Hilton Head Island, SC – May 26, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 6:17-23; Luke 6:24-31
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Blessed are you poor; for yours is the kingdom of God.” – Luke 20b
The Sermon on the Mount is the longest uninterrupted collection of the teachings of Jesus to be found anywhere in the synoptic Gospels. It consists of everything in the fifth through the seventh chapters of the Gospel of Matthew.
However, the Gospel of Luke also has a version of that sermon, although it is much shorter in Luke than it is in Matthew. Furthermore, biblical scholars call it “The Sermon on the Plain,” because Luke begins his account of the episode by saying, “And (Jesus) came down with (the disciples) and stood on a level place.” No one knows why the locations for the sermon are in two such opposite places, or even where, specifically, they can be located on a map of Israel. There is a beautiful church for the Matthean location on a mountain which rises up from the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. It is called the Mount of the Beatitudes. The church was constructed by Benito Mussolini, of all people. There is no corresponding church somewhere on a plain beside the lake. If there were, it could not match the beautiful view from the portico of the Church of the Beatitudes down across the lake, to where the Jordan River runs down to the Dead Sea.
The content of the Beatitudes is similar in both Gospels which record them. However, Luke has fewer Beatitudes than Matthew, and less content in the rest of the sermon. Furthermore, in Matthew Jesus speaks about spiritual conditions in his Beatitudes, whereas in Luke he talks about physical conditions. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the first Beatitude. In Matthew Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” while in Luke he says, “Blessed are you poor.” It is an important distinction. Both ideas are no doubt valid, but they have two quite different meanings.
In both Gospels Jesus delivered his sermon primarily to the twelve disciples. Also in both a large crowd appeared, wanting to hear what Jesus had to say to his specifically chosen disciples. The famous twentieth century New Testament scholar William Barclay says of the sermon that it “is nothing less than the concentrated memory of many hours of heart to heart communion between the disciples and their Master.”
At this point we need to remember the social class of the twelve. They were all from what was then known as the Am ha-Aretz. That Aramaic term literally means “the People of the Land.” That means the common people, the poor people, the low-class people. Jesus deliberately chose his closest followers from among his own class. In 21st century terms, Jesus was not middle class, and certainly not upper class; he was from what we now call the working class. They were the lowest-income people of the land of Israel.
Because that was true, we can now better understand the difference between the thrust of what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount from what Luke said he said in the Sermon on the Plain. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” implies something about those who are spiritually impoverished, who feel spiritually poor or malnourished. However, “Blessed are you poor” is a direct statement to the twelve disciples, all of whom were economically and financially poor.
As long as Jesus stayed on spiritual themes, he might get into theological trouble with the religious authorities of the Jews, but when he referred to the economic and financial impoverishment of the Jewish peasantry, he could get into political trouble with the Roman authorities. And that was potentially very serious trouble. The Romans paid no attention to religious revolutionaries, but they paid very close attention to potential political revolutionaries. When Jesus told the disciples, “Blessed are you poor ones,” those words could be taken by the Romans as a veiled hint that better times were coming for the poor in what Jesus called “the kingdom of God.” What, exactly, did those words mean? Might Jesus be a very clever but also subversive social revolutionary when he spoke of the kingdom of God?
The kingdom of God is the single most important concept in the theology and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Again and again he referred to it in many of the things he said. If people were fully to commit themselves to doing what God wanted for the world rather than merely what they wanted for themselves, it would revolutionize life for everyone. The poor would no longer be as poor, and the rich would no longer be nearly as rich. Everyone would help one another out, sharing much more willingly what they had for the benefit of others. The sick would be better cared for. Ethnic and economic outsiders would be more readily welcomed into the inner circles of society. Prisoners who had broken the rules of society would receive better treatment. The kingdom of God represented a total revolution of the heart and mind, which would result in a social revolution.
Because Jesus intended the Beatitudes to be heard mainly by his twelve disciples, he was indirectly telling them that though they were poor now, they would lose their identity as poor people by the wealth of a new attitude which the kingdom of God would provide for them. They were never likely to become wealthy, but the injustice they felt for being kept poor by the social structure would melt away, and they would find happiness in other ways. The kingdom of God is realized when human attitudes are fundamentally changed.
The word “beatitude” means “happy.” The followers of Jesus who are poor will become happy, because they will come to know that they are subjects in God’s kingdom, and that will alter their outlook. Happiness is inevitable in the kingdom of God. Those who now are hungry shall be satisfied when they know themselves to be in the kingdom of God. Those who are weeping because of painful or sorrowful circumstances shall laugh. The beatitudes of the kingdom shall convince everyone that they too have been included in it.
In the Sermon on the Plain, there are four Beatitudes. In the Sermon on the Mount, there are nine. In the Sermon on the Plain there are a series of “Woe to you” statements; in the Sermon on the Mount there are none. However, Matthew elsewhere does include many “Woe to you” statements to the Pharisees. In The Sermon on the Mount Jesus taught the disciples what we call the Lord’s Prayer, but in the Sermon on the Plain there is no Lord’s Prayer. Luke includes it in a shorter version elsewhere in his account of the life of Jesus., shorter version elsewhere in his account of the life of Jesus.
