Jeremiah 17:5-10; Luke 6:17-26
Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals.
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord.
It’s a clear choice, blessing or curse, echoing the words of Moses in the land of Moab, beyond the Jordan, before the people of Israel crossed over into the promised land:
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, … then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. … I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.[1]
Like Moses, Jeremiah presents a stark contrast, but it’s not the same as the familiar either/or that divides our world into us and them, red and blue, in and out, modes of speech and thought that provide clarity only at the cost of ignoring the many colors, perspectives, and traditions that actually constitute the world. Jeremiah and Jesus don’t peddle simplistic world portrayals. They speak with urgency about deep orientations that ultimately are either life-giving or not: life will either be characterized by lush fruitfulness, or it will represent an arid wasteland.
“Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make their flesh their strength,” Jeremiah warns his audience. Hearts turned away from God have turned away from the fountain of life and blessing, and are relying on human strength alone – whether that is economic power, political influence, military might, or technological skill – hearts turned away from God result in shrublike existence in parched places; and if that brings up pictures of drought-stricken landscapes and raging wildfires, your imagination may be on the right track.
But hearts turned toward God, hearts trusting in God, hearts open and receptive and obedient to God’s will and purposes lead to life’s flourishing and fruitfulness. Those whose hearts are turned toward God are like trees planted by streams of water. Even during a dry season, their thirsty roots find moisture and nourishment. They are not anxious when drought comes.
Now who on earth would choose a path that leads away from the source of life? Ask Jeremiah, and he’ll cry for an hour. So much depends on where the heart turns. And the heart, that part of our inner life where our intentions hatch and our decisions are made, the heart turns quite a bit. The heart is fickle, devious above all else, perverse, according to Jeremiah. “Who can understand it?” he asks, implying that no one can. The heart turns this way and that way, we don’t know how.
Most U.S. Americans would agree that every person is free to live the way they want as long as it doesn’t interfere with the freedom of others. We admire mavericks, creative entrepreneurs, and fearless explorers who boldly go where no one has gone before. We value freedom and autonomy, and we don’t want to live lives controlled by others. We follow our hearts. We create our own paths, directed by our own will and our own goals, pulled by our own dreams, energized by our own desires, in pursuit of our own accomplishments, with as little or as much concern for our neighbors as we see fit. We make our own respective self the measure of our lives. And the heart turns this way and that way, we don’t know how.
In contrast, the understanding of reality presented to us in scripture is thoroughly God-centered. Where we think of the good life in terms of self-fulfillment, the biblical witnesses speak of the purposes of God for us and for all of creation. Where in our culture prosperity has become a matter of getting as much of what you want as fast as you can, Jeremiah and other witnesses in scripture tell us of prosperity as the fruitfulness of life rooted in God. They see being autonomous as being disconnected, as being alienated not only from God, but from other people and from the non-human creation. From this perspective on life, our hearts need to turn, not like a whirligig, but like a hiker who realizes she’s on the wrong trail; we need to turn and reorient ourselves to God, and through God to each other and our fellow creatures.
“Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord,” says Jeremiah, but he’s no preacher of a prosperity gospel. There are voices that promise personal fortune, such as this one from the book of Proverbs,
Honor the Lord with your wealth
and with the first of all your crops.
Then your barns will be filled with plenty,
and your vats will burst with wine. [2]
But there’s also the counter-testimony by voices such as this one from Psalm 10, “The wicked boast of the desires of their heart, those greedy for gain curse and renounce the Lord. … Their ways prosper at all times.”[3] There is plenty of evidence in every generation that the ways of the wicked prosper and those who trust in God suffer.
When Jesus taught at the synagogue in Nazareth, he read from the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor”— and he declared the words fulfilled in his own mission.[4] The next time we hear Jesus teach in Luke, he has just come down from the mountain where he prayed and appointed the twelve, and now he addresses the disciples, and a multitude of people overhear his teaching, and the first words out of his mouth are, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” He doesn’t say that poverty is a blessing. He says to the poor disciples, You are blessed, for the reign of God is not a distant dream but already a present reality, and you are a part of it. You are blessed, because the brutal logic of the world is not divine law. You are blessed, because the reign of God is not a reflection of the world, but its transformation in glory, and you are witnessing the beginnings of it.
“God has a preferential love for the poor,” wrote 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.”[5] The world pushes the poor to the margins and leaves them out of the conversations about the future, but they are at the center of God’s attention and of Jesus’ mission. The good news proclaimed to the poor is the assurance that God is for them. In a world governed far too often by the rules of the wicked, the poor and the hungry are overlooked and forgotten, but God sees and remembers them. The good news proclaimed to the poor is that the kingdom belongs to them, and not to those who always act as if they owned the world. The good news proclaimed to the poor is the community of Christ, a God-centered, Spirit-empowered community where compassion, love, and justice are living realities.
Justo Gonzalez calls this a “hard-hitting gospel” because God’s good news to the poor is also challenging news for those who are not poor.[6] “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” Jesus doesn’t say that the rich are cursed. But he does say, Woe. Because wealth becomes a curse when it cuts us off from the needs of others, from the community of life, and from God. Wealth becomes a curse when we sit back and say to ourselves, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry!”[7] Wealth becomes a curse when the rich man leaves his house and doesn’t even see Lazarus sitting hunched over by the door, let alone offer him something to eat, a bed, or medical attention.[8]
Jesus proclaimes good news to the poor, but it isn’t inevitably bad news for the rich. It’s the good news of God’s reign: the good news of a community where compassion, justice and love are living realities. For God’s reign to be good news for the well-fed, rich, laughing, and admired, they will have to wake up and change their ways, writes Sarah Henrich.[9]
The way of proud self-reliance is cursed, and it ends in an uninhabitable wasteland. But the way of trust in God is blessed. So much depends on where the heart turns. And the heart is fickle, devious above all else, perverse, according to Jeremiah. “Who can understand it?” he asks, implying that no one can. The heart turns this way or that way, we don’t know how.
But God searches the heart; to God all hearts are open, all desires known, and from God no secrets are hid, we confess in our prayers. God comes to us, again and again; God is close to us, searching and knowing, challenging and affirming, calling us back, again and again, to the way of blessing, the way of Christ.
The real challenge, then, is to trust the One who searches and knows the heart. To trust, and not to fear, the One present among us and within us. To trust the One whose desire for all of creation is to be a communion of love.
[1] Deuteronomy 30:15-20
[2] Proverbs 3:9-10 CEB
[3] Psalm 10:3-5
[4] Luke 4:16-21
[5] Quoted in Culpepper, Luke (NIB)
[6] Justo Gonzalez, Luke (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 93; quoted by Sarah Henrich https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-luke-617-26-2
[7] Luke 12:19
[8] Luke 16:19-31
[9] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-luke-617-26-2