The Text: Luke 6:20-31
Looking at his disciples, Jesus said: “Blessed are you…”
How blessed am I! How blessed are we! Have you ever made such an observation before? Have you found yourself in a situation where you feel truly and deeply blessed?
There are any number of circumstances that occur on a daily basis where we could make this observation. We probably don’t say it or think it enough.
We could all say it in response to a good harvest or as we consider the abundance of good things that come under the umbrella of ‘our daily bread’. We can feel blessed to have good health, blessed to have a job, a roof over our heads, family and friends, a certain quality of life and on and on the list could go.
In our Christian context we of course include God when it comes to our understanding of being blessed. To receive God’s blessing means to have his favour upon us. We even include a blessing at the conclusion of every worship service to bring God’s blessing to us. It is such a blessing to be blessed, to feel blessed…until of course you don’t: until you don’t feel it; until you don’t think you are!
Every reason you can think of for being blessed has its opposite. What about when there is no harvest and has been no significant harvest for a number of years in succession? What about when your health is failing or when your relationships are breaking? What about when the roof over your head is no longer affordable or when your income is no longer reliable? What about when the blessings of life are torn away through death?
If a number of things have gone wrong for you, when the bad news comes in threes and sometimes even more, then you might be hard pressed to consider yourself blessed. At such times you can start to doubt that you have God’s favour. You can feel as though you have earned God’s displeasure for something you have done or failed to do. You might even wonder what you have to do to get him on side again.
It is natural to think this way. But when it comes to God’s blessings we are not meant to think in terms of what is natural. The normal/natural rules don’t apply. You only need to listen to the teaching of Jesus in our Gospel reading from Luke to see that!
This bracket of teaching is similar to the beatitudes in Matthew 5 that Jesus included in his sermon on the mount. In Luke’s version Jesus is on a plain (6:17), but as with the Matthew account there is a large crowd of people who have gathered to hear him.
You can imagine there would have been people from all walks of life who were listening to Jesus that day. There would have been the rich and the poor, the young and the old, males and females. Some had come to be healed of their diseases; others were troubled by evil spirits (v18-19). All of these people would have heard the same teaching of Jesus – but I imagine they would have received in completely different ways. The same is true for us as we hear it. So what did they hear? What do we hear? We hear a radically different take on life, a radically different take on what it means to be blessed in life.
Jesus said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man’.
Jesus connects blessing with precisely the opposite things we would. How blessed do you feel when you are poor, hungry, sad or oppressed?
As the crowd listened to Jesus that day there would have been those who were in one or more of those situations. Surely some might have been angry or, at the very least, annoyed at these words. Try telling someone who is suffering that ‘she’ll be right – it will all work out in the end’, and see what response you get.
But others would have taken comfort from them. If you are poor or down-trodden with limited prospects of improving your lot in life, then these words appear to offer hope. The assurance that things will work out in the end, the promise of eternal life, has brought many people comfort during grief and other trials.
But Jesus didn’t stop there. His topsy-turvy definition of blessing has a flip-side that could create even more issues for certain sections of his audience, us included. For he continued: “…woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets” (v24-26).
How might these words have been received? The downtrodden and poor probably liked them. There might be some consolation for the disadvantaged in hearing Jesus take a swipe at the rich, promising that they would get their just desserts.
But anyone who was well off, or even just content in life, could have been confused, challenged, angered or unsettled by these words. Many of us probably fit into the ‘well-off’ category, don’t we? We are wealthy in comparison to others in the world. We are well fed. We laugh. Is it so wrong to receive comfort from some of the pleasures of life? Is it wrong to have sufficient food on the table, to have laughter in your life and to have a good reputation among others?
It can be hard to get to the bottom of the message Jesus is trying to convey here. But at the heart of it is the way Jesus challenges our natural understanding of what it means to be blessed. If you simply conclude from this teaching that Jesus is talking about future blessings, then you have missed the point of it.
Yes, there will be a day of reckoning at a time to be determined. We confess that Jesus ‘will come again to judge the living and the dead’. As to how he is going to sort out everything so that justice can be done on the one hand and mercy exercised on the other, is up to him to work out. That is why he has the job of Lord, not us.
But this teaching is primarily about understanding what it means to be blessed here and now. Listen to the opening line of Jesus’ teaching again: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’. This teaching on blessing was not about a future reality but a present one – ‘yours is the kingdom of God’.
This went against everything that was ingrained in them. Wealth and health and happiness were seen as signs of God’s favour. Poverty and sickness and misfortune were seen as signs of God’s displeasure. Thankfully we are not so simplistic or superstitious in our understanding these days. Or are we?
The connection between what we have and how blessed we feel is still very much ingrained in us – as is the understanding that bad things shouldn’t really happen to God’s good, blessed people. It is ingrained so deep that Jesus had to use this provocative, in your face, teaching to try and draw it out. He made it very clear that our level of blessing is not dependent on circumstances: ‘blessed are you who are poor – woe to you who are rich: blessed are you who hunger – woe to you who are well-fed: blessed are you who weep – woe to you who laugh’.
Wealth and health and popularity do not signify that a person is blessed, even though they might feel it. Poverty and sickness and oppression do not signify that a person is cursed, even though they may feel it. It is not circumstances that determine whether or not a person is blessed or cursed. God alone determines this!
And thank God for that! This means that a run of misfortune in your life does not affect your blessed status in God’s eyes one bit. Another way we could translate this teaching of Jesus is to say: ‘even if you are poor or hungry or sad or persecuted you are still very much blessed, because you belong to the kingdom of God’.
We could also translate the flip-side in a slightly different way, as a warning: ‘if your wealth, provisions, happiness and popularity are coming between you and the things of God’s kingdom, then you could be living in a fool’s paradise that will come crashing down’.
Being blessed is not about what we have. It is about who we are! We are God’s children. We are members of his family. We had nothing of worth to offer God in order to secure a place in his family. It has come about purely through his actions of grace. And that makes us truly, richly and fully blessed – already now and also in the future. Wealth and health and reputation can all be taken away – but ‘nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:39).
With this definition and understanding of what it means to be blessed, it transforms the way we see and live our lives. Irrespective of our own circumstances, irrespective of how much or how little we think we might have, we can still be a blessing. When you know that no one can take away God’s blessing from your life you are suddenly free to be a blessing in so many ways. A miraculous healing can bear witness to the grace and power of God. But a believer who trusts in God, even in the midst of their suffering and grief and pain, can also be a powerful witness.
The normal rules don’t apply anymore because there are no limits to the way God’s grace is received by us and no limits to the way it can flow through us. So regardless of whether we are rich or poor, well-fed or hungry, happy or sad, respected or oppressed, we can show the world through our faith, hope and love what it means to be truly, richly and fully blessed by God! Amen.