Why does any biographer choose to write what they include in any biography? Currently I am reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant. He was the author of Hamilton, which was the inspiration for the outstanding Broadway musical. In both books, Chernow may have told us more than we needed to know about both men, but he does so thoroughly and masterfully.
In his biography of George Washington, Parson Weems said the teenage George chopped down a cherry tree, much to the chagrin of his father. That is the only record of that incident in any of the scores of biographies of the Father of our Country, if indeed it happened,. Someone else claimed Washington threw a large coin across the Potomac River at Mount Vernon. If he did, and had the game of baseball then been invented, George Washington would have been the greatest center fielder or pitcher ever to play the game. The Potomac is hundreds of yards wide at that spot. Writers wanted to magnify our first President in the minds of their readers, and so they wrote what they wrote.
Four first-century Christians wanted to magnify Jesus in the minds of their readers, and so they wrote theological biographies. No two Gospels were exactly the same, nor are any two biographies about anyone else exactly the same. More than Matthew, Mark, or John, Luke seems to have understood the revolutionary message of Jesus in his own unique way. For one thing, Luke was a Gentile, and he quotes Jesus as proclaiming a much more universal Gospel than the other three Gospels. For Luke, Jesus is the Messiah not only of the Jews but of the entire world. Everyone is to be included in the kingdom of God, and not just the children of Israel.
But let us return to a more studied understanding of what Jesus may have meant when he said to his disciples, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” In our day, there is talk of “The One Percent” being the really rich. In Jesus day, perhaps five percent of the total population of the nation of Israel were relatively well off, and ninety-five percent were really poor. There was no middle class in New Testament Palestine, none at all.
Many of us have travelled to poor countries in Latin America or the Caribbean. All of us have seen very poor sections of American cities or the open countryside. I will never forget my first journey into the American South. It was 1954, and my parents drove my youngest brother and me to Fort Benning, Georgia. The second of the four Miller sons was stationed there. He and his wife had a new baby daughter, and we all wanted to see all three of them. I could not get over the poverty of many poor people, especially black people, living along southern two-lane roads in those pre-interstate highway days. I saw Ireland in 1962, and thought it was the poorest country I would ever see, until I went through Yugoslavia by train in 1963. The South, Ireland, and the former Yugoslavia are all greatly improved economically from those days. However, poverty is still poverty, whenever and wherever it is encountered. Judea in the first century was an extremely poor place. The people to whom Jesus primarily spoke in his sermon were his own disciples, and they were extremely poor.
Nonetheless, he told them, when they realized that God’s kingdom was there before them, their lives would be changed forever. The kingdom of God is the most revolutionary concept ever offered to anyone anywhere. It is presented to us as well, should we be willing to adopt it. It gives great benefits, but it also requires major commitments. No one can realize he or she is in God’s kingdom without becoming a changed person. Later in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus told the twelve, “Those who would save their lives will lose them; and those who lose their lives for my sake will find them” (9:24). Life must change for God’s kingdom to come into existence.
If I were one of those poor Irish farmers north or west of Dublin, or I were one of those peasants in their small, frail huts in Bosnia or Croatia or Serbia, and I heard those words, I am sure my ears would perk up. Our situation, yours and mine, is that almost none of us is anything close to being truly poor. Therefore Jesus’ invitation to enter into God’s kingdom is not nearly as compelling as it was to the twelve disciples and the other hundreds of would-be disciples who heard the Sermon on the Plain, or on the Mount, if you prefer. If people are sufficiently desperate, they will try anything to escape their desperation. We, on the other hand, have always lived in a purportedly Christian culture, and the echo of Jesus’ urgent invitation does not ring as loudly in our ears as it did in the ears of those who first heard it.
Nonetheless, the invitation is no less revolutionary for us than it was for the Am ha-Aretz who listened intently to what the man from Nazareth was saying to them. It is as revolutionary as Marx or Lenin without the bloodshed, or Washington or Adams or Jefferson without the political upheaval, or like the most radical of libertarians without the abolition of most government authority. Jesus did not promote only a spiritual revolution. He called for a world revolution in which people would care for one another more willingly and completely than was their natural inclination. It is spelled out more fully in Matthew: “If anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well….Give to those who beg from you, and do not refuse those who would borrow from you” (Mt. 5:40,42).
This sounded great to the poor peasants who listened to Jesus, but he also required a complete change in them as well. They didn’t have coats, and some of them didn’t even have cloaks. No one would borrow from them, because they had nothing to lend. But for them to enter into God’s kingdom, they had to consider the wellbeing of others ahead of their own needs and wants.
Tradition says that most of the twelve were executed because of their commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They had lives, and they willingly gave them up, although that early in the story they didn’t really comprehend fully what they were signing on for. We too must give up our lives on behalf of God’s kingdom.
Therefore, Jesus says to us as he said to the twelve, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”