Who and what do we live for?

Image Credit: Cosimo Roselli: The Sermon on the Mount (1481)

Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C
16 February 2025

Jeremiah 17:5-10
Psalm 1
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Luke 6:17-26

It is difficult for us not to associate blessings with material things. Perhaps because we somehow remember how marginal human existence can be. And so we may say that God has blessed us because we have money in the bank, or because we have a roof over our head, or a cottage at the lake, or two cars in the driveway.
To be sure, there is, somehow, the acknowledgement that what we have we have by God’s mercy, but it still equates blessings with material things, even health is material and when we have it we consider it too a blessing.
I am not suggesting that these are not blessings in the sense that we can consider them gifts of God but it makes it difficult to understand why we have some or all of those things and why others do not. It also it does not address the question whether the things we value are the things that God values.

Prior to the blessings and woes in our reading from Luke, Jesus spends the night praying on the mountain. It is on the very next day that he calls the twelve disciples, “Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot, and Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.”
It is immediately after the calling of the twelve that Jesus begins to speak. Large numbers of people are here. They have come to hear Jesus speak, and also to be healed.
But what Jesus says is directed at those who follow him. He looked at his disciples, then he began to speak.

First Jesus speaks blessings, then he speaks woes. The poor, the hungry, those who weep and those who are persecuted are the ones whom he calls blessed, in stark contrast to what we consider blessings.
Then he pronounces woes on those who are rich, full, who are laughing, and those who are held in esteem.

This is confusing, for we want to be rich (or at least comfortable, we don’t even know what constitutes being rich), we want to be full (even while we go on diets and go to the gym), we want to laugh, and we want people to speak and think well of us. Most of these things we consider signs of living a successful life. And we have been told that since we were children. A high school teacher told our daughter that she should go into computers because she could make a lot of money.
And what’s wrong with laughing? Are we supposed to be serious and doleful?

Perhaps the woe against those who are laughing may help us understand what is going on. To understand it properly, we must remember that the closest thing people had to media was the town crier. They were not inundated with news media telling them about the most recent catastrophes half way around the world. When we turn to humour wherever we find it, it is often to escape the gloominess we may otherwise carry, or it is because we have grown used to diversions.
The woe Jesus speaks against those who are laughing now is not directed against humour or our desire to now and again escape the weight of the world. It is directed at those who are indifferent to the plight of their neighbour, against those whose lives are unaffected by the poverty, hunger, grief, and persecution of others. It is directed at those who see no correlation between their wealth and the poverty of their neighbour, at those who say that everyone gets what they deserve, at those who have forgotten the warning Moses gave as the people of God when they were about to enter the Promised Land, “¹⁷Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’ ¹⁸But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.” After warning people against the falsehood of such pride, Moses continues, “¹⁹If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish.” (Deuteronomy 8).

But there is more.
Jesus is speaking to his disciples. He is telling them what the life of a disciples would look like. It was not a path to prosperity and power but a path to poverty, hunger, weeping, and persecution. This too is hard to conceive for us who still equate being Christian with good citizenship, or perhaps with going to church, or with God rewarding us for being good. That we don’t live in the days of the early church does not mean that we could not experience poverty, hunger, deep sadness, or persecution, even if that’s not usually on our mind.
And so we do well to rethink what we consider blessings.
Think again of Jesus’s woe against those who are full. It is not that hunger is a virtue, but in the same way that the woe against those who are laughing speaks to an absence of social responsibility, so the woe against those who are full speaks to an absence of room for God and for others. When you are full there is no room for anything else. And so being hungry allows a vision of the world that those who are full cannot see.

The theologian David Bentley Hart wrote about the tears of St Peter upon realizing that he had betrayed Jesus (Luke 22:62) that “we expect Peter to weep; (…) After all, Peter’s humanity is our own, and so we do not hesitate to recognize his grief as ours also. (…) To us, the story would (…) seem incomplete if this detail were missing. But that is not how things would have seemed to most of the contemporaries of the evangelists. (…) [A]mong the literate classes of late antiquity, to call attention to Peter’s grief would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man’s sympathy, nor could his sorrow possibly have possessed the (…) tragic dignity necessary to make it a suitable subject of either a poet or a historian. If a peasant’s weeping possessed any interest at all, it might be as an occasion for cruel mirth. Tragic dignity was the exclusive property of the nobly born.”¹
The historian Tom Holland notes something similar when he draws our attention St Paul’s assertion that “we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (1 Cor 1) Holland says that “nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries … The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive.” In the ancient world, it was the role of gods to uphold the order of the universe by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.² Glory, we know from John’s gospel, is Jesus crucified. (John 12:20ff)

And so the blessings and woes of Jesus in Luke’s gospel seek to open our eyes and our lives to seeing the world differently, to see the world the way God sees it.
And in God’s world we are our brother’s keepers, our possessions are not our own, just as our lives are not our own but belong to God. In God’s world the powerful have been brought down and the lowly lifted up. The hungry have been filled with good things, while the rich were sent away empty. (Luke 1)

Jesus reminds those who follow him that the life with him and in him does not consist of the multiplication of earthly riches, that the Kingdom of God is not that squared which we already have. To be blessed means to live in God’s presence, and to live in God’s presence is to see our life in relationship to the world God loves.
1 Timothy reminds us to take hold of the life that really is life. “¹⁷As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, (…) ¹⁸They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, ¹⁹thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.” (chapter 6)
Jesus invites us to take hold of the life that really is life.

Amen.