“Blessed are you who are hungry now” and “blessed are you who weep .. but woe to you who are rich; woe to you who are full now; woe to you who are laughing ..” It seems to me that, through the years, the Christian faithful have generally accepted the passage as evidence of what has come to be known as Jesus’ “preferential option for the poor” and of what has come to be seen as his general criticism of the wealthy.
We can pause, though, for a moment, and ask if such an abbreviated understanding is adequate to appreciate the depth and wonder of Jesus, the One, who in faith, the faithful claim to be the Christ of God.
On first review of the passage, it becomes quite evident that Jesus is turning on its head a deeply ingrained convention of the time. In Jesus’ day and culture, the poor and disadvantaged were seen as being cursed by God, and the comfortable and wealthy seen as being blessed.
The first hearers of the Gospel would surely have been shocked by such a profound reversal, by such assurance that the poor and disadvantaged are fully loved by God.
And some would say the message goes even further, as it appears the wealthy are not just being relieved of God’s blessing but are actually being cursed! Such a conclusion, however, completely contradicts the first one, that God’s love embraces the apparently un-loved.
As a result, we then could maybe say that the ways of woe identified by Luke are not a curse imposed by God, but rather hardships experienced by the so-called privileged independent, who have come to rely on themselves and eschew dependency on God and one another. The rich are more to be pitied than condemned, we might conclude, and, like Zacchaeus, be invited back into community, which is such a primal human need.
Some liberal Protestant faithful might go so far as to suggest the words assigned to Jesus are really Luke’s, the impassioned writer of the Gospel, who is using every device at his disposal to hold his early Christian community together, and convey the truth and wonder of his experience of the Risen Christ, the One by whom his life had been transformed. And maybe that’s the thing we have to keep foremost in mind as we approach the purpose of this passage for our lives.
I know an elementary school teacher who was supply-teaching one day in a class of grade three children. They were all typically delightful seven-year-olds, especially one little boy who was slightly smaller than the rest, and slightly more animated. As he was shepherding the class through the hallways of the school, another teacher approached him and told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to get this little boy under control and get him back in line (in the metaphorical sense).
The visiting supply teacher endeavoured to immediately comply. He knelt down to the level of the little boy and proceeded to admonish him, actually wagging his finger in the process. To his surprise, the little boy began to gently smile, and he realized that he had inadvertently put his left arm around the little boy as he was wagging his right-hand finger at him. The little boy was reading not the teacher’s wagging finger, but rather the teacher’s arm around him. It seems to me that that’s the way with Jesus - woe or blessing, self-imposed or otherwise, Jesus has his arm around us all the time; holding us, his hand there at our backs, assuring us of possibilities for life.
The message of the Gospel, the life and promise that is Jesus, is that there is no condemnation in the soul of God. “For God so loved the world,” the Bible tells us. “I have come that you might have life, and have it in abundance,” Jesus says. And it is as though we remember every time that when Jesus sees the crowd, he has compassion on them, because they are like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus has compassion on the crowd, the whole crowd, and not just some selected from the midst.
The promise that is ours in Jesus is a promise for our lives. The promise that is Jesus is one for the whole world, for our lives together, and it assures us that: God is with us, we are not alone; there is nothing we can do to make God stop loving us; the way things are is not the way things have to be; in Christ, God shares our sorrows and our agonies and pain; there is no hurt or wrong or injury in our lives that God cannot redeem; there still is laughter, though it might be seasoned by our tears; it’s never God who takes us, but it’s always God who lovingly and tenderly receives us; the day will come when we will meet again, and know each other perfectly and fully in the love of God; it’s never death but life that has the final word, and that we’re told by Jesus:
Don’t despair; don’t depend on yourselves alone .. Blessed, or facing woe, depend on me .. I’ve got my arm around you.
This is the promise of the Gospel, and my prayer is that we may all be blessed.
