Words and deeds and bringing God into the present

Text: Luke 6:17-26

If you read the Gospels in large sections at at time, rather than in a few verses here and there as we usually do in church, you might notice that Jesus follows a pattern of teaching and doing, with some rest and prayer along the way. He speaks, and then he acts, and then he speaks again. Some of the actions Jesus takes are fairly foreign to us, like exorcisms and rebuking demons and miraculous healings, and as a society of people who are more likely these days to tune in to talking heads on the tv shows at home and talk radio in the car, and as a group of fairly well educated people who like to toss around opinions and ideas, it’s pretty tempting to just pass over the things Jesus does to focus on the things he says. 

Which is great when he is saying that God loves us and is hard when he says woe to you who are rich and well fed and happy.

So let me just say right off the bat that Jesus’s words at the beginning of today’s readings need to be heard in the context of what Jesus has been doing before his teaching and is going to do after he has finished it. 

What he has been doing since we last saw him calling Peter and James and John to leave their fishing boats and follow him is - a lot! First, he sees a leper, who asks to be made clean, and Jesus heals him. Then some people bring a paralyzed man to him (busting through the roof to lower his bed into the house) and Jesus heals him while also mentioning that forgiveness and physical healing are both needed for restoration to wholeness. Then he calls a tax collector, a rank outsider, to join his group and goes to a dinner party at his house. Then he healed a man with a withered hand, on the Sabbath in the synagogue. He’s been busy and what he’s been busy doing is reversing the fortunes of people on the margins, restoring them to health, and doing so in a very countercultural way - touching a leper, eating with tax collectors and Pharisees, healing on the Sabbath.

And after the teaching we hear today - the first part of the so-called Sermon on the Plain - he will go and heal a Roman centurion’s slave (Roman centurions of course being the enemy in Jesus’s town), and then raise a young man from the dead, restoring him to his impoverished mother.

And after that, messengers from John the Baptist will come and say to Jesus, who are you? Are you the messiah? You don’t seem like a messiah - you break the rules and lots of people are against you. And Jesus will say: Go and tell what you have seen, that the blind received their sight and the lame now walk and the lepers are cleansed and the dead have been raised. The outcast have been brought into the fold and this is the kingdom of God.

Jesus will speak - the kingdom of God is like this, he’ll say - and then he will act - bringing the kingdom of God into reality in the present. And then he will speak again and the hope is that the people who are listening, and that includes you and me, will connect the dots. We see him reversing the fortunes of the poor and the reviled and the hungry and the weeping and then we hear him say, this is the kingdom, these belong in the fold, too. And we understand that God’s work is going to be shown through the poor and outcast because those who are doing well are not going to need to be made better.

And for those of us who are already whole, who are already fed, who are already satisfied with many blessings - it is no skin off our noses if others are are made better and brought into the fold. Jesus will show us again and again that there is enough and more than enough. 

And Jesus will also show us again and again that the world will always be making it hard for those on the margins. The poor will always be with us he says, and that is not a commandment. It’s commentary. It’s background for where his work is to be and where he invites us to be also. The way the world works is that there are always forces that do not bring life to people and those forces are characterized by violence, misuse of power, and greed. Jesus showed that his work was to lift up those who were victims of those forces, victims of unjust structures, victims of poverty and disease. That’s where one will see God at work, when justice is brought to them.

And that was a big reversal for those who heard him then, and for some who hear him now, because it is much more palatable to us to hear that our good fortune is due to God’s favor to us, that the good things we have are a sign that we are the deserving recipients of God’s special treatment when maybe we have good fortune because we are not victims of violence or poverty or someone else’s greed.

So when Jesus says, woe to you who are rich because you have received your consolation, it’s not a curse, but it is commentary. Those with wealth are already rewarded by the world. Those who are full are already satisfied. Those who laugh now are already enjoying life. But we might want to watch out, because it might not always be that way. We may discover an emptiness when our material comforts begin to feel meaningless, when tragedy comes, or a recognition that maybe we wasted our lives on stuff that doesn’t matter, when we have it all and we still feel hollow.

Jesus’s work was to show how God could be brought into the present, not just by making declarations, especially declarations about the future, but through his actions as a friend of the reviled and outcast and a healer of the suffering.

So what will we do with our blessings as we ponder how to answer Jesus’s call to us to follow? How will we bring God into the present? How will we show to the world the kingdom of God now?