"Jesus, did you really mean to say....Blessed are you who are poor?"
Knox, 6 February, 2011 © Scott McAndless – Communion
Proverbs 10:2-6, 15-16, 22, Psalm 49, Luke 6:17-26, Matthew 5:1-10
The movie, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian begins with an epic scene. After the opening credits, we see Jesus on a small hill speaking to a crowd with the famous words of the Sermon on the Mount. And, as the camera pulls back we discover that it is, in fact, a very large crowd indeed and yet still the camera continues to pass over the heads of people until we find ourselves at the very outer edges of the crowd where Jesus’ voice is barely coming across as more than a murmur.
And there, at the outer edge we find a group of people (including the title character, Brian, and his mother) who are straining to hear what Jesus is saying and discussing among themselves what they think they have heard and what it might possibly mean. Of course, the scene makes for great comedy especially when (in my favourite bit) one of them thinks he heard Jesus say, “Blessed are the cheese makers” and another self-importantly explains that the saying mustn’t be taken literally and that it obviously refers to all manufacturers of dairy products.
But, more than just being pretty funny, I think that that group in that opening scene is good image of the church. I mean, that is us, isn’t it? We stand at a distance from Jesus – a distance imposed upon us by almost two thousand years of history and many differences in language and culture. Many things seem to stand in the way of us hearing clearly and properly understanding what he said.
Just think of it in terms of language. Jesus spoke, as far as we can tell, Aramaic. But when his words were eventually written down in the gospels they were written in Greek. And most of us can’t even read the Greek New Testament and we have to read English translations. So we are three language steps removed. But language is not our only problem. Sometimes it is our own assumptions that get in the way even more.
For example, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says to a crowd of disciples, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Now that is a rather surprising saying and I find that, in many ways, we have a hard time hearing it. For one thing, I have literally had people tell me that Jesus couldn’t have said that. I will say to them, “You know, Jesus said, ‘Blessed are you who are poor,’” and they will say to me, “No, that’s not right. What Jesus said was, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Of course, that is what Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, but not what he says in Luke. But we don’t seem to remember what he says in Luke because what he says in Matthew is so much more familiar. But, more than that, what he says in Matthew is also a whole lot easier for us to hear.
For one thing, the saying just doesn’t really make all that much sense as it appears in Luke, does it? How are the poor blessed? Another way to put it: Jesus is telling the poor that they should be happy about their situation. Now, I realize that we may sometimes recognize that poor people can be happy and blessed in spite of their poverty, we don’t have much trouble with such a notion. But that is not what Jesus is saying here. He is congratulating them for their poverty.
Consider also what Jesus means by poor. He is not just talking about people who are down on their luck or “between jobs” as we might put it. The word that he uses here would actually be better translated as “the destitute” or, even better, “the dispossessed.” In an agricultural society that was based on the ideal of every family having a little plot of land on which they could grow enough food to merely survive, the poor were those who had no place in the economy, no possible means of earning a decent living at all.
According to the World Bank, three billion people, almost half of the world’s population right now, live on less than $2.50 a day. That means that, compared to 50% the world’s population, everybody here today is actually quite wealthy. But we don’t think of ourselves that way at all, do we? In fact, we are quite capable of complaining about how poor we are – about how we do not have enough money to get or to do some of the things that we want or feel that we need. But it is sobering to realize that what Jesus was talking about when he spoke to a group of people and called them poor is as far removed from any experience of poverty that any of us might have ever experienced. And yet he told them they were blessed.
And that is another thing to notice about the saying as it comes to us in Luke’s Gospel. In Matthew, Jesus may talk about the “poor in spirit,” but in Luke he speaks directly to the poor. He says, “Blessed are you who are poor.” In other words, the poor people that Jesus was talking about weren’t just people who were somewhere out there or people who were occasionally seen begging in the streets. They were in the crowd and Jesus was speaking directly to them.
