Luke 6:17-26
Does this text seem familiar? It should—in Luke 1, which we heard on the last Sunday of Advent, we hear a version of these words as Mary rejoices with Elizabeth. In Luke 4, which we heard three weeks ago, Jesus preaches his first sermon, which sounds like a shorter version of what we hear today. And today, Jesus elaborates on the ideas that we first heard from Mary—clearly Mary has trained her son well.
This text might feel familiar in other ways too—and yet different in key ways. You might remember that this sermon happened on a mountain. And yes, it did—in the Gospel of Matthew. But here, in the Gospel of Luke, instead of having people look up to Jesus as he preaches from a mountain, Jesus looks up at the disciples as he preaches on a plain.
Last week Jesus told Simon Peter to cast his nets into the deep water. This week, Jesus delivers his message on a plain, a level place. As with last week’s deep water, we might not understand a level place in the ways that prophetic tradition would recognize it. Professor Ronald J. Allen says, “The word “level” often refers to places of corpses, disgrace, idolatry, suffering, misery, hunger, annihilation, and mourning”—and then Dr. Allen traces the word across 6 prophetic texts in the Old Testament. Jesus is on a plain with us, on the level, giving us even-handed discussion about what it means to follow him during the desperate times in which we find ourselves, whether it’s the Roman empire or late stage capitalism.
He must know why he has attracted a following: people come to him eager for healing, yearning to have their demons evicted. Throughout the Gospel of Luke, the Holy Spirit has been on the move, demonstrating Divine Power, and the beginning of today’s Gospel is no different. In the middle of level ground, Jesus gives us plain talk about the Kingdom of God, which is different from earthly kingdoms.
In ancient times, people saw evidence of Divine favor in earthly circumstances. In the ancient context, people knew that that someone was blessed by God—or gods and goddesses--because they were rich, because they weren’t hungry, because they had respect from every corner of society. Ancient people assumed that if one was poor, if one had desperate circumstances, if one’s life was marked by death or other forms of doom, that it was because a person had done something to deserve that fate. Ancient people saw divine favor expressed in quality of life
Jesus tells us of a different reality. The poor aren’t damned, the hungry aren’t doomed, the mourning aren’t perpetually sad, the reviled aren’t forever cast away. Indeed, when we live on the land of the level, we are surrounded by people whose lives are wrecked. And here comes Jesus, echoing the words of the angel Gabriel to his mother Mary, words that say, “Hail, o blessed one. The Lord is with you. You have found favor with God.” Jesus tells us over and over again that when we feel lost, when we feel abandoned, when we feel most outcast from our society, God is right there with us, on that plain.
And then we get to the Woes. Blessings and woes—it’s the language of the prophets, the message that God has not abandoned us, the message that there is a penalty for living lives that seek success by the world’s markers, not by God’s. Jesus knows how easy it is to fall under the spell of our larger society that tells us that we should value wealth, comfort, prestige—it was true in the time of Jesus, and it’s just as true today.
In the Gospel of Luke, we get many parables about wealth, about the dangers of trusting in earthly wealth. Each Gospel warns about wealth in its own way; the Gospel of Luke returns again and again to the message that earthly wealth takes us away from God. That is not to say that those of us who are wealthy are beyond salvation. Not at all.
In fact, if we look at the book of Luke and the book of Acts as one narrative story written by the same person (and we are fairly sure that both books were written by the same person), we see a radically different way of living, radically different from the ways that the larger world would see as rational. In the book of Luke, over and over again, Jesus tells us that God’s blessing will look radically different than what the world trains us to expect a blessing will be, and that wealth is not the mark of greatness that the world tells us it is. By the time we get to Acts, the disciples have begun to put this idea into practice.
The early chapters of the book of Acts show that the disciples have pooled their wealth, that they are neither rich nor poor, that they hold their goods in common. They eat together and they worship together and they help the poor—and this new way of life attracts people, just like the new way of life that Jesus proclaims attracts people.
If we look at the Sermon on the Plain, we see that there is a middle way between the brokenness of our current world and the stories of success that our current world tries to sell us. If we share our wealth, the poor will get their reward, and we will avoid the spiritual dangers that come with extreme wealth. If we share our food, then the hungry will be fed, and we will be nourished too. If we comfort those who weep, then at some point, smiles will return to their faces and to ours.
Make no mistake—living this way can invite scorn, or worse. Jesus warns us again and again of the cost of discipleship, that the larger world might exclude us, might revile us, might defame us because we choose to live out our Gospel based lives. But that will be fine. Jeremiah tells us, and the Psalmist tells us, and Jesus tells us, and another several thousand years of wisdom from all sorts of spiritual thinkers—they all tell us that if we live the way that Jesus calls us to live, we will find ourselves like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither.
If we find ourselves in a time of drought, we don’t need to be anxious. If we perceive that we are in a place that prophets would have recognized as one of corpses, we don’t need to fear. Our roots run deep. We will continue to have green leaves. Jesus speaks to us on the Plain, on our level, showing us again and again that there is a way of healing, a way of hope, that we can find blessings in places where most people would see as desolate.
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