At his hometown synagogue, Jesus was reading from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah when he said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”[1] Jesus was reading ancient words, but when he spoke them, they were his own. That day at the synagogue, Jesus spoke Isaiah’s declaration, and throughout his ministry, he filled it, every word and syllable, with the fullness of his life — with his full attention, with his whole heart, with his every breath. When John sent word to Jesus from prison, asking, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” he said, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, …[and] the poor have good news brought to them.”[2]
The God who sent Jesus is openly partisan, and some might say, shockingly so. “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” Jesus declared. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Jesus didn’t declare that somehow it is a blessing to be poor, hungry, hated, or excluded. The poor, the hungry, the hated and excluded are blessed, because God is on their side.
In the world the poor and the hungry too often find themselves pushed to the margins of attention, that’s the way things work around here, but Jesus embodies and proclaims God’s reign. The good news proclaimed to the poor is that the kingdom of God is theirs, and not the property of those who like to think they own everything worth owning in the world. The good news proclaimed to the poor is divine solidarity, the assurance that God is for them and with them—and not sometime, someday, but now. “God has a preferential love for the poor,” says theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, “not because they are necessarily better than others, morally or religiously, but simply because they are poor and living in an inhuman situation that is contrary to God’s will. The ultimate basis for the privileged position of the poor is not in the poor themselves but in God.”[3] So what is it, we wonder, the rich have proclaimed to them? Every one of Jesus’ beatitudes is mirrored by a woe. Woe to you who are rich! Woe to you who are full now! Woe to you who are laughing now! Woe to you when all speak well of you! What are we to make of that? Is woe somehow the opposite of blessed? Does it mean cursed or damned? Jesus may have picked up from Isaiah the rhetorical style of woes linked together in a chain:
Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land! Woe to those who rise early in the morning in pursuit of strong drink, who linger in the evening to be inflamed by wine, whose feasts consist of lyre and harp, tambourine and flute and wine, but who do not regard the deeds of the Lord or see the work of his hands! Woe to those who drag iniquity along with cords of falsehood, who drag sin along as with cart ropes! Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter![4]
Woe does not mean cursed, New Testament scholar, Matt Skinner, insists, and certainly not damned. “Like the English word yikes, it is more of an attention-getter and emotion-setter than a clear characterization or pronouncement.”[5] Well, Jesus got our attention, didn’t he? “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”
Who are the rich? The term denotes economic well-being and security, as well as belonging and power, and, in Luke, a sense of arrogance: the rich need not look to God’s reign for encouragement about the situation in which their social and economic status puts them. The rich are the ones who insist, “Oh, I’m not rich, I’m just comfortable.” The consolation of the comfortable is their wealth. The consolation of the poor is the kingdom of God.
Woe to you who are comfortable, for you have received your comfort. Woe to you who expect the future to be little more than a continuation of your comfortable present. Woe to you who say to the seers, “Do not see,” and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things; prophesy illusions; leave the way; turn aside from the path; let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.”[6] Woe to you who can’t lean into God’s future together with those who long for a world where justice and peace embrace, and where all who hunger feast at the banquet of life. Woe to you when your wealth traps you in illusions of self-sufficiency, mastery, and control.
In the opening declarations of his sermon, Jesus isn’t delivering notes on sainthood or listing qualifications to get into heaven, nor is he dividing his audience into winners and losers. He speaks words of encouragement and affirmation to those who, by the world’s standards, have little to show. And he speaks words of warning to those who can’t ask for anything but more of the same. With encouragement and warning, Jesus is calling all who are listening – rich and poor, hungry and full, sorrowful and carefree – to lean into the dawn of God’s reign together and to live by the light of God’s mercy. Paul, in Ephesians, calls this “to see with the eyes of the heart enlightened”[7] – to see all things and ourselves in the embrace of divine love, where we are each fully ourselves and one with each other. Paul identifies this unity as both the ground of our being and the horizon of our journey in time.
The world, of course, is ruled by powers hostile to the creative and redemptive power of love, but before the foundation of the world, God chose saints to be agents of God’s reign, in every generation.[8] God chose ordinary people to live as God’s people, people set aside for God’s purposes, people who would let their attitudes, actions, and words be determined by the boundless love of God. In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus doesn’t speak of the love for God and the love for one’s neighbor as equally central to our lives as disciples; instead, his opening teaching, after the blessings and woes, is about loving our enemies, loving those who hate, curse, mistreat, beat, rob, and deprive followers of Jesus of what is rightfully theirs.[9] His descriptions reflect experiences of rejection and exclusion many believers in the first century had to endure, trials that pushed their love for God and their love for their hostile neighbors to the limit. For many of them, only the memory and example of Jesus on the cross gave them the strength not to give in to violence, retaliation, or hatred. The good news of the kingdom is more than a word spoken with conviction; it is a word lived by the followers of Jesus, a word embodied by the community of saints who bear the name of Christ. We desire to live the word that is good news to the poor, and we are fortunate that our commitment to this life isn’t being tested by violent rejection and persecution. One of our teachers at the abbey this summer told us a very short story about the power of loving one’s enemy.
Upon having his monastery invaded by Chinese soldiers and a gun pointed in his face, the Tibetan monk remained calm, continuing his prayers. The soldier angrily shouted, “Don’t you realize I have the power to kill you?” Undeterred in his prayers, the monk replied, “Don’t you realize I have the power to let you?”[10]
The message of radical love that Jesus brings and is, calls for change: change of perspective, change of vision, change of behavior. That’s a lot of change. And resistance to change, fear of change are widespread these days; they are among the main drivers in our current politics, both nationally and globally. But Jesus calls us to let ourselves be changed, to let ourselves be conformed to his radical love, to lean into the dawn of God’s reign and dream. Willie James Jennings writes,
Without dreaming, even holy dreaming, voting loses its compass and can be driven by anxiety, anger, or the desire to harm others. Such holy dreaming is not utopian – it is absolutely crucial to civic action that resists the powers of death. People of faith should remind everyone that they vote not simply to elect officials but to aim [the] world toward hope. The most important test of an election season should always be: Do the candidates, the proposed policies, the platform agendas, the bonds or propositions all promote a shared life, or do they draw us toward segregationist ways of living and thinking?[11]
In Luke we read that Jesus spoke the blessings and woes, and all the teachings that followed, on a level place. I like to think of the level place as the place where every valley has been filled and every mountain and hill has been made low, where the crooked has been made straight, and the rough ways smooth.[12] In my dream, in the level place, the powerful have been brought down from their thrones, and the lowly have been lifted up.[13] In the level place, Jesus comes face-to-face with us, all of us, the whole company of saints and sinners, and we come face-to-face with each other, recognizing one another as kin, and together we lean into God’s future, a shared life where love reigns.
[1] Luke 4:18
[2] Luke 7:20-22
[3] Quoted in Culpepper, Luke (NIB), 145.
[4] See Isaiah 5:8-22
[5] Matt Skinner https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/all-saints-day-2/commentary-on-luke-620-31-4
[6] See Isaiah 30:9-11
[7] Ephesians 2:18
[8] See Ephesians 1:4
[9] See Fitzmyer, Luke, 630.
[10] Nathan Foster, The Making of an Ordinary Saint (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2014), 23.
[11] Willie James Jennings, Aiming the World Toward Hope https://reflections.yale.edu/article/spirit-and-politics-finding-our-way/aiming-world-toward-hope
[12] Luke 3:5
[13] Luke 1:52