6C Epiphany
13 Feb 2022
You leave your village early in the morning before the heat of the day would make walking any distance miserable. Besides, it is a long journey on foot and will take you the better part of the morning to get there. Word had spread that the rabbi was coming down from the hills to teach and continue healing everyone who came near. Since that day on the beach when you saw the net so full of fish it almost capsized the boat, you have become one of the disciples. This man offers a way of being that is fully ancient and yet completely new. People in Galilee are flocking to him, regardless of their origins. He heals those from the gentile cites of Tyre and Sidon in the far north, Samaria, and those from Jewish towns close to the lake. Yes, people from all over come to hear him and be healed.
Finally you reach the place where Jesus is and you join the other disciples, trying to get as close as you can. You see the twelve men whom he has selected and named apostles, but next to him are also Mary of Magdala and Martha and other women who are always with him. All are listening intently.
Then he starts to speak slowly and deliberately. At first the words make no sense. Yet by now you have learned that what he says often does not compute with what you have been taught and what you see in the world around you. What could possibly be a blessing about being poor, so poor as to have nothing? Does not God bestow wealth on those he favors? Not many people always have food, surely they are the ones who receive the abundance of God. But this man says it is not like that. That is not what God intended, or what God wills now, for people. And if you follow his way, you will find that God wants good things for his people.
The next part is very hard to understand. Those who follow him will face all sorts of persecution. By now you can understand why; he teaches that God considers you and all those people surrounding you to be favored and blessed. It is hard to accept that. Ah, but remember that net full of fish. Remember the way he looked at you. It was as if you were the only person who existed, and he could see into your very soul.
Jesus continues and you hear him say those that have everything that a person could want or need are NOT the blessed of God for their wealth comes on the backs of those who do not have. God does not want the world to keep going on those terms. You must give up everything to be filled.
This is a different way to see what it means to be living in the Realm of God. Jesus said it was supposed to be that way from the beginning, but that people tried to be like God and became infected with greed. He wants to change things, but he also wants to change you. You will need to give up your life to find it. You shake your head as you try to understand.
I don’t know what motivated those early followers of Jesus. At this point it was not at all about death and resurrection; those conversations come later. Folks who became disciples had to be hearing a message of hope.
Remember how he quoted Isaiah about the good news for the poor? He is now teaching his followers how that will be. First, and above all else, God is the God of the poor and the lowly. I suspect that those disciples may heard that in more than one way. Judas Iscariot may have hoped for an insurrection. The beloved disciple may have taken it to mean dissociation from an earthly existence. Peter? I don’t think he knew exactly what Jesus meant.
This passage states Jesus’ message in no uncertain terms. God is here to advocate for and redeem the poor. The prophets of the Hebrew scriptures said no less, but it took God becoming one of us to drive the point home. God was born as a human not as the emperor of Rome, not the king of Palestine, not even a priest in the temple. He was a lay person from an assuming family in an unassuming town. And he was poor. He likely knew what food shortages meant, what a lack of work could mean for a family. His father Joseph seems to have died when he was young and that would have added to the burdens on the family.
We have cleaned up Jesus, sanitized if you will, to make him more palatable for our middle-class sensibilities. Christians have been doing the very same thing since the time of Constantine. But as soon as we do that, we lose him. He heads to the poor part of town.
This passage from Luke may one of the most, if not the most, profound statements from all of Christian scripture. It should be recited each Sunday.
So, then, how is this good news for those of us who are not in poverty? The world that Jesus lays out is one where there is abundance for all. No one should be hungry or poor or in danger because they are poor. Jesus paradoxically taught from a place of abundance; power came from him. No wonder people flocked to hear the good news; they not only heard it, they experienced it. The vision of a new Jerusalem is one where all are fed. So the good news for us is that we can have a world where we do not need to live in fear or danger. But we cannot just sit back and say thank you Jesus!! We must carry on the work that Jesus began.
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” ― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World
Soon Jesus will start predicting his death. I can see why many followers left, first because if you were among the haves you were asked to give much and, as the rich young man decided, it may be too much to bear. You may have pulled the plug later when you realized you might just die if you kept following him.
We look back from a 2000 year vantage point. Like the Monday morning quarterback we try to replay the game to our liking. In the end, though, one cannot escape these words from Luke. These are the cornerstones of the Kingdom of God and, no matter how hard we try, they won’t be replaced. Matthew tried to water it down; Luke declares it in all its stark reality.
The more we have, paradoxically, the further we are from God. For us the message is that to obtain the kingdom we must first let go. The more we serve the poor and the more we release ourselves from attachment to material things, the closer we are to the Kingdom. There is more, for ultimately detachment will mean giving up what is in the mind for what is in the heart.
Today however we hear words that give us our first real test as followers of Jesus. How will we respond?
Comments