Upside-Down and Inside-Out

Ordinary Time VI; February 11, 2007

Luke 6:17-26

To put it bluntly: this teaching of Jesus reveals that he is either a lunatic or he has unique insight into the world as God sees it. Take your choice.

“Blessed are you who are poor”? Really? In many communities you can’t get routine health care without going to the emergency room; you go to a food bank to get food for your family; you move whenever the unpaid rent catches up to you; you cannot get dental care; you cannot give to your church; you never have new clothes. And this is simply reflecting what it means to be poor in the United States. If you are poor in Haiti, you will probably be dead by your mid-forties. If you are poor in much of the world, not just hunger but actual starvation is a real possibility. “Blessed are you who are poor”?

You can extrapolate from that similar objections to Jesus’ other three blessings. These four blessings are preposterous. So I say again: either Jesus is able to see something the rest of us do not see, or he is crazy.

Usually we try to make these sayings more palatable by explaining “what Jesus really meant.” Perhaps it is right to do so; after all, to be poor, hungry, weeping and persecuted in his society may have meant something rather different from what we think of. Yet I cannot believe they meant something so radically different that we can simply wish away the radical nonsense of Jesus’ statements.

So the attempts to explain them in a way that makes them easier to take – “Just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down” – go on and have since the first century. Matthew tells the blessings – the “Beatitudes” – in a more spiritual way: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” and so forth. But John Calvin suggests that Matthew’s version does not spiritualize the beatitudes so much as apply them to special cases. Obviously, Calvin suggests, simply being poor does not hand you a “Get out of hell free” card. Rather, he says, to be poor, to be hungry and to weep open you to the realization that true happiness is not to be found in the transient pleasures of the world.

I like what he says about “Blessed are you when people hate you… on account of the Son of Man.” He reminds us that the powers of evil have a pretty good grip on this world. Generally speaking, people do look for happiness in material ease and comfort, in getting as many goodies as possible with as little effort as possible, and only think about God as, well, as a super-sized Santa Claus. And so those who actually think that God is to be obeyed, that God is to be praised, that God is to be loved and worshiped, will be put down by the others. In other words, Calvin says, if you face persecution because of your faith in Jesus, you are happy, because Satan figures you are worth the trouble.

The other radical thing about Jesus’ words here in Luke is that each blessing is matched by a woe. Woe to you who are rich, woe to you who have enough to eat, woe to you who laugh, woe to you when all speak well of you. That is contrary to our usual way of thinking. We figure the rich must be happy. We are grateful that we have enough to eat. We believe laughter is a good thing. And what’s wrong with having a good reputation?

That one I can answer. If everyone speaks well of you – everyone, that is – then you obviously don’t stand for anything. President Lyndon Johnson is remembered as a pretty good story-teller in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln. One of Johnson’s stories is about a school teacher applying for a new job in a small town in West Texas. Johnson, you know, was a school teacher before he went into politics. Anyway, the school board was fairly evenly divided between the flat-earth party and the round-earth party, so they asked the young man how he taught it. He said, “I can teach it any way that you gentlemen want it taught.”

Woe to you when you’re more about trying to please people than when you stand for something. Jesus did not have only school teachers, preachers and politicians in mind, remember. That crowd he’s speaking to has fishermen, shepherds, doctors, teachers, lawyers, farmers, artisans, soldiers, day laborers, government workers and all sorts of folks in it.

So, having ranted a while about these preposterous sayings of Jesus, what am I going to do with them? Two things. The first is this: to challenge you to decide if Jesus has unique insight into the world as God sees it or if Jesus is a lunatic. The key to all these sayings is that they are upside-down and inside-out from the way human beings normally see the world and life in it. We figure it’s good to be rich, to be well-fed, to laugh, and to have a good reputation; and that the opposite is bad. It is certainly true that, just as to be poor is not an automatic ticket to heaven, to be rich is not an automatic ticket to hell. After all, St. Augustine reminds us, the Patriarch Abraham was rich.

Yet these sayings do declare that the way we ordinarily see the world is not necessarily the way God sees it. God does not intend for there to be people who die in their mid-forties because they cannot get medical care, for there to be children who starve to death, for there to be millions who see life each day as bleak, unremitting struggle against sorrow. This is not a new thing with Jesus; the Torah teaches the same thing and the prophets proclaim the same thing. Jesus is really just reiterating the witness of Jewish tradition throughout the ages. So, if he is crazy for saying these things, the whole Bible is crazy.

God simply does not accept our sinful values as an accurate picture of reality. There is nothing inherently wrong with wealth, feasting, laughter and a good reputation. From time to time, Jesus even enjoyed them. But to pursue those and to be content with them, to find one’s happiness in these things, is to deny the world as God sees it and to live in a world that is corrupted by human greed and human pleasure. So the first thing to say is that Jesus presents us with the choice between seeing the world as God sees it and seeing it as sinful human beings normally see it.

The second thing is that Jesus is not talking about how God will make everything better when you die and go to heaven. I insist on this point. “If you are poor now, be happy, because you will be fine in heaven.” Yuck. That is not how Jesus uses the phrase “the kingdom of God” in his preaching. When Jesus talks about the kingdom of God, he is talking about the way life is among those who belong to God. The way God sees the world is not some la-la vision that can never become reality; it is precisely what God is about. God’s work in the world is to reverse fortunes so that the poor will find their needs met as the kingdom of God comes among them. Why is there even a food bank where the poor can get food? Why are there village health workers in Haiti? Why is there a micro-credit bank in Nicaragua that many of you support? Because the kingdom of God has come among us. Followers of Jesus Christ decide that he is not crazy, that he does in fact have unique insight into the world as God sees it, and so they decide to live in the kingdom of God rather than in the kingdom of this world.

It strikes me that there is a huge crowd pushing in to listen to Jesus, yet when he starts to speak, Luke says that Jesus is speaking to “his disciples.” That does not mean just the Twelve, but it means anyone who is learning from him. The crowd probably enjoys listening, perhaps even gets a few hoots and hollers in at the expense of the rich, but then they go back to their lives of scrabbling for all the goodies they can get, thinking that that is the ticket to happiness. But the disciples are those who listen to Jesus and decide that he is making some strange sort of sense and that is how they want to live. They want to live in the world as God sees it and as God is working to make it.

God is at work making the kingdom of God, where the poor are welcome, the hungry are fed, the teary laugh and those who are defamed because of Christ are happy, because they know they stand for something; and where the rich get nothing more, the sated will have growling bellies, the pleasure-filled will weep and the celebrated are revealed as frauds. That is, if Jesus knows what he is talking about, then that is what God is doing, and Jesus invites you to be a disciple and decide to live in that world, the world God is making. What do you choose?

Lord God, show us your ways and give us wisdom to choose well. Amen.

Robert A. Keefer

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Clarinda, Iowa