You see, the people who most readily responded to Jesus message, the people who followed him all over the countryside and came to him for help and healing overwhelmingly belonged to his very group: the destitute, the dispossessed and the poor. For one thing, we know now that there were a whole lot of such people in first century Judea and Galilee. The Roman economic program was transforming the countryside as high Roman taxes were pushing people into debt and then, when those debts could not be paid, the creditors foreclosed on small family farms that people had lived on for generations. The landless dispossessed were the fastest growing class in that society and so it is only natural that Jesus did speak directly to them.
They are also the people who populate many of his stories and parables. He was always talking about slaves (enslaved because they could not pay their debts), about day labourers waiting in the marketplace hoping for someone to hire them for a day’s work. He told stories about tenant farmers who could not pay their rents to their landowner, men with unpayable debts, the blind, lame and homeless who were invited to a wedding feast. When you think about it, Jesus was talking about the destitute all the time.
All of that means that we cannot simply spiritualize this saying as we are so often tempted to do. That is why, of course, we prefer Matthew’s version of this beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” because anybody can be “poor in spirit,” can’t they? I mean, Bill Gates may be the richest man on the planet, Warren Buffet may be rolling in cash, but surely if they have the right attitudes, they can still be “poor in spirit” and thus blessed. It is a rather comforting thought for those of us who aren’t exactly what Jesus might consider poor.
Now, I am not trying to suggest that the saying, as it comes to us in the Gospel of Matthew is wrong or that Matthew has wrongly interpreted it. When Matthew took what Jesus actually said and translated it into Greek as “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he was absolutely correct that that was, at least in part, what Jesus was really trying to say. But that does not mean that Matthew, in his account of Jesus’ message has completely captured what Jesus intended. Luke was also quite correct to interpret what Jesus said as “blessed are you who are poor.”
So, what does that saying as we find it in the Gospel of Luke really mean? In this sermon, as we find it in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus seems to be painting a picture of an alternate reality. In the world as Jesus describes it, all of those people who, right now, have everything going for them: the rich, those who are well fed, laughing and well respected are condemned. “Woe to you” Jesus says to them. Meanwhile, those who are poor, hungry, weeping and despised are congratulated and called blessed. What Jesus is describing, in fact, is a complete reversal of the way that the world usually works.
And that alternate reality – that complete reversal of the way that things usually work – is actually the point of everything that Jesus is saying here. Jesus came to proclaim the kingdom of God. The first words out of his mouth as he began his ministry were, “The kingdom of God has come near.” (Mark 1:15) And what was the nature of this kingdom? Jesus often summed it up in a simple phrase, “The first shall be last,” he said, “and the last will be first.”
In other words, the essence of the kingdom would be found in this world in a complete reversal of the natural order of things. It would be a reversal that overturned the usual spiritual or moral order of things – the assumptions that were naturally made that certain people were somehow better than others or closer to God. Jesus regularly proclaimed that this order had changed. He was always ready to knock the self-righteous – those who figured that they were closer to God than anybody else – down a peg or two. And at the same time he was always ready to demonstrate God’s love and affection to those that everybody else called sinners or unclean. For Jesus, the kingdom of God always meant that the spiritual order of this world was to be upset – or, to put it another way, that the “poor in spirit” were “blessed.”
But it was never just about spiritual things for Jesus. The kingdom of God was also and especially about overturning the social and the economic and perhaps even the political order of society. The kingdom of God would never be realized in this world – and for Jesus the kingdom of God was primarily about what happened in this world – until the mighty were cast down from their thrones, until the proud had been humbled and the confident were confused. Most of all the kingdom of God would never be realized until something happened that made the rich and the poor change places.
So what was Jesus saying when he stood on that level place and looked out at the people who were there and were poor, hungry and demoralized and he called them blessed, and then he turned and looked over at the little knot of people who were rich and well fed and well spoken of by everyone and pronounced woe upon them – what he was saying was that the kingdom of God and all the upset of the normal order of things that it represented really had arrived. It was here and nothing could ever be the same again.
So, yes, Jesus really did say that the poor were blessed because they were poor and he really meant it. These words must have been a great encouragement to the poor folks who followed him around and hung on his every word. They must also have been a challenge to those who felt comfortable and secure in their wealth and possessions. That, also, was exactly what Jesus intended.