Ravenous
Jeremiah 17:5-10; Luke 6:17-26

February 15, 2004

No one is lukewarm about Christianity. Our pews are not so full anymore because the majority of people complain we say either too much or too little. Today’s Gospel according to Luke is the Sermon on the Plain, an intentional complement to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. The two evangelists both report the same thing and yet very different things. It is such passages - lists of moral propositions - that have traditionally driven away many a cultured despiser of religion. Too pompous and presumptuous - do it my way or the highway. Most people are seduced by narrative, by a story that one can enjoy for its own sake, and maybe get zinged by the way the tale makes one look at the world and oneself from a different perspective.

Not a lot of narrative in this one at first glance. That’s because we’re trying to go too fast, to speed read through Luke’s beatitudes, memorize them, put them on placards or bumper stickers, and move on the next issue. Let’s slow down.

It is true that one cannot avoid comparisons to the other big Sermon. Luke appears to mirror what Matthew has reported, but has also gathered other parts of Jesus’ sermon from quite different locations in Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew too seems to have assembled many of the thoughts of Jesus into a convenient occasion.

An intriguing suggestion about where Luke’s blessings and woes came from fits right into the story. When Jesus got up to preach on Isaiah 61:1-2 (Luke 4:16-30), some think these blessings and woes are what he preached and got his hometown folk so hopping mad they tried to kill him. Literally, these were words to kill for.

It keeps happening that wherever Jesus went, healing had to happen. Even healing gets him into big trouble, for just prior to today’s story, Jesus encounters a man with a withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath under the cynically watchful eyes of a bunch of Pharisees. What should one be doing on the Sabbath, good stuff or evil stuff, he asks these severe critics? Then he does the good stuff and heals the man, and the scribes and Pharisees are hopping mad too, discussing how they can do in Jesus. Trouble was Jesus’ middle name. He was going to get killed sooner or later.

It was a good time for a retreat, sort of to let things blow over for a while. He went up to a mountain for prayer and meditation, and made the final decision on who his select twelve disciples would be. Then they all came down to a flat place where a huge crowd quickly gathered, crushing about him to hear his words and to be healed from their illnesses. It was overwhelming, but Jesus kept on keeping on.

And the people kept coming on - he healed people “who were literally swarming with filthy spirits. The whole crowd was trying to touch him, because power flowed out of him and he healed them one and all” (Cotton Patch Version).

Then he started talking to his students, but who among the crowd couldn’t help but listen in? By the way, lots of preachers once they get a good sermon keep repeating it. Martin Luther King, Jr., only had about 80 sermons in his repertoire, many of them being reworked to fit the new occasion. Charles Tindley used to preach the same sermon every Christmas, “Heaven’s Christmas Tree,” for 30 years. The church had to rent a huge auditorium to hold the congregation of 10,000 worshipers. So if Jesus did repreach his Nazareth synagogue sermon, we are the beneficiaries. Now we can hear what all the trouble was about.

Matthew says blessed are the poor in spirit, but Luke cuts to the chase, “You’re blessed when you’ve lost it all. God’s kingdom is there for the finding. You’re blessed when you’re ravenously hungry. Then you’re ready for the Messianic meal. You’re blessed when the tears flow freely. Joy comes with the morning. Count yourself blessed every time someone cuts you down or throws you out, every time someone smears or blackens your name to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and that that person is uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens -- skip like a lamb, if you like! -- for even though they don’t like it, I do...and all heaven applauds” (The Message).

A lot of people prefer what Jesus said in Luke to what was reported in Matthew. “Poor in spirit” can ignore all the real physical and emotional consequences of poverty that just keep multiplying. Millions, billions of people are hungry in their stomachs today, not worrying about some abstract hungering and thirsting after righteousness. The poor are God’s people; anybody who isn’t truly poverty-stricken is faking it as far as God’s kingdom is concerned. That should have all of us worried.

To make the point explicit, only Luke follows up with a parallel set of “woes.” They are not, however, absolute condemnations as many people have assumed. Listen to how a modern translation slants the declarations. “It will be hell for you rich people, because you’ve had your fling. It will be hell for you whose bellies are full now, because you’ll go hungry. It will be hell for you who are so gay now, because you will sob and weep. (Talk about how language has changed!) It will be hell for you when everybody speaks highly of you, for their fathers said the very same things about the phony preachers” (Cotton Patch Version). You can leave here feeling really guilty that your prosperity and hard work has disqualified you from the kingdom. A lot of preaching has operated from that self-righteous assumption, even though the preachers themselves have not exactly been paupers. The translators have over interpreted these woes - it’ll be hell - as being punishments for their good fortune. We’re looking again in the wrong direction.

When Jesus paints this picture of blessing and woes it is not an action plan of what you’ve now got to do, but the pronouncement of what God has already done. Human life is never ups and upper-ups, to cite Lucy Van Pelt, but there are woes and blessings to every life. Very successful and wealthy people are seldom completely happy. Hollywood stars are idealized for their good looks and talents, yet we shake our heads at their relationship problems. The very things that make them successful -- pretending to be someone else doing wonderful or terrible things the actor has never personally done -- renders their ability to live honestly and faithfully to another person in perpetual jeopardy.

There’s an anxious, and as a matter of fact, self-serving reading of these beatitudes and anti-beatitudes that searches for the right things for people to do to “make history come out right.” Lots of social and political revolutions have attempted to make the world right, succeeding in the long run only to create new power lords. Jesus’ words are not goals or a holy to do list for social activists, but a declaration of what God’s real world is like right now. God has already made the world come out right, and our task as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian hung by the Nazis, said is “to be what in the reality of God (we) are already.”

This is God’s world and the reality is that money and power are not the criteria to judge the worth of people. Rich people are OK, as long as “rich” is not how they define themselves. Poor people are important, once they understand they have a lot to contribute in the real world.

In the real world hungry, ravenous people are fed by those who are full and those who are full are fed in turn by the ravenous. No one should accept their this-worldly status as the way things are, neither the poor and ravenous, nor the rich and well-fed, because the Gospel still declares to you and me that God turns all of our contrivances upside down. We’ve got to stop pretending the real world is out there.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan