Epiphany 6 – Luke’s Beatitudes (6: 17-26)

I guess there’s a good chance that when you heard the Gospel this morning, you immediately thought to yourself: Oh we know this one, and then realized suddenly that no, maybe not, or at least that the text sounded different from how you remembered it. Well, there is a good reason for that. The passage we have just heard, where Jesus lists all the people who are “Blessed”or “Happy” and generally known as the Beatitudes, has two versions: one in Luke’s, the one we have just heard, and one in Matthew’s, Matthew’s version being the one we know the best. Matthew’s beatitudes are part of the bigger portion of “The Sermon of the Mount”, and we read also read them on All Saints’ Day, and occasionally for funerals as well. Matthew’s version is also longer and most agree to say that it is more “spiritual”. For example, in Matthew’s Jesus does not say “Blessed are the poor“, rather he says “Blessed are the poor in Spirit“, neither does Jesus say “Blessed are you who are hungry“, rather he says: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst forrighteousness“. Lastly Jesus does not say: “Blessed are you who weep” rather he says: “Blessed are those who mourn (their sins)“.

And so we know better and often we like better Matthew’s, first of all because it is easier to understand. Indeed, that Jesus would say that those who are hungry for justice are blessed, this we can understand. It seems harder to understand what Jesus meant by saying that people who are actually starving are blessed. And then it’s less harsh too: In Matthew’s version, there is no woes, just blessings. Nobody is cursed, not even the rich, because what Jesus really meant is that you need to be poor in spirit, so it does not matter whether you have money or not, or plenty of it. And so scholars have very long conversations about which one of the texts came first and generally they end up agreeing that Matthew re-worked Luke’s text, either to make out the real meaning of it, or maybe just to make the pill easier to swallow. So the question for us today is the following: Should we keep reading Luke’s beatitudes, and if so, how can we understand them as they are?

Well, there are two things we may want to consider first:

– We can assume that there are different versions of the beatitudes because Jesus probably preached to different people, and he probably didn’t say the same thing each time, so Luke’s version has value in itself.

– And then and mainly, I don’t think Jesus made a difference between our everyday life, the state of our business, the shape of our bodies, and then a spiritual life that would come on top of it. It does not make sense in the Gospels to ask this kind of question: Oh, did Jesus mean that literally or is it spiritual? The idea that spirituality is in a different realm than our own very ordinary lives is a very modern idea, in the world in which the first century Jews lived everything was spiritual, God wasn’t hidden in another place. When Jesus addressed the souls, he addressed the bodies, when he healed the souls, he cured the bodies. Luke says: They had come to hear [Jesus] and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were cured with unclean spirit were cured.

When Jesus talks about people who hunger and thirst and are excluded and rejected, maybe it’s because of political and economical reasons but the problem at the root of it all is the power and privilege of those who refuse to obey God’s law, and we see that in Jeremiah as well: The problem is in the human heart to start with. Hunger has become an economical, political problem, but at the root is a spiritual problem. In the past weeks, I have been volunteering at the Good Shepherd Center in Wilmington and one of the things they do is “Second helpings”: Everyday they go to the grocery stores in town and they collect the food that is unsold and everyday, they come back from each one of the stores with a full van of food, and they sort out the food to give to the hungry. If these people didn’t care and didn’t go there everyday to pick up boxes and boxes of bread, produce and meats, the stores would just throw everything away. In a world of plenty, poverty exists first because of our selfishness and indifference.

