Text: Luke 6:17-26

The past few days, while driving around in the rain and meditating on this morning’s ancient word, what bubbled up in my stream of consciousness was the old gospel song, “Showers of Blessing.” We used to rock the basement of First Baptist, Boise, singing that song with unmitigated gusto. “There will be showers of blessing, sent from the Father above…” And as corny as that expression of sentiment may seem, that is what Jesus is saying to his disciples and the crowd as he begins his time of preparing them for the future.

Emerging from obscurity, Jesus has hit his stride as this portion of the gospel of Luke unfolds. He has been baptized by John, sojourned in his own personal wilderness with the powers of temptation, and announced his ministry in his home synagogue in Nazareth, “…to bring good news to the poor…to proclaim release to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). After his own people run him out of town for the audacity of his preaching, he has wandered the countryside calling disciples, healing the ill, cleansing lepers, and casting out evil spirits. He has begun to teach and he has performed the apparent miracle of the amazing catch of fish where the fishermen had found none. He has challenged the obsessive legalism of some of the Pharisees and scribes.

Now he has gone up into the hills to pray, to spend some quality time with God, to recharge his own depleted battery. He’d spent the entire night communicating with God. Mountain time is spiritual time in Luke’s gospel, time for reflection, for contemplation, for meditation, for centering oneself in the presence of the holy. With sunrise, the day’s work calls to him. He begins by identifying a dozen of his disciples to be whom he names apostles. A disciple is a learner; an apostle is someone who is sent out. It seems Jesus is already feeling some urgency to train those who will carry on his ministry after he is gone.

With the apostles newly named, he is eager to get on with the business of the day. He comes down off the mountain and finds a level place where he can do his ministry of preaching and teaching and healing. Mountains are for prayer; the plain is the place to be with the people, doing the work of the One who sent him. Wherever he goes the crowds follow. Even if he manages to escape for a night of prayer, they seek him out with the day’s dawn. The text says there was a “great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Sidon and Tyre.” What does this tell us about the crowd? We have a large number of people who have become his followers, including the Twelve just named to help lead the movement; then we have a larger group who have come out of desperation for a word of hope or a healing touch; those who have come out of curiosity to see what all the fuss is about and to enjoy the festivity of the event; and those who have come to keep tabs on this renegade rabbi who is challenging the status quo and spreading sedition. There are the poor and the rich, the oppressed and the powerful, the sick and the tormented, the faithful, the skeptical and the opponents. There are Jews and Gentiles, Sidon and Tyre being coastal cities in Phoenicia beyond Galilee. It is clearly a mixed audience, a multicultural audience, if you will.

And why were they there? Luke says “They had come to hear him and 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.” As Deborah Core has remarked of this scene, “No one is exempt from his scandalous love. Why wouldn’t the crowds press in on him?” she asks. “Everyone has an ache or a pain, a sore back, a frightening lump and he cures them all” (Deborah Core, “From Either-or to Both-And,” journeywithjesus.net, February 5, 2007).

So, in the midst of all this commotion and activity, instead of getting the Sermon on the Mount, the writer of Luke offers us the Sermon on the Plain, as Jesus elevates the intensity of his teaching and training of his followers. And the contrast in setting between the two gospel writers is carried through in the way each tells about Jesus’ crucial teaching at this point in his ministry. The Sermon on the Plain is much less spiritual than the Sermon on the Mount, as the writer of Luke speaks rather plainly about what the inbreaking culture of God is like, here and now, in an embodied present.

Looking directly at his disciples but speaking loudly enough that all those who had ears could hear, he begins, “Blessed are you who are poor…” No “poor in spirit here;” he’s talking to just plain poor people, and not even the working poor. He is speaking quite specifically of the dirt poor, the destitute, those who can’t see a way out. “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” “What did he say?” More than one head was scratched that morning. “Did we hear him right? This makes no sense.”

Remember we are dealing here with a culture in which blessing would have been considered a sign of social status, a mark of God’s favor. According to Brian Stoffregen, in ancient Greek “to be blessed, you had to be a god…to be blessed, you had to be dead…beyond the cares of earthly life…to be blessed, you had to be very rich and powerful…to be blessed, you had to have big and beautiful things.” He says, “…in the Greek translation of the Old Testament…[blessing] referred to the results of right living or righteousness. If you lived right, you were blessed. Being blessed meant you received earthly material things: a good wife [or husband], many children, abundant crops, riches, honor, wisdom, beauty, good health, etc.” “In all these meanings,” he argues, “the ‘blessed’ ones existed on a higher plane than the rest of the people” (Brian P. Stoffregen, “Exegetical Notes,” Crossmarks.com.)

