THE DISSONANCE OF NOW AND THEN
Luke 6:17-26
A Sermon by
University Presbyterian Church
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time February 11, 2007
(This sermon draws part of its substance and its title from a sermon I preached at University Church on February 15, 1998, but also borrows from a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor, “God’s Ferris Wheel,” as cited in the footnotes.)
That “thanks be to God” you just spoke… was that a bit half-hearted? These are, after all, such strange words… strangely familiar in one sense, for they begin with phrases that sound a bit like the beatitudes we have come to know from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount… yet strangely unfamiliar and uncomfortable, too, because they go beyond the positive blessings and accompany them with unsettling words of “woe.” And unsettling, too, because these words of “woe” seem to be spoken to people not unlike ourselves: at least moderately rich, full, laughing, respected. What are we to make of such words?
The language of blessing is not so foreign to us. The thoughtful “bless you” after a sneeze… the tender benediction of a grandmother who says graciously, “bless you, child.” We unload a burden with a dear friend, and she says, “Bless your heart.” And, of course, there is another less favorable way in which “blessing” is used, particularly in Southern idiom; one says, “Bless his heart,” and the next phrase one expects to hear is, “He can’t help himself. Bless his heart.” But most of the time a blessing is just that.
Beatitudes are words of blessing. “Beatitudes,” says Barbara Brown Taylor, “are short, two-part affirmations that sum up common knowledge about the good life. ‘Blessed are they who have good 401(k) plans, for their old age shall be comfortable.’ ‘Blessed are those who floss, for they shall keep their teeth.’ That sort of thing.”
So the form of what Jesus said was familiar to his hearers. He said, “Blessed are…” and they all got ready for some nuggets of wisdom. But the content of what he said rocked them back on their heels. “Blessed are… you who are poor?... who are hungry?... who weep now? Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man…?
… It was a shocking substitution of bad things for good things, in which blessedness was equated with the very things people did their best to avoid – poverty, hunger, grief, hatred. In every case, Jesus made those equations even stronger by tacking a reversal of fortune onto them. “Blessed are you who are poor,” he said, “for yours is the
Then, to underscore the reversal and to make it clear that he meant exactly what he had said, Jesus added some warnings of “woe.” Now, “woe” is a word we don’t use much in our time, but we do have a sense that it is not a good thing… in fact, that it is the opposite of blessing. As one biblical scholar suggests,
On the lips of members of the faith community addressing one another, a blessing is [usually] a celebration of someone’s pleasant and happy circumstance, and a woe is a lament over someone’s plight.
That much we understand. But surely we sense that more is at stake when these words are spoken by Jesus.
… When spoken by God or by one who speaks for God, blessings and woes are more than descriptive; they are pronouncements that declare in effect that those conditions will prevail. On the lips of Jesus Christ, therefore, the blessings and woes of [our] Gospel lection can be taken as the “official” proclamation of the way life will be among the people of God.
Blessings and woes are not suggestions for the good life with a list of problems to be avoided. A blessing or a woe is a divine pronouncement, and it is performative; that is, it does what it says.[2]
And that is baffling to many, for the “woes” spoken by Jesus pronounced judgment on the very things that many people did, and still do, their best to achieve – wealth, food, laughter, esteem. “In the same way that Jesus made the bad things sound good, he made the good things sound bad.”[3] “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.”
How we respond to Jesus’ words, of course, obviously has a lot to do with who we are and the conditions in which we find ourselves. In one is hungry, obviously the Gospel here is good news, indeed. If one is full and satisfied, then these words from the Sermon on the Plain sound like bad news. “The words themselves don’t change,” Barbara Taylor points out; but they sound different according to who is hearing them. Says
I think it is fair to say that most of us hear them from the well-fed end of the spectrum. Not many of us walked here today, and if our stomachs are growling it is not because our cupboards are bare. Most of us are rich, by global standards, and some of us are fabulously so. Many of us have worked hard in hopes that people would speak well of us, and when they do not, we take it as a sign that we still have more work to do.[4]
The problem, she says, is that many of us hear the beatitudes and then dive into a “deep tank of guilt,” or else we come to ignore these words by putting them into “the same file with all the other good Christian advice that no one we know personally has ever followed.”
