6th Sunday after Epiphany , 02/17/2019

Sermon on Luke 6:17-26, by Paula L. Murray

¹⁷Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of His disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, ¹⁸who came to hear Him and to be healed of their diseases. And those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. ¹⁹And all the crowd sought to touch Him, for power came out from Him and healed them all. ²⁰And He lifted up His eyes on His disciples, and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. ²¹Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. ²²Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! ²³Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets. ²⁴But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. ²⁵Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. ²⁶Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” Luke 6:17-26 ESV

Epiphany began with these words, “Arise, shine, for your light has come.”¹ Over the course of the Church year we follow the life of Jesus Christ, who is the “light come into the world’s darkness, the light the darkness cannot overcome.”² His life is laid out for us in the Scriptures, particularly in the four Gospels that tell the stories of Jesus’ incarnation and his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension and everything in between. But at the point in Jesus’ life the sixth chapter of Luke describes, the truth John proclaims is not apparent to anyone but Jesus and the rest of the Holy Trinity. To the human beings involved, there is only the early stirring of hope that this one, this Jesus, is the long-awaited Messiah, the salvation of Israel and even the nations. There is hope, but not certainty.

It is hope that is the gift of the Sermon on the Plain or Level Place. This is Luke’s version of the better known Sermon on the Mount, found in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. It is not odd that Jesus would give a similar sermon in a variety of places. Other than His incarnation itself, at which time the Word was made flesh, Jesus walked through the countryside preaching the same message over and over again in much the same way that pastors throughout the ages and in all places have preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ over and over again. So it is no surprise that we have in both Gospels a very similar story in which Jesus preaches about our hope of the kingdom of God.

The sermon itself represents the end of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He has performed a few miracles, cleansed a leper, cast out evil spirits, nearly been tossed off a cliff by his onetime neighbors disgusted by Jesus’ preaching of a God who will include Gentiles in his salvic plan, called men to follow him, gathering even a tax collector into his stable of disciples. So he has begun to establish his reputation as a servant of God, a healer, and gathered around him a group of disciples who will learn from him and prepare to carry his message forward. He has also come on the radar screen of those who will, in the end, seek his death, for he has forgiven sins, healed on the Sabbath, associated with sinners and allowed, indeed defended, his disciples when they broke Sabbath by gathering grain.

But for now he steps down from the mountain and out onto the plain or the level place. Matthew emphasizes the transcendent or divine nature of Jesus, and Jesus’ closeness to the Father. So when Jesus prays he goes up on a mountain to be closer to God and take a break from God’s people. But Luke is all about the immanence of God. Luke has Jesus come down to be among God’s people, and not just any of God’s people, but often the poorest and most downtrodden.

When we think of the level places we think about the sort of landscape on which we might build a home or plan a freeway, and we hear something of this during Advent when we are told to prepare the royal highway on the level ground. God will lift up the low places so they are level.³ But prophets like Jeremiah,⁴ Daniel,⁵ Joel,⁶ and Habakkuk,⁷ for instance, also see the level places as those places where wars are fought and corpses left behind, the land is degraded, where the apostate, the diseased, and the poor congregate, and where misery and grief abound.

So it is here, on the level place, where landscape and lives alike are broken by human sin, that Jesus our Christ, the holy one of God, chooses to stand among a broken creation, and preach a sermon to both his disciples and hundreds of strangers, Jews and Gentiles together, most of whom are desperate for healing. To them, a people who have been trained to believe that God has blessed the rich, the well fed, the beautifully clothed, the healthy, to them who are poor, hungry, homeless, or sick, Jesus preaches hope.

This hope of which Jesus preached was no mere wish that things go a bit better for all whose lives are shattered by poverty or misfortune. Jesus speaks with God’s own authority, and what he blesses is blessed now, and that blessing is sure and certain. Theirs will be no pie-in-the-sky promise of a future overturning of the political and social order of the day like the Zealots or radicals promised. They are not excluded from the joys of heaven because their poverty of spirit is reflected in their illness or hunger or Gentile heritage. No, they are blessed now, in their poverty, their hunger, and their disease, because the Kingdom of God is theirs now. They may be forsaken by those whose lives are not shattered by disease or death or poverty, but they are not forsaken by God, who will be as generous to them as the world is stingy and mean. Neither will God forsake those who grieve and those who suffer because they hear the authority of God in Jesus’ voice and know his power is to heal and to save. To follow Jesus is to be cursed by the world, a world focused on the illusory power of temporary health and wealth.