Jesus has turned the tables, as he seems prone to do. It is probably more difficult for those of us for whom this has become a familiar text to imagine the impact these words had on those first hearers. The poor are blessed as residents of God’s realm, the hungry will be filled, those who are weeping will laugh, and anyone who has been excluded, defamed, reviled, persecuted for Jesus’ sake will find themselves jumping for joy when they receive their heavenly reward. Even if we, as people of privilege, don’t know first hand what Jesus is talking about, we have come to see and understand it vicariously. This is good news indeed. You’d have to be pretty mean-spirited not to rejoice in the saving good fortune of those who have been poor, hungry, drowning in tears of despair and victims of oppressive forces of all sorts. We can join in a lusty “Hallelujah! Amen!” when we see wrongs righted and blessings showered on those who suffer, even if we maintain our sense of superiority over these “come latelies” to elevated social status. Though these teachings have been around for 2000 years and many claim ours to be a Christian nation, we still have a nagging tendency to believe that it is the “haves” who are the truly blessed and the “have-nots” who are not blessed (and may be actually cursed). God takes care of the good and punishes the bad, right? We may yet hold a sneaking tendency to believe in the “deserving poor.”

But wait, there’s more. Luke is not content, like Matthew, to let the blessings just shower down. The writer says Jesus underscores his teaching by pairing every blessing of the poor with a warning to the rich. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 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. Woe to you when people speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” Ouch! This seems like a particularly harsh word. For those of us who are among the privileged, it is a word that may hit closer to home than the one about blessings.

Now many scholars have worked overtime to make sure that this text is not misread in what they see as two crucial ways. One is the misbelief that Jesus is glorifying poverty here; that this is part of that twisting of the word of Lord that argues that the poor will always be with us and there’s really nothing anyone can do about it. Jesus is not telling his hearers that abject poverty is desirable and you should seek it out if you want to win a place in the kingdom of God. Rather he is naming that same reality he names when he says that it is the ill who have need of the physician, not those who are (or, in self-righteousness, believe they are) healthy. The other scholarly argument seeks to move us away from any belief that the rich cannot enter God’s realm, that there is no place for them in the coming culture of God.

The first argument is more compelling to me than the second. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is clearly concerned with improving the physical lot of the poor, the sick, the outcast, the downtrodden, and the demon-ridden right here and now. Poverty is decidedly not a good thing. In fact, it is a powerful indicator of what is wrong with current culture. It seems to me that what Jesus is saying to the apostles and disciples is that it is their work, as it is his, to make these blessings a reality, to bring an end to poverty, to care for the least in society. Though some scholars argue that Jesus is speaking descriptively here and not prescriptively, it is hard for me to see that he is not asking us, as disciples, to join him in God’s work of making these blessings real for all God’s children in need.

The question of the rich is a more difficult one in that it seems to me that the accumulation of wealth and power, of prestige and privilege almost automatically cuts one off from the reality Jesus is envisioning, the reality of the culture of God in which there is such abundance of life with all its gifts that no one ever need be poor or hungry or despairing or excluded, ridiculed and reviled again. Traditionally, we have said that the culture of God is not only coming, but it is also here, now, in the person and ministry of Jesus and his followers. If our wealth, our stuff, our hoarding, our quest to ensure our own personal security is our focus, then the chances we will miss that culture, God’s new creation, are pretty significant. The argument goes on to say that the way a rich person enters God’s realm is to get a perspective on wealth that allows him or her to care and to share.

In the end, Jesus’ enterprise is fundamentally about being centered in God. His understanding of life and how it should proceed is deeply rooted in the culture of God, and that is a culture shaped by abundance of life, by a just allotment of the resources from that abundance, by redemption, both physical and spiritual, by healing and wholeness, by peace and justice for all, by full inclusion of all God’s children. It is not a culture focused on rewards and punishments, in which the poor - or the rich - are privileged, for there is no privilege in God’s realm. Nor are the rich or poor punished, except as they fail to embrace this new cultural reality God so freely offers through Jesus. Blessings and woes are both articulated to make sure that we know what God has in store for us when we find ourselves in close communion, as well as what happens to us when we let any idol, including wealth or poverty, take God’s place.

“Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the sad. It’s an upside-down world in the eyes of God,” says Joyce Hollyday. “Contrary to the overwhelming evidence, justice is real and hope is possible.” It must seem topsy-turvy, this teaching of Jesus, this surprising collection of blessings and woes. It challenges my world view, turns it over, makes me consider what my sisters and brothers all over this globe may need in terms of resources, healing, peace, wholeness. It sends me to my closets and garage and checking account and heart of hearts to see what I really need and what I can do without. In the end, it may be that what Jesus is showing us is the world turned right side up, asking us if we can find a way to live in such world as we also work to bring it to reality. It won’t be easy, but the outcome promises to be both grace filled and amazing. Amen.