The Sermon on the Plain

Sermon by Beth Downey Sawatzky on Luke 6:17-26

Our text today from the Gospel according to Luke, is not The Sermon on the Mount, which you’ll find in the Gospel of Matthew. And even though it sounds awfully like, it is not just another version of the Beatitudes from that sermon in Matthew. This text represents more or less the same event in the career of Jesus’ preaching, and its themes strongly overlap, but for Luke’s own particular reasons this text as we have it in his gospel, is something else.

This is the Sermon on the Plain. This is the Blessings and Woes.

One of Matthew’s priorities throughout his Gospel account is to convey as strongly as possible to his readers the divinity of Christ—that Jesus the Messiah is God made flesh. In keeping with this, Matthew places Jesus on a mountain top high over his listeners, echoing other important scenes from Torah in which the word of God was handed down to the people through a chosen deliverer who received that word in face-to-face encounter. As good Jewish readers, that is, Matthew wants us to see Moses on Mount Sinai here, bringing down the Ten Commandments, face shining with the immanence of God’s presence.

Luke’s priorities, as shown in his approach to this Gospel scene, are slightly different:

For one thing, Luke is writing to a gentile audience (many scholars believe Luke was Gentile himself), and his Gospel shows a real emphasis on demonstrating the equality of human beings under God. Hence, the Sermon on the Plain. Matthew puts Jesus up high, making a metaphor out of the landscape, while Luke puts Jesus and the people on level ground, everybody “from all Jerusalem, Judea, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon,” on even footing. His arrangement of the tableau is almost a foretaste of John’s gospel language about dwelling, with its emphasis on Christ’s intimacy with humanity: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Another thing about Luke is that he’s one of the late gospel writers. Many scholars place him as a contemporary, even a companion of the Apostle Paul. And there really are some tight harmonies between Luke’s gospel and Paul’s letters when it comes to this emphasis on the equality of human peoples under God. When Paul writes in Galatians “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith…so that now there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor male nor female, for you are all one in Christ,” that is very much the sentiment—very much the Gospel—that Luke is preaching.

Now, all of this may sound a bit like ‘six of one thing and half a dozen of the other’: Matthew emphasizes God’s supremacy, Luke emphasizes humanity’s equality under Christ…same-same, right? Not quite. There is a meaningful difference between telling people that Jesus is the supreme ruler of all creation, coeternal from the beginning with God the Father—and in telling people that Jesus loves and rules over all creation equally. With equal regard, equal grace, equal power and will to gather humanity unto himself.

So with that framing in mind, I’d like to take a closer look at what’s going on in this episode of the Sermon on the Plain, and what Jesus might be driving at with these prickly Blessings and Woes, so different in their rhythm and weight from Matthew’s stream of Beatitudes.

“He 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 [over.] They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

Matthew spends a lot more time on that point about the healings—the ‘Wonder Working Power,’ thing. Luke takes something of a less-is-more approach. But you’ll notice, it doesn’t lack a certain shiver of emotional punch for being brief. “And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all.” Imagine the crush. Imagine the hands. Imagine the eyes of the people and the hungers shining in those eyes. Imagine the spark in the atmosphere, the deeply felt but intangible zap when someone finally makes contact—just a finger brush, and that Divine static charge courses through them just exactly like electricity waiting for a channel to bolt for the Earth—and with that touch—[breath]—they are healed of all their afflictions.

That’s the activity of the scene. Then Jesus looks up at his disciples—this indicates the whole crowd of followers, not just the 12—and he speaks these things about those who are blessed, and those who are marked for woe.

Whenever I hear the nature of God portrayed like an equation, something that can be manipulated towards a result—“solve for X”—I get my hackles up. I feel strongly that the nature of God is so much higher than our own natures, so beyond our comprehension, that it must be much more like a law of being, like a law of physics, than algebra. Isaiah’s language really captures it for me when he writes:

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

As the rain and the snow

come down from heaven,

and do not return to it

without watering the earth

and making it bud and flourish,

so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,

so is my word, that goes out from my mouth:

It will not return to me empty,

but will accomplish what I desire

and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

Frederick Buechner, in his book Beyond Words, writes that “In the biblical sense, if you give me your blessing, you irreversibly convey into my life not just something of the beneficent power and vitality of who you are, but something also of the life-giving power of God, in whose name the blessing is given. Even after old, half-blind Isaac discovered that he had been hoodwinked into blessing the wrong twin, he could no more take the blessing back and give it to Esau than he could take the words of it out of the air and put them back into his mouth again.”

