All Saints Sunday, Year C
Luke 6:20-31
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
November 3, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God….But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” – Luke 6:20, 24
Our Gospel today has some harsh things to say regarding two things dear to most of our hearts: our eternal wellbeing and our wallets. The contrasts Luke offers may come from the Ancient Near Eastern love of dichotomies and linguistic tendency toward extremes, but I’m really not sure. However, I do know that most of us here today—probably all of us—would tend to walk among the “rich” in Jesus’ time. If you take his words seriously, it appears we need to keep an eye open when it comes to our wealth and possessions.
Today’s beatitudes from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain may not be as familiar to you as the longer list recorded in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.[1] Both Matthew and Luke were written around the same time, likely among Christian communities near Antioch. I personally suspect—without any scholarly backing here—that Matthew was written in reaction to Luke. Matthew tends to be a bit more rigid, literal, and proof-texty in his approach to things, giving me something of a “well, actually” vibe, especially when read alongside Luke’s more socially-focused accounts. When it comes to the beatitudes, Matthew’s list is not only more famous than Luke’s but also more internalized. Matthew’s account tells us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” while Luke simply states, “Blessed are you who are poor.” Likewise, Matthew doesn’t record any of the “woes” against the rich and secure that we read in Luke.
As usual, I’d like to begin by looking at a few different terms the Gospel writer uses, starting with the words “blessed” and “woe.” In popular Christian culture, “blessed” and “blessing” have become sort of hashtag, throwaway words. We know that they indicate something vaguely good, maybe even miraculous, but we often use them as little more than a substitute for “thank you” or to express that we like something (think of telling Beth a song was “such a blessing”). Sometimes we even use variations as a way to soften or endear an insult (“you shine a light in one ear, and it goes straight out the other—bless him!”).
Looking behind our text, commentators say that “blessed” means something like “happy,” “fortunate,” or even “unburdened.” Ancient Greek writers used it only in reference to the gods and their state of freedom from the worries of daily human life, suggesting an existence secure and at peace. People eventually started applying the term to the worthy dead (the ancient Greco-Roman version of saints). By Jesus’ time it appears to have picked up the connotation of what we might call “the good life”—possibly even “easy street.”
With the term “woe,” it’s easy to assume we’re looking at the opposite of “blessed,” something similar to “cursed.” But that isn’t the case. Jesus is using an onomatopoeia—a word derived from what something sounds or looks like. His “woe” is a cry of mourning or alarm, something like our “alas,” “look out,” or “oh no!” He isn’t damning someone for being rich; he’s alerting those well-off to real danger, a warning that our relationship to our worldly goods does indeed have an effect on how we approach both God and our neighbor.
The word behind “rich” here is straightforward, designating someone who was wealthy or even a member of the nobility. However, the term translated “poor” is more specific than our language suggests. Biblical Greek had two words for people we might consider poor.[2] One referenced the people who labored each day to meet their needs, often at a subsistence level. They were lower class, but they had some dignity and were an integral part of society—someone we might call “working poor.” But the term the Gospel writer uses here is for the level of people below that one: those genuinely reduced to begging. Think “destitute” or “indigent”—even “unworthy poor.” The root behind this word eventually settled into English as our spitting sound, “ptooey!”[3] These are the absolutely down and out, those not only lacking a consistent source of food, shelter, or money, but also ones who had lost all of their family and community ties as well. They were both economically disenfranchised and social outcasts, more or less refugees within their own homeland.
So we basically have Jesus saying, “You blissful beggars!” and “Watch out, wealthy!”—things that would have confused his audience about as much as they still do us today. As Americans, we can relate to the warnings about wealth. After all, studies have shown that “money can’t buy happiness.” But no one can legitimately associate an individual needing to constantly struggle against others, snatching away sips of water and crumbs of food in order to survive the next few hours, with security and the good life. Being despondent is no blessing. Jesus, who clearly worked and lived among these two kinds of poor people, would have had no illusions about the challenges facing them. The words must have felt insulting or patronizing to those struggling to gather their daily bread.
