This past Sunday we heard the Sermon on the Plain found in Luke. Besides being the best example of sermon length found in scripture, it is also the most difficult text to work with in preparing a homily. After all, it is the Lord’s own sermon. What can anyone add to it? What more can be said? Many years ago at the beginning of my journey as a convert to Catholicism I listened to a priest preach on the Beatitudes and his conclusion was that basically they show us where we miss the mark. While I don’t disagree with his assessment, I do hope that today’s gospel can show us more.
The sermon begins with poverty. Poverty sets the tone for all that follows. That in itself should set us back a bit, and make us think and consider the contrast between our comfortable state of life and true poverty, a state of having nothing, no home, no food, owning nothing, but also often a life where there is too frequently little hope; a life where oppression and subjugation are a daily reality. In the face of such a dire situation Jesus hands us the first and greatest contradiction in his sermon: he announces the blessedness of poverty.
It’s worth noting that the Lucan sermon differs qualitatively from Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. Here in Luke we have no qualifier of “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It is simply the poor the Lord considers. These poor little ones are the captives he has come to set free, the ones to whom he proclaims liberation and a year acceptable to the Lord. The contradiction of the blessedness of poverty is followed then by yet more contradictions of blessedness—those of hunger, sorrow; of being hated, secluded, segregated and slandered. Those who experience such are blessed because they are simultaneously the object of liberation and the impetus for systemic change.
We should contrast this view of poverty and the poor with the popular “prosperity gospel” message. Prosperity gospel pronounces wealth to be a sign of divine blessing, whereas poverty reveals God’s rejection and curse. Undoubtedly the same view existed in the time of Jesus, but in his way of turning the world order upside down he shows a reality that differs starkly from what must have seemed as self-evident then as it does even now. Poverty is an undesirable experience. The idea that poverty could contain blessing runs so contrary to modern-day thinking that there is even a theological position within evangelicalism that accompanies prosperity gospel claiming the beatitudes are not meant in any way whatsoever for Christians. This is a key tenet within the evangelical idea of dispensationalism.
Here I want to add that evangelicalism is the tradition I came from, and that prosperity gospel is not necessarily part of what is on its own a beautiful spiritual expression. Rather prosperity gospel has entered as a perversion that serves only to bolster the inherent inequality of an unjust system and attempt to justify what is contrary to the gospel message. Prosperity gospel ignores that the dispossessed have a primordial role in salvation history. They are the “crucified people.” So, rather than being an indictment against evangelicalism, prosperity gospel is an indictment against a system that relies upon inequality and oppression for personal gain.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for us to understand is how poverty can in any way be a blessing. Not the poverty in spirit that offers the possibility of beatitude by grace to any who choose to possess the right frame of mind or attitude, but actual real poverty—the poverty of those who have lost hope, lost even the will to try and find a way out, the ones who experience complete despair, who no longer can find strength to rise each morning. They are the ones who have only God, with nothing left to grasp upon earth. Yet in the crucifixion of their experience they serve as Christ in our midst, both the cause and doer of justice.
Worth noting also here is that the church teaches that we are to make a fundamental option for the poor. This too can be a hard concept to grasp. It speaks of spirituality being ordered toward the poor in a real way, one that seeks to liberate, to make systemic changes and eradicate oppression. It speaks of a life in the faith built upon the foundations of embracing the poor, sick, and dying, and not only embracing them but also working to understand and eliminate the causes of systemic injustices.
Something also needs to be said about the second part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain that sets it apart from the Sermon on the Mount; namely, that it contains a list of woes following the beatitudes. I take the woes partly as a consequential warning. Those who grasp and cling to material comforts stand the greatest chance of total spiritual loss because they have set their sights on what is passing rather than on that which endures. It is also, and perhaps more, a warning to those who participate uncritically in the oppression of humankind.
Perhaps the simplest lesson to be had is that the deepest realities Jesus taught puts us far outside our feelings of comfort. He forces us to embrace realities that are starkly contradictory to the ways that we have come to accept as normative. The lesson is indeed spiritual as much as is it is a statement concerning the imposed poverty of injustice, and as such it invites us to experience discomfort. Furthermore, it invites us to be in a place we experience as unfamiliar and uncomfortable, one where we may extrapolate even beyond poverty, and find in the company of Jesus all who are on the outside of the current society’s acceptable class of individuals. When we find common ground with those on the outside, then we find beatitude.
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