Jeremiah 17:5-10; Luke 6:17-26
3rd Sunday before Lent
St Barbara’s 16.02.2025
Rev Tulo Raistrick
We love our pithy moral sayings, don’t we? “A stitch in time saves nine.” “The early bird catches the worm.” “Don’t count your chickens until they’ve hatched.”
It is noticeable that in both Matthew and Luke’s gospels, they start an account of Jesus’ first extended sermon, or batch of teaching, with some pithy statements, statements that are easily memorable and challenging. “Blessed are they who…” And significantly they both base those teachings around a rhetorical style that was used frequently in the Old Testament: the blessings and curses of God. The prophet Jeremiah, in our reading this morning, gives us a good example of this. If you live life in the way God calls you to, you will be blessed, you will be happy; but if you go against God’s commands, you will end up in a life that is one of unhappiness and despair.
Matthew’s version of these pithy sayings, the beatitudes, is perhaps better known, and here at St Barbara’s we have re-visited his version two or three times over the last ten years, whilst this is the first time we are looking at Luke’s account. Luke’s version is shorter and more challenging. He only has four blessings compared to Matthew’s eight, and he links each blessing up with a woe, a woe which reveals what happens when the opposite of the blessing is done.
And whilst Matthew focuses on primarily spiritual qualities – the poor in spirit, those who hunger for righteousness – Luke is far more physical, reflecting a key theme of his whole gospel, God’s concern for the poor, the marginalised, the excluded.
In Luke’s beatitudes, God blesses those who are poor, those who are hungry, those who weep, those who are hated and excluded and insulted. Luke is not referring here to those who are spiritually in this condition, but to those who are physically, materially, in this condition.
In today’s world, that would include those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who, having been forced out of their homes and forced to live in temporary refugee camps, are now being forced out from there as well, by a raging civil war, leaving tens of thousands of people unable to access clean water, hospital treatment or food. Or it would include the millions in Sudan, slowly being starved to death through the atrocities carried out by the warring sides in the ongoing conflict there. Or it would include the people of Gaza, returning to homes reduced to rubble, and faced with the prospect of a seemingly hopeless future.
How can they be blessed? What does that mean? How does the promise of God’s kingdom or the promise of their hunger being satisfied or the promise that a time of laughter will come make any sense for people in such terrible situations? These are not easy words for us to wrestle with.
To try and understand them I go back to some of my experiences over the years living alongside people in Africa who lived in extreme poverty. What sense did they make of Jesus’ words?
The first thing that I discovered as I listened to my friends was that these words assured them that God, unlike almost everyone else, was on their side. Their experience was that almost anyone who had wealth or power sought to exploit them, abuse them or simply ignore their plight. They were used as cannon fodder for bigger political or military ends, their lives seen as cheap and disposable. And yet Jesus spoke of them, not the rich and powerful, first. He not only recognised their existence, he valued them and loved them.
For my friends, denied worth or value because of the way they had been treated or ignored by the rich and powerful, to know that the Son of God, reflecting the values and love of his Father, should value and love them was of immense worth. Amidst some of the most extreme suffering, value, meaning, dignity, could still be held on to. This was one thing that could not be taken away from them. They could say: “We are blessed because God is on our side, and not on the side of those who abuse us and exploit us and seek to dehumanise us.”
The second thing I discovered from my friends was that the hope of an eternal future really mattered. In some theological circles it has become seen as slightly old-fashioned to talk about the hope of heaven (pie in the sky when you die). That such talk is seen as in danger of fulfilling Karl Marx’s words that religion is the opiate of the people. People will only think about heaven and not seek to change their lives in the here and now, so the commentary goes.
My own experience of living in apartheid South Africa was totally the opposite. I’ve not lived amongst a people with such a keen sense of heaven, of a day when the tables would be over-turned, when the powerful would be brought to account and wrongs no longer ignored, when the poor would rejoice and their tears would end. People who could so keenly identify with the words of Mary’s Magnificat. But neither have I lived amongst a people with such a keen sense of justice, for a desire for change in the here and now. The hope of a better future gave them the energy and inspiration to fight for a better world now.
What Jesus’ words assured them of was that not only was God on their side, but that he had for them a better future, and that was a hope that transcended their poverty. Indeed, unlike almost everything else, this was something that money and power could not buy. Indeed, money and power were a positive disadvantage to experiencing that hope.
So what do these words mean for us? There are few of us here in Earlsdon who are materially poor to the extent that Jesus’ hearers would have understood that term. There are few of us who go to bed hungry. So what do these words mean for us?
Well, for one thing, if God in Christ reveals that he is on the side of the poor, then we should be too. The issues of the poor and marginalised, the starving and hungry, should be our issues too. That requires us to educate ourselves. How often is Sudan, what the UN has recognised as the largest humanitarian crisis in a generation, mentioned on our news. The Congo is in the news now, but for how long? The interest of the powerful, the interest of the media, moves on. Do we too? Or do we continue to hold these places in our prayers? Do we lobby our MPs to find out what our government is doing? Do we support aid agencies such as Tearfund and Christian Aid in their work in these places? In the limited way we can, do we stand alongside those in poverty in our world? That is part of the calling, the challenge, of Jesus’ words here.
And secondly, we would do well to learn from those who may well have a healthier view of heaven. It seems to be a strange fact of life that the more power and money people have, the more afraid they become of losing it. The focus of life is on accumulating more and holding on to what one’s got. But living life with a genuine hope of heaven gives a different perspective – one where unafraid of death, we learn to live each day we have to the full; where unafraid of losing what we have, we learn to live with joyful generosity.
Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God”. May we take the side of the poor, and inspired by the hope of heaven, work for justice and mercy now.