So although we might (and legitimately should) be concerned about Jesus’ warning to the rich, his words likely stung both ends of the financial spectrum he was talking to.
And maybe that detail is the most important thing for us to remember: Jesus was talking to both of these kinds of people. He wasn’t railing against theoretical outsiders or lauding an idealized version of poverty. The very first line of our reading says both the blessings and the woes were being spoken to Jesus’ own disciples, the ones physically in front of him. That means even from the beginnings of the Christian movement, before the crucifixion and resurrection, before it was considered a separate religion from Judaism, and long before it became popularized across the Roman Empire, Jesus had both rich and poor followers. He isn’t setting the disciples up for a religiously sanctioned class war, as the second half of today’s Psalm might suggest. Jesus isn’t cutting anyone out of the Kingdom here, not even the rich. He’s addressing a reality that has remained current from his day to ours.
So what’s the point? Why did Luke record these extreme and even insulting comparisons?
I imagine he wants to turn our ideas of heaven upside down.
It’s easy to think of the Kingdom of God as some sort of everlasting all-inclusive resort vacation, a reward saints receive after working faithfully to love God and their neighbors their whole lives. Or maybe we imagine it as something like an eternal Thanksgiving dinner, with a glorious, never-ending array of delicacies, followed by the intense rest you long for after stuffing yourself. After all, for more than twenty-five years Christian radio has been telling us Jesus promises a world with
“…a big, big house
with lots and lots of room,
A big, big table
with lots and lots of food,
A big, big yard
where we can play football,
a big, big house…”[4]
But is that really our Father’s house?
While the Bible does talk about feasting and “many dwelling places”[5] in God’s Kingdom, I think our imaginations, even as Christians, have been unduly influenced by materialism and the American dream. Western culture, and especially our individually-focused interpretation of it in the United States, is eager for excess: we hunger for more, bigger, newer, and better, whether it’s in regard to our income, possessions, or relationships. We’ve all been trained to consume, and our ravenous obsession with resources at home and around the world reveal that nothing can possibly satisfy us. We’re far from empty, but we cannot ever be filled. Our view of life—much less the afterlife—is disordered. We as a culture are the wealthy who behave as if we don’t and never can have enough. We fight for surplus like the starving people Jesus was talking about fought for scraps of food. Is “higher, further, faster, more” really an appropriate tagline for the Kingdom of God?
Remembering that eternal life is less about time and more about a quality of being, maybe how we live in the present affects our appreciation of eternity. What if heaven isn’t about excess and indulgence as much as it is about sufficiency and peace? Perhaps for people of few or no means, God’s Kingdom is “heavenly” because they no longer have to worry about scratching together resources they so desperately need on a moment-by-moment basis. Used to surviving on nothing, simply having enough is more than they could ever have hoped for. But for us, lives branded with the phrase “greed is good,” the Kingdom, with its provision of sufficiency for all—sufficiency, but not excess—will feel like Hell as we’re forced to reign in our appetites. Equality can feel like oppression when you’re used to being privileged; “enough” looks like starvation when you’re accustomed to indulgence.
I wonder if the spiritual challenge of our day isn’t about becoming more competent, cleaned up, less sinful versions of ourselves, like Fr. Jim’s pumpkin illustrated last week—fancy folks waiting to gorge ourselves at the Supper of the Lamb. Maybe it’s more about humbling ourselves, about preparing for the renewed economy of God’s Kingdom in the present, about understanding when enough is enough, recognizing where our surplus can assist others, and humbly sharing the gifts God has given us.
Maybe in our world, that’s the pathway all saints must take.
[1] Matthew 5-7
[2] www3.nd.edu/~jneyrey1/Attitudes.html
[3] www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1851
[4] www.lyrics.com/lyric/12277237
[5] John 14:2 NRSV