The unwelcome circumstances that bless us.
Primary Texts
Jeremiah 17:5-10
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Luke 6:17-26
If you don’t like crowds, or you’re a bit agoraphobic, this morning’s gospel may be unsettling to enter into in an imaginative way because it presents us with a huge gathering of people from a wide area – stretching from the coast of what is today southern Lebanon, to the high country on which Jerusalem sits. It is a collection of ordinary people, most of whom are – by our standards – desperately poor. They lack a lot of things, but what they don’t lack is faith in Jesus – specifically in his ability to bring wholeness to their broken lives. They have gone well out of their way to hear him and be healed by him, and their faith or trust results in many spectacular cures, both spiritual and physical.
During a quiet moment Jesus teaches his disciples that this great throng of people are assured a place in God’s kingdom; that their hunger will be met; that their sorrow will be overcome by joy; and that their adherence to him, though it will bring them ridicule and worse, will be as nothing compared to their future peace. What we have here is Luke’s equivalent of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 – where quite Matthew has a relatively long list (v3-10) of the circumstances that lead to real happiness or blessedness.
Then Jesus turns his attention to those who, almost certainly, have not sought him out on this occasion – except, perhaps, to keep tabs on his progress and build up a dossier of evidence to convict in the future. These people are the rich, the satisfied (those ‘who are full now’), the haughty (those ‘who laugh now’ – I don’t think Jesus is criticising people for having a sense of humour), and those (who do things to garner public opinion or, I guess you could say, who allow the opinions of others to dictate what they do and say – the people who ‘all speak well of.’
Jesus’ way of defining blessedness and woefulness along these lines, here, is completely consistent with what Jesus is reported as saying about poverty and wealth in the other four gospels but it grates a bit with the way that we – as a society and even as a church – typically think about happiness and success, on the one hand, and sadness and failure on the other. Usually we Christians, along with society as a whole, don’t see anything positive in poverty, whereas we see a lot that is positive about having money – we can get our children into better schools, obtain better health care, and so on. But in the Gospel today we have Jesus holding up deprivation as a blessed state and wealth as something of fleeting worth.
What are we to make of that? Are we to do all we can to make ourselves poorer and convince others to do the same so that the maximum number of people inherit the blessedness of living hand-to-mouth?
That is a possibility, and one, I think it is fair to say, that has been explored by ascetics over the centuries – the Christians, for instance, who took to the deserts of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean as Christianity was becoming more worldly in the (fourth and fifth centuries). These people, Anthony of Egypt or Saint Saba of Palestine, gave up their possessions and committed themselves to living a simple, austere life, centred on prayer and the contemplation of scripture. There certainly is something attractive about that way of living – free from the many distractions that beset us in the everyday world – but I doubt it is everyone’s cup of tea. And, to be honest, although the monks that live in these circumstances don’t own things in a personal sense, they usually have access to the things they need to survive – and to do so in a relatively healthy way – as a community, working the land together, planting and harvesting, baking bread and perhaps even brewing beer. In that sense, they differ from the people whom Jesus describes as blessed who are, one might say, desperately poor – whose bellies are often empty, who have tears in their eyes and have so little to lose that they will trek for miles to see a man who does miracles. Are we to become, then, even poorer than the ascetics and throw ourselves totally on the mercy of other people?
This possibility too has been explored in Christian history. Many people during the Middle Ages thought this was the best way to respond to Christ’s teaching. During this period the church saw the rise of groups who lived by begging, living from the charity of others. And the most famous of these would have to be St Francis of Assisi. The fact that he continues to be held in the highest regard by Christians of many denominations, including our own, suggests that we Christians still, at some level, think that there is something holy about poverty.
I think that is a good instinct, but when I consider what Christ teaches his disciples on ‘the level place’ that Luke records him having spoken from, I don’t notice any encouragement from him to seek after poverty. What I note, instead, is his insistence that the negative consequences of poverty – the hunger and the tears – will be overcome in the kingdom of God that the poor (gathered all around him) are in the process of inheriting. I say, ‘in the process’ because their very act of coming to see Jesus, to hear him, to draw near to him, is to enter into the Kingdom of God (‘the Kingdom of God is amongst you,’ (Luke 17:21). They trust Jesus in a way that the wealthy people who have avoided coming out to see Jesus (or come out to see him with ulterior motives) do not. Those rich people have placed a lot more trust in their riches. And that, I think, is the key thing (or a key thing) when it comes to interpreting and appropriating this passage and many more like it in which Jesus contrasts poverty with wealth. I don’t think he is promoting poverty as a good in itself but he is alerting us to the positive consequence that follows from that deprived state – and, by extension, any diminished state we find ourselves in – namely, that it leads us to trust in God, to search for God, to reach out with all our being to touch God and be healed.
