Luke 7:17-26
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 everyone in the crowd was 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[d] on account of the Son of Man. 23 Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is how their ancestors treated 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 how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
A big question: Just how absolute, how unqualified, are Jesus’ statements here? When he says, for instance, “blessed are you poor” he sure seems to be speaking of “the poor” as a whole category of people without making distinctions amongst different kinds of poor - the kind of distinctions we make between the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor, those who deserve our help and those who do not, those who have met certain conditions and those who must learn to abide by the rules to receive assistance. But Jesus doesn’t seem the least bit interested in any of this. “Blessed are you who are poor,” he says, “for yours is the kingdom of heaven”.
Our immediate assumption is that Jesus can’t be saying what he seems to be saying. We feel it necessary to insert qualifications Jesus does not himself impose, stuff about people believing or obeying in order to receive the blessing, some action to take or criteria to meet in order to activate or access the blessing. And we would seem, not only to have conventional wisdom on our side, but even the OT passages which we read earlier, both of which plainly state that blessing comes from heeding wisdom and cursing comes for disregarding it. But all this is strangely absent. One get the sense that he’s offering a counterbalance, even subverting the old conception, which is a conception we might still hold.
The other troubling aspect of this passage is that Jesus certainly seems to be speaking about the poor in the ordinary sense of people who don’t have material resources. That Jesus would speak in primarily economic terms violates our widespread assumptions as to what faith is all about. Surely Jesus doesn’t mean the literal poor; he must be using the poor metaphorically, referring to some abstract kind of poverty. Right? Scripture itself actually captures and canonizes this ambivalence. In the parallel passage in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus does indeed say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. If you’re so inclined you can argue over which evangelist preserves the original, or you can assert that Jesus must’ve said both since we have both in Scripture.
Indeed, both “blessed are the poor” and “blessed are the poor in spirit” are Scripture. And while there are some who think that Matthew tempered the impact of Jesus’ words - faithfully preserved in Luke - by adding “in spirit”, it seems clear to me that we are not only more familiar with Matthew’s version but that we reflexively interpret Luke in light of it, that when Jesus promises blessing to the the to the poor he means those who are aware of their spiritual poverty (never-mind that this blessing is contrasted with the woe pronounced upon the rich). This may seem like a trivial contention, but in fact it both reflects and informs what we think this faith is all about. We do have every reason to hope that God will enrich the spiritually poor - we shouldn’t abandon Matthew’s version - but as I’ve said recently and undoubtedly will continue to say, for all sorts of reasons we are people who have learned to “spiritualize” the Gospel, to make all the action subjective, interior, invisible. We can imagine that Jesus might make us rich in spirit but we almost literally cannot imagine that Jesus might make the poor rich. We’ve learned to hope that, rather than turning the whole world upside down, rather than the kingdom coming, Jesus intends only to reorient our psychology.
Last week at my little “Christians and Trump” talk I argued that the big mistake Christians have made - whether they support Trump or anyone else - is to assume that secular politics is the primary, possibly the only, way to produce change in the world, so we easily assume that it’s incumbent of us to seize power and to make the world the way we think it ought to be. Christians have become those who think voting changes the world but who doubt following the way of Jesus will make any difference. Our faith is about the private, inner, personal realm while politics is about the public, outer, communal realm. But this is a distinction Jesus rejects. As Stanley Hauerwas (whom I mentioned the other night) ask - and here I paraphrase - “How did we turn the Gospel into an apolitical account of personal salvation rather than the Good News that the kingdom of God will prevail?”
In this passage, and throughout the Gospel, Jesus proclaims that the kingdom is coming, even that, in him, it now is, and this is the very substance of the Good News. God really will turn the world upside down, transform creation, make all things new. Here Jesus gives us a picture of what the kingdom will look like; it will be a place where the poor become rich, where the hungry will be filled, where those who weep will laugh (with joy). Exactly those people who do not receive blessing in the present age will be blessed in the age to come. To those folks, this is good news. If you’re fully beat down by the world, take heart that God does not intend for to stay there forever.
But if the world turned upside down, those on top will be brought down, the exalted will be humbled. In the same way that Jesus does not distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor, here he does not differentiate between good rich people and bad rich people. Christians in the West always tell themselves that Jesus does not condemn wealth, just greed, not the possession of riches but the love of them - but Jesus’ own words give us more than a little reason to doubt this.
At this point you might bristle (or delight!) because this sounds too, like, Marxist, but the goal here is very much not to co-opt Jesus into political agenda but, in fact, to practice the politics of Jesus. This is not something we pursue by creating a political party, but simply by being the church, a community of people who live as citizens of the kingdom is this foreign land, who live according to the future age in this present age.
We pray every Sunday, as Jesus taught us, that the kingdom will come on earth as in heaven. If, in the kingdom, the poor will made rich, the hungry will be fed, the weeping will laugh with joy, then its not too much to expect to see glimpses of these kinds of things here and now, even to live in such a way that we enact the very possibility opened by Christ. Again, the most essential question for us is, “What kind of community do we intend to be?”
We probably ought to pay attention to the “woes” Jesus issues as well. It seems to me that when he addresses the rich, the well fed, the laughing - those people who have received in this life but will not, it seems, in the kingdom - we assume that Jesus is speaking to someone other than us and/or, again, he doesn’t quite mean what he says. Everyone loves the idea of the entitled folks being humiliated, but we ought to consider the possibility that we are quite rich, that we are quite well fed, that our lives are filled with entertaining diversions - that we might be the kind of people for whom the arrival of the kingdom turns out to be unpleasantly disorienting, that having been on top for so long we then find ourselves on the bottom.
And just as the blessings of the kingdom can be realized here and now, so can the woe. I imagine that the woe that Jesus pronounces targets not only some future reckoning, but also the present age in which the comfortably numb have been rendered all but incapable of embracing the politics of the kingdom and living in it. The rich and well-fed do not want the world turned upside down because it seems they can only lose in that scenario, the only place to go is down. But the entire logic of the Gospel is that this is path that leads to life, that if we die to ourselves we will be lifted up, that death leads to resurrection.
Now, I don’t intend to make myself poor so that the poor might become rich. But maybe that would really be the best thing - not just for the poor - but for me.
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