The catch is, the [blessings and woes] are not advice. There is nothing about them that remotely suggests that Jesus was telling anyone what he thought they should do. When Jesus is giving advice, it is hard to miss. “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who abuse you.” Now that is advice – love, do, bless, pray – one imperative after the other, with no distinction between rich and poor, hungry or well fed. It is the same list for all of them, whether they happen to weeping or bent over with laughter.
The [blessings and woes of Luke 6] are not like that. In them Jesus does not tell anyone to do anything. Instead, he describes different kinds of people, hoping that his listeners will recognize themselves as one kind or another, and then he makes the same promise to all of them: that the way things are is not the way they will always be. The Ferris wheel will go around, so that those who are swaying at the top, with the wind in their hair and all the world’s lights at their feet, will have their turn at the bottom, while those who are down there right now, where all they can see are candy wrappers in the sawdust, will have their chance to touch the stars. It is not advice at all. It is not even judgment. It is simply the truth about the way things work out [in God’s realm], pronounced by someone who loves everyone on that wheel.[5]
So, where does that leave us as hearers of these words? What are we supposed to do? It’s not readily apparent. Fred Craddock says preachers can’t stand up here and say, “Well, we ought to be hungry now,” or “Let us not laugh now, lest later we weep and mourn.” Blessings and woes are God’s words, and God will want to implement them.[6]
It’s also fair to say that this text is not some sort of primer for economic and social reform that will somehow set things up as God intends. It is really more than that.
Luke’s version of the sermon is a vision of divine justice, but it is hardly a program for economic revolution. It is a powerful critique of the oppression which strips away the pious pretenses with which the powerful and wealthy congratulate themselves and justify themselves before God. Yet the heart of the sermon is spiritual, focused on the relationship between the hearer to God and God’s reign as exercised in the present time and beyond it. The persistent “now you are… for you will be” structure of the blessings and the woes reveals the dissonance of the kingdom with the present and declares a reversal of fortunes by divine initiatives.[7]
Allowing ourselves to hear Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, indeed to meet the Jesus of Luke’s Gospel, opens us to the new reality he proclaims and to the dissonance he declares between present reality and the promise of God’s reign, between now and then. The “blessings and woes” are thus words that afford us an insight into the very heart of God, an insight that gives us an opportunity to glimpse our own hearts as well.
Again, Barbara Brown
When [Jesus first spoke the blessings and woes] out loud, everyone heard them in a different way, depending on who they were. Jesus never said who was who. He let them all sort themselves out, but after they had done that, there was no mistaking what Jesus was good for and what he was not.
Anyone who was there that day to win the lottery could go on home. Even if they managed to nab a little bit of his power, it would not help them to get on top and stay on top. Jesus was not any good for that. In fact, people who were attached to that were in for some woes, because the way things are is not the way they will always be, and no one gets to stay on top of the wheel forever. What goes around comes around. That is not advice. It is not even judgment. It is God’s own truth. It is also pure blessedness for those on the bottom, who never really expected to get off the ground.
Although Luke does not say so, I believe it is also pure blessedness for those on top, because there are some vitally important things about human life on earth that you simply cannot see with your feet so far off the ground. To get a good look at them you have to come down, as Jesus did…. Things may not look as pretty from down there. You may see some things that make you cry, but your grief may teach you more than your good fortune ever did.
Neither the going up nor the coming down is under our control, as far as I can tell, but wherever we happen to be, the promise is the same. [The way things are is not the way things always will be.] Blessed are you who loose your grip on the way things are, for God shall lead you in the way things shall be.[8]
[1] Barbara Brown
[2] Fred Craddock, in Craddock, Hayes, Holladay and Tucker, Preaching Through the Christian Year – C,
[3]
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[6] Craddock, et al., 102.
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