Luke contrasts those who hold such illusions with the crowd surrounding him who does not, for the reality of their lives does not allow it. Here is where the woes come into the picture Luke paints for us in God’s Word. The Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew features nine blessings, or beatitudes, as they have traditionally been called. But Luke gives us only four blessings, and following each blessing there is a woe.

Most of us have probably heard the phrase, “Oh woe is me.” Often we’re laughing when we say it, acknowledging a stupid mistake or a temporary downturn in our affairs. A woe is something that causes troubles or difficulties or a lament about the same. It’s tempting to think of woes as curses, an anti-blessing meted out by God for bad behavior. The good guys are blessed, and the bad guys are cursed. That might be true were it not for the infinite capacity of God to forgive. There is no sin that is too great for God to forgive. So the woes are not necessarily curses; God is not necessarily condemning people to hell.

Rather, it more like people are condemning themselves. Listen again to the first woe, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” The problem is not that the rich are rich; it is not their possessions that are necessarily at fault. After all, it is the rich or the comfortable that support in some part Jesus’ ministry and provide housing for his corpse after his death and before his resurrection. It is the fact that their wealth is their consolation, that in which they take comfort and put their trust. They are not looking to God for their daily needs and their vindication as a holy people. They look to their accounts, their vineyards, their golden vessels on the dining room table and find their satisfaction in those things and their protection from life’s uncertainties. It is the same case with the well fed who revel in their culinary satisfactions, and the happy in their happiness. But there will come a time when earthly satisfactions fail to satisfy, and may even carry in them the seeds of an eternal dissatisfaction.

The poor, the hungry, the powerless have no such illusions, for they have nothing to trust other than God himself. They look to Jesus and see in his compassion and his healing the powerful hand of God and hear in his pronouncements God’s own authority. So they believe, and they trust. They believe and they trust and sometimes they pay for their belief when the well-off and the well-respected despise them for their simple faith as well as their poverty and need.

We who live in the greatest nation ever to have held sway on the earth need to heed these woes, and the blessings, too. It is far too tempting to rely on the sovereign power of the state to provide our care when we have need of it. It is very much too easy for us to take for granted those blessings we have received, and think we have in all ways deserved them. Think for a moment, on the relative differences between a child born to middle class parents in the states and a child born to an Indian Dalit couple, who with their children daily sift through enormous piles of waste to find the evening supper and cast off shoes to cover a child’s growing feet. Neither child was responsible for its birth, yet both will live out the consequences. The first is in danger of living only for the great rewards of an industrial country; the second will live for the joys of heaven for earthly rewards are largely denied them. The first may take all that he or she has for granted and as what is due them; the second will see every possession as a gift and a blessing and will live for the greater blessings to come.

“Blessed is the man,” says the prophet Jeremiah, “who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by the water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when the heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”⁸ We bear fruit when we put our faith in God, and not in all those things in our lives which offer false promises of a grace that lasts.

Epiphany shines a great big light on the child born in a manger two thousand years ago so we may see true grace and turn away from the false. It is God’s intent that our hope be both “sure and certain.” Epiphany also reveals to us what we need to see going forward in our own lives so that we don’t trod paths that lead us away from Christ and his Church. Most of us are not wealthy as the world counts wealth. Most of us are not poor as the world counts the poor. We are blessed with what we need and a bit more. It is the bit more that counts, and what we do with it. Most of us are well-fed, although we may have known hunger in the past. Many of us have known the life-long sting of grief for loss, and know that we will mourn to the day we die. We are in-betweeners, I guess. We can fear poverty, and appreciate wealth, and be grateful for what we have received. We have known hunger and grief, although we may take joy in this moment. But mostly we look to the world to come where neither hunger nor grief find a home. Let us pray always, then, that the Lord will help us trust in him for all that we need now and as we approach our deaths and him alone, that we may use what God has given us to bear fruit, fruit that is a blessing to the Lord’s work and the poor.

¹Isaiah 60:1; ²John 1:1-5; ³Isaiah 40:3-5; ⁴Jeremiah 14:18; ⁵Daniel 3:1;⁶Joel 1:10, 20; ⁷Habakkuk 3:17; ⁸Jeremiah 17:5-8

The Rev. Paula L. Murray
Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, USA
E-Mail: smotly@comcast.net

(top)