Preaching on the Level

Preaching on the Level

16 February 2025

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

For a teacher, where you sit when you teach makes a big difference. For teachers of an earlier era, the correct position was up the front and up high (hmm like this, really). Teaching was literally the imparting of knowledge from on high – nowadays educationalists are more likely to observe that students and teachers are all learners together and that teachers can best inspire students by being alongside them. On the same level.

Matthew and Luke both inherit this story of a sermon that sets an agenda, almost like a mission statement, relatively early in Jesus’ career. But they each do something a bit different with it. Matthew, who understands Jesus as a new Moses for a new covenant, has Jesus like the original Moses delivering his manifesto on a mountain, from on high, which is a way of saying that the Sermon on the Mount has the authority of the Law brought down by Moses from Mt Sinai in the wilderness. 

Luke, by contrast, has Jesus coming down from the mountain where he has been praying all night. He joins the disciples and a great crowd of people who have come to be healed, and he sits down with them in a level place. We know that he is sitting down, as a rabbi normally did to teach because the Gospel tells us, he looks up at them. This is Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Plain. Jesus is on the same level as those who have come to him in need - and he talks to them ‘on the level’. He speaks plainly, as one who lives among them and knows their needs.

I remember reading this passage in a Bible study group once, many years ago, and the leader asked the question. What does Jesus mean by this - ‘blessed are the poor’? And after an extended silence, the first person to respond said, ‘well, he means blessed are the poor in spirit’. But Luke’s Beatitudes, the ones less often read, the sermon on the level by the scruffy rabbi who shares the poverty of the dirt poor of Galilee – won't let us get away with that. ‘Blessed’, Jesus says, looking at the crowds gathered around him in the most desperate backwater of a remote occupied territory in a century where about 98% of the population lived a hand-to-mouth existence. ‘Blessed are you who are poor’. And we know he really means it because the word the gospel uses here, ptochos, means destitute, reduced to begging, utterly helpless. We know this is exactly what Luke means because it’s the second time he has made this remarkable claim. The first time was back in chapter one, where Luke records the startling, prophetic words of Mary of Nazareth - ‘he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of lowly estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty’. Blessed, Jesus says to the now silent crowd, are you who are poor.

Blessed are you who are destitute, or who don’t have enough to eat, blessed are you who look at your children and weep for the future that they will be denied. Most of the people surrounding Jesus would have known he was talking to and about them. And perhaps he is also talking to and about his own disciples, who had left their simple livelihoods to follow him and to share the lives of those who didn’t matter, the unimportant and the marginalised. You too, Jesus assures them, are blessed because you inherit with them the kingdom of God.

But, what is he talking about? In what world is it a blessing to be desperately poor, and in what universe is it a blessing to go hungry, to be excluded and to despair? I can think of a couple of answers, but we have to be very careful with both of them. The first answer is this - it really is true that those who have nothing are sometimes more generous than those of us who live in security and comfort. I have been privileged to eat and drink with families who didn’t have enough to put on the table, with men and women and children who knew that all they had was one another, and who honoured me by including me. Blessed for sure are those who share out of the little that they have because they know that the most important thing they have is one another. Blessed are they because they know their need of God, and because they yearn for the promises of God. But - we need to be very careful of this one lest we romanticise or make excuses for grinding ugly poverty and the misery of lives not lived to their full potential. We have to be very careful indeed, because if we are not careful it slides back into some self-congratulatory version of “blessed are the poor in spirit”.

Blessed are the literal poor, says Jesus, for they will inherit the kingdom of God. It’s the same promise of reversal, the upturning of privilege that Mary of Nazareth prophesies. God will lift up the lowly and throw down the powerful. Blessed are the poor and hungry and despairing, because they will be restored and will rejoice. 

But you need a very powerful faith to believe this, don’t you? Because the whole of human history tells us it isn’t true. Right now, it isn’t true in Gaza or in South Sudan, or in a lot of other places. Will those who weep there ever have cause to rejoice? It’s a promise that human history belongs to God and will be redeemed in God, a promise that is already but not yet fulfilled in Jesus, and a promise that we yearn for as the fulfillment of all things. 

Where we have to be very very careful with this one is that it doesn’t slip back into telling the poor that they’ll get their reward in heaven. Jesus tells a very powerful story about this idea in chapter 16 of Luke’s Gospel, the story of Lazarus and the rich man. You’ll remember that the poor man, Lazarus, is comforted in heaven while the unnamed rich man who refused to give any comfort on earth goes to the other place. And Jesus makes the comment that there is a great divide between the places where Lazarus and the rich man have ended up. But actually the great and enduring divide doesn’t just come into being after the last judgement. It had already been created by the rich man, while he and Lazarus were both alive.

Speaking of the great divide, how does it feel that we are reading this passage the week after the world’s richest man cancelled about 40% of the global aid spending for the poorest of the world’s poor? That was Elon Musk, of course, who said he was feeding USAid into the wood chipper. And in the same week his boss, the billionaire New York property developer, promised he would evict the traumatised and starving population of Gaza and turn the real estate into a luxury resort. Blessed are the poor!

The prophetic promise of justice and the radical reversal of fortunes that Jesus promises is core business for God, and for this reason it should be core business for us. As Christians we are challenged to be the good news that Jesus promises - and woe to us if we are not! The woes in this reading from Luke’s Gospel are just as crystal clear, in fact, as the blessings. Woe to us when we have more than we need while others suffer, woe to us when we are comfortable and complacent and too impressed by our own good reputations.

Well, you might be thinking, but what’s the good news? Doesn’t this morning’s psalm rather contradict all this, and the reading from Jeremiah, that suggest those who are flourishing must be more righteous? Like trees planted beside streams of running water, while the wicked living in less desirable parts of town get their comeuppance? Well, I think the main point is that the groundwater of creation is Wisdom and divine love, but that we need to drink - you know? get our roots down into it. At the risk of over-stretching the psalmist’s arboreal analogy, recent plant research suggests trees - at least of the same species - help each other out, spread out a few roots to share water and nutrients with their neighbours. Having a prime waterfront address is certainly a good opportunity to start practising the golden rule.

To put it another way - and speaking on the level - Jesus does seem to have a habit of claiming things that aren’t true yet - and daring us to live towards them. Because they can only come true in the yearning and living. Your kingdom come, we pray, on earth as it already is in heaven. But, we have some part to play in that, and it is in the living towards the promises of God that our own lives unfold as they should. We do grow into the likeness of the things we spend our live on. Live as a blessing to others, and you will be blessed. 

So, what’s the good news for us? No, I’m not suggesting you should move out of your homes. But it matters what we do with the things we call our own. It matters that we balance our care for ourselves, and those with whom we share our lives, with the needs of others who Jesus tells us are our neighbours. It matters that we notice and respond to the needs of others, that we recognise injustice and support those who work for justice and equity, especially in our local area. That we live on the level.