples get the blessings and rich disciples get the woes. We the disciples, get it all – the blessing and the warning, too.
The word for blessing used here is markarios in Greek. It is stronger than the word “blessing” is in English. It means “How fortunate” or even “how happy.” “How fortunate are you who are poor.” “How happy are you who are hungry.”
The poor and hungry, the weeping and despised are not fortunate because of their condition, of course. Their condition is miserable, not what God wants for them or for anyone. No, they are fortunate because, in their desperate and outcast state, there is nothing to distract them from putting their whole trust in God.
The Jeremiah reading, and the psalm which we sang as our middle hymn, both speak about trust, about the good fortune of those who trust in God. They are like trees planted by streams of water. Those who trust God will be fruitful and a future awaits them.
In the Jeremiah reading, the one who places trust in others rather than God is like a plant struggling in the desert, a plant in a parched wilderness that “shall not see relief.”
When Jesus announces a blessing on the poor, he is saying they are people who are planted beside the stream of God’s kingdom that flows by God’s decree toward those who need relief. The poor did not choose to grow near the stream; God has welled up under their feet and chosen them.
Philip Yancy is a conservative Christian, an editor of Christianity Today. He is well aware of many theologians who, like Barth, point out God’s preferential love for the poor. In a wonderfully unpretentious way, Yancy admits to having wondered if it were really true that God has a special love for the poor. Yancy used to wonder, he says, until he ran across a list of ten “advantages of being poor” (written by Monica Hellwig).
I want to read it for us just as Yancy gives it. It has some surprises in it. Try to be open as you listen:
1) The poor know they are in urgent need of redemption.
2) The poor know not only their dependence on God and on powerful people, but also
their interdependence on one another.
3) The poor rest their security not on things but on other people.
4) The poor have no exaggerated sense of their own importance, and no exaggerated
need of privacy.
5) The poor expect little from competition and much from cooperation.
6) The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxuries.
7) The poor can wait because they have acquired a kind of dogged patience born of
acknowledged dependence.
8) The fears of the poor are more realistic and less exaggerated because they already
know that one can survive great suffering and want.
9) When the poor have the gospel preached to them, it sounds like good news and not
a threat or a scolding.
10) The poor can respond to the call of the gospel with a certain abandonment and
uncomplicated totality because they have so little to lose and are ready for anything.
In other words, says Yancy, “poor people find themselves in a posture [to receive] the grace of God.”
Being so desperate that nothing separates you from God may still not appear as a blessing to you, as a fortunate state, list or no.
That is where the woes come in and help us. Woe to you who are so rich you never have to rely on God at all. Woe to you who are so full that the idea of emptiness, especially someone else’s emptiness, has never entered your head. Woe to you who laugh at God’s law now, you will be weeping later. Woe to you who can go through any door and be welcome; the doors to the kingdom just might be closed.
The blessing Jesus gives to the poor may be puzzling, but the woes aren’t.
Remember, those who gathered to hear the word believed Jesus had power; and all of them went away healed, all the disciples, not just the poor.
Jesus is a partisan, unreasoning, unrestrained in his love for all people who are trying to thrive in a desert, far away from the kingdom’s life-giving stream.
Or, as Barth puts it, Jesus is the one who reveals “the limit and the frontier” of all kinds of things we think we are bound by. If you are someone who feels bound by the demands of your job to the exclusion of all else, the need to pay bills you’ve locked your life around, Jesus’ woes are good news. They reveal the limits of financial salvation, the stifling fullness, that sometimes feels more like a trap than a way to be full or free.
If you are someone who laughs without a care and no thought of those who are less well off, Jesus’ woes are good news. They reveal the limits that isolate you and keep you from experiencing compassion and connection, the narrowness that has locked you into a life with people just like you who have nothing new to offer.
If you are someone who thinks you are bound by the needs for a certain title such as “Great at my job,” “best mom in town,” “angriest child,” “better than Dad was,” “deserving of love,” – if you are someone who thinks you are bound by the need for a certain name – Jesus’ woes are good news. They reveal the limits of any name other than “child of God.”
Beloved, the kingdom stream wells up in the back yard of the poor, but even the rich can drink from it if they leave their irrigated lawns to spend time with their neighbors.
Blessed are all those who know where the kingdom stream flows and put their roots down to drink. AMEN.
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(1)Karl Barth, Dogmatics, IV, 2, p. 180
(2)Webster’s New World Dictionary, p. 1066