Blessings are like that. They’re like a static charge unleashed. They have aim and drive, objective, effect, an incontrovertible nature. That’s true when one person blesses another in God’s name. How much more so when God blesses us directly? Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “for God’s gift and His call are irrevocable.” That almost sounds like it should start with “Beware.” Almost sounds like it should start with “Fear not.”

So when I hear passages like these blessings and woes preached as though they describe a kind of cause and effect relationship in which human beings earn God’s compassion or retribution by doing or not doing certain things, I get a little squirrely. It’s that word “for,” isn’t it? “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” “Woe to you are full now, for you will be hungry.” That word “for” basically means “because,” and in the course of all these repetitions I think it starts to stick in our ears, stick in our minds until, preoccupied as we are by our little human senses of justice, we build up sort of preponderant impression of causality.

We get to thinking that these blessings and the woes are are imposed—because of something. We can get to feeling like we ought to be suspicious of joy, fearful of plenty or contentment, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. We can get to thinking that “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled,” is some kind of magic spell—if we could just figure out the exact way that we’re supposed to claim that statement, the goods will manifest. Being #blessed--getting money, becoming filled, attaining joy, is something we ought to be able to do for ourselves, right now.

But that is not how blessings work. In fact, what if causality has nothing to do with Jesus’ point here? What if Jesus is simply describing how things are, the human condition for all people, at all times, in all places, and trying to show us how God permeates that condition?

What if Jesus is not saying “everything happens for a reason,” but simply saying, “everything happens”? What if we’re more in the province of Ecclesiastes here? For everything, there is a season. When you are in seasons of joy, plenty, and peace, it is a fact of life that seasons of pain, need, or confusion are probably yet to come for you. So there is a kind of shadow of woe that abides with those who are enjoying times of comfort and ease. But that shadow should make us prayerful, generous, compassionate…not afraid.

Because equally in those times, there is a static charge in the air—like the one you feel on a humid summer day when the air grows very still before a storm—that charge that indicates the presence of power: God’s blessing, God’s guaranteed presence and faithfulness in your life through whatever may lie ahead.

It is there for those in the midst of storms, too:

Blessed are you who are poor, who need, who hunger, who weep, because for everything there is a season and for hard moments there are also sweet moments, but more than that blessed are you because God’s gift, and God’s call are irrevocably with you.

Everything happens. I think in all honesty everything does not happen for a reason, but everything happens, and it always has. And God is working all things together for our good. Those two things go together, gift and call. God’s gift of blessing, of faithful presence in each of our lives is the force that empowers us to answer the call when it comes to us, to participate just as we are in that working together of all things for good. Even at our most broken, for someone, at just the right moment, God has appointed us to be a gift.

On that note, before I close, I want to pay just a moment’s attention to one other feature of this passage, which is Luke’s return—twice—to this thing about prophets. Because sometimes we are called to gift one another with comfort or understanding. And sometimes we are called to gift one another with tough truths.

‘Blessed are you when people hate you, exclude you, insult you, reject your name as evil, for this is the way their ancestors treated the prophets. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.’

Now, I think we can all agree that it’s important to pay attention to the patterns of feedback that we get from the people around us in life—this text should not be read as an encouragement to double-down self-righteously in the face of criticism, or to fear others’ well-earned good opinion. For all that electricity metaphors have been a staple in this sermon, God knows we do not need more polarity in our shared life of faith. We need to listen to each other. But I think this text is a message of caution about pedestals and pillories: raising people, or ideas, or institutions up as all-good or all-bad. Whenever our concept of self, or of the other, or of community is monolithic that perspective has become skewed, and needs correcting.

So as we meditate this evening on blessing and call, I would like us to also spend some time thinking about members of this community who have blessed us as a church congregation with challenging truths, or who have given voice to the challenging elements of God’s call on our community life. I would like us especially to think about people who have done that for us, who may no longer be part of this community, or who haven’t been around in a while. Because even when the messengers who carry it into our lives may fade from view, God’s gift and God’s call are irrevocable.

Amen.