Wealth, though not a bad thing in itself, inevitably tempts us to put our trust in the created order, in the things that we have managed to gather to ourselves. Those things become our security and God becomes an add-on, rather than the purpose of our lives. And the result, if this process runs its natural course, is that we fall into idolatry, which is the state where we worship the creature rather than the creator, and our purposes become the narrow purposes of selfishness.
As parishes around Auckland go, we are one of the wealthier examples, and as individuals most of us are comfortable, at least, so we have to take Jesus’ teaching this morning rather seriously, because there is every chance that our trust in Christ has been compromised by our wealth and the security that affords us. Call to mind another teaching of Jesus, namely, that ‘It is harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of needle’ (Mark 10:25; Matt 19:24) and you see just how precarious our situation is.
Thankfully, there is another teaching of Jesus, to the effect that what is impossible for human beings is possible for God (Luke 18:27) – which suggests that even though we have the odds stacked against us when it comes to pursuing God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, we still just might be able to do it with God’s help. That help could come in some very unexpected – and initially unwelcome – ways; it may come in the form of a setback or significant hurdle, a health scare, perhaps simply the discovery as we advance in age that we are actually mortal – whatever it takes God to get our attention focused back on God and God’s kingdom.
Those interruptions in the smoothness of an otherwise comfortable life are, essentially, what Jesus describes as blessings today. Just as poverty is not be sought out as a good in itself, neither should we seek out such interruptions in our stable lives, but when they do come we shouldn’t see them as wholly negative and become overwhelmed by them, but see them as invitations and opportunities to trust in God and allow God to bless us through them.
Tony Surman
Evensong 16 February 2025
Hosea 10:1-8, 12 and Galatians 4:8-20
Several weeks ago, I came home from church and realised that I was wearing two very different earrings. One was a fairly chunky silver hoop and the other was a much narrower gold hoop. In the process of the morning, I had stood in front of a variety of mirrors to get ready and not noticed my mismatched ears. I went through two morning services and chatted with various people at door, and during morning tea. If anyone noticed my eclectic earring choices, they didn’t tell me.
We can all have blind spots and some of them are more problematic than others. This mismatched accessory situation was not a crisis, and I doubt it was going to disrupt worship for anyone in church that day. We all have blind spots. But it can be hard to point these out to one another. Especially if someone is not open to feedback.
Both of our readings today involve truth-telling. In the reading from Hosea, the prophet is telling the nation of Israel that they have become idolaters. In the New Testament reading Paul confronts the Galatians who are turning away from worshipping God and back to their old practices. This truth-telling has Paul wondering if the Galatians now see him as an enemy rather than a friend.
As I pondered these readings I was struck by both Hosea and Paul who were willing to say hard things to people who weren’t very open to their message. We could be convinced that they didn’t have much love for the recipients of their messages because they are quite stern. It is possible to believe that the opposite of love is hate. However, the opposite of love is more likely to be indifference. If you hate someone they continue to take up mental and emotional space in your life but if you are indifferent to them you don’t care about their wellbeing or give them the time of day.
Why are Paul and Hosea so concerned to point out to the people that they were walking away from God? I think it came from a genuine concern for their wellbeing. If God didn’t care about people he could have just left them to their own devices to worship other gods and suffer the consequences. God spent significant amounts of effort in the Old Testament sending prophets to the people of Israel to remind them that as his people they were called to live in a specific way. And yet, time and time again they didn’t listen and continued doing what seemed right to them.
The problem is we become like the gods we worship. If we find ourselves worshipping gods that demand perfection or are greedy, or sow seeds of hate and division, we too are likely to become exacting task master’s or greedy or divisive.
It should serve as a warning to us that the Israelites often wandered farthest from God when they were prospering, doing well financially, and living in times of peace. They saw their success as the fruit of their own hard work and grew self-sufficient and prideful. As people who live in relative financial security and in a peaceful nation, we too can be tempted to think that our success is because of our own hard work and fail to see God’s gracious work in our lives.
When we read scripture, it is easy to sit here and think… “I wish so and so was here to hear this message, they really need to hear it.” It is much easier to spot the splinter in someone else’s eye than the log in our own. Perhaps you have people in your life who see truth telling as a personal mandate. However, their hammer-like tendencies can cause us to curl up our toes and retreat. The message might be right but the method is lacking. Their style of giving feedback may have total put you off the whole idea. But the reality is that we all need to know if we are veering of track and it is better to know at the start than when you are well and truly off course.
This week we are invited to allow scripture to hold a mirror up to own lives and do some soul searching. Not because God is a fault-finding perfectionist but because we become like the God we worship. The invitation is to become more loving and compassionate and faithful.
Therefore, we sow righteousness; reap steadfast love and seek the Lord that he may come and rain righteousness upon us.
Sarah Murphy