Now the thing is, in our passage today, Jesus does not say that hunger is a problem, or that poverty is a problem, or that sadness is a problem, or that rejection is a problem, rather Jesus says that the hungry, the poor, the sad and the rejected are blessed, so how can we understand it? I think there are three levels of comprehension

1 – We can see that as Jesus announcing “his program”. We are still at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, and Jesus defines his mission. From a world that is separated between “winners” and “losers”, Jesus brings an understanding of the world where people are equal in God’s eyes. Jesus preaches on “a level place” when Matthew tells us that Jesus preached “on a mount”. In Luke’s, it’s clear from the Magnificat sung by Mary thatJesus has come to bear witness to a God who (…) has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:5). There is a re-balance that needs to take place, and it explains the curses as well: In God’s kingdom, the rich will be cursed because what they have in excess will be redistributed. This should not come as a surprise and looking for this kind of equality should be part of all Christian programs: There is suffering in the world we need to alleviate. Redistribution is not just economical or political, sharing is God’s law. The difference with communism is that God does not force us to answer this call.

2 – A second thing we can notice is that this teaching seems to be directed towards the disciples, those in charge to share in Jesus’s mission more specifically. If we read carefully today’s lesson, we can see that Luke tells us quite clearly that Jesus was healing the people and then “looked up” at his disciples before he started teaching. What we can gather from that, is that if Jesus had to look up towards his disciples to talk to them in a “level place”, he could have been trying to address the fact that they were withdrawing or “looking down”, maybe they had resistances or were developing some impatience that Jesus would spend so much time with the crowds of weird, unclean and sick people. After all, if you have a chance to read what comes right before our passage, the disciples have just been chosen, elected as the twelve who were to represent the twelve tribes of Israel, Jesus should have had important things to teach them, why then would he let all the people with problems slow them down? What we hear today could be the response to these unformulated questions the disciples may have had in some dark corners of their hearts. Jesus wants to tell his disciples that instead of looking down on the people, they were to see them as examples: As the people were hungry, poor, sad, rejected, the disciples needed learn to become all these things for the kingdom. That’s what Matthew seems to have clearly understood.

But then if the meaning is spiritual it’s still very down to earth and that’s why we want to stick to Luke’s version before rushing to Matthew’s. Luke forces us to ponder the following question: How can the disciples be hungry for the kingdom if we they are filled with the things of the world, if they are constantly worried about what they’re going to eat, what they will purchase next, if they can’t be on their own but always long for being surrounded by friends who look out for them or just long to have their fun? We need to experience in our bodies what the spiritual requires. How can we learn compassion if we are always shielded from want and suffering? We’ll soon be in Lent, and I sometimes wonder if we haven’t spiritualized Lent too much: We don’t fast anymore, we don’t make financial sacrifices, we certainly don’t wear our mourning clothes. But how can we be spiritually poor and hungry, if we have no idea what real poverty and hunger are to start with? Doesn’t it make us just hypocrites? And how can we learn to develop compassion if we never share in people’s suffering, if we don’t let ourselves come close enough to experience their pain?

3 – The last thing we may to want to think about is that Luke shows us that these words Jesus was speaking were part of the healing of the people. After he had healed many people, Jesus started teaching and the teaching was part of the healing. So what is it that is healing in Jesus’s words? I think it is that Jesus saw the blessedness of the hungry and the poor and he could see their future glory. He saw how God cared for them if the world didn’t, and he saw what God had in mind for them. In order to be healed, we certainly need someone to see our suffering, but sometimes we also need someone to tell us that we are not broken. we need someone to see our inner strength, our inner resources, our deepest beauty. We need compassion but we don’t need pity.

There is a story I read one day in a magazine. It’s the story of a man in a wheelchair and he said he was trying his best to avoid Christians, because they always wanted to “pray over him” so he would walk again. And he said that well, first he had other problems than just not being able to walk, and also he said he didn’t assume God didn’t love him because he was disabled, and he said he didn’t like that people would just assume he didn’t have a full life with a purpose even in his aliment. He said that instead of wanting so hard to fix him, the Christians who looked down on him should have been able to see his inner strength, his resilience, and all the other beautiful parts of his life. I think that Jesus looked at people this way, and can still look at us: He sees the sufferings but as he blessed the people, he also whispers: You’re not broken. This world may be broken but you’re not. The Kingdom is at work in you and you’re shinning light for all the would be godly people.Maybe we need to hear that too.