Luke 6:17-26 (NRSV)
He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
~
"It's the Lukan version of the Sermon on the Mount, which is a revelation about how the world really works, and a presentation of the ethics that this new community will have to adopt. The ethics that exist have to do with the way the cultural structures are. The ethics that Jesus is pronouncing have to do with the way the world is. Matthew has a much more elaborate sermon, and it on the mount, the place of revelation and transcendence. Luke has the sermon on the level place, among the people, talking to them about how to live in this world."
- from notes by Paul Nuechterlein on Gil Bailie's, “The Gospel of Luke” lecture series, tape #4.
~
"The second and third blessings are in the future tense, the first one is in the present tense: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Is there something more basic about the division between poor and rich which these beatitudes are immediately overturning? If we understand that God's kingdom, God's culture, is one not based on such divisions, then we are already blessed. We are already beginning to live in God's culture, even in the midst of those worldly cultures which continue to rely on a division between poor and rich. Our worldly cultures also rely on idolatrous gods who are seen as blessing the rich. This beatitude is obviously a direct challenge to those idols. The true God blesses the poor.
"I said that God's culture does not rely on divisions between rich and poor at all. So why does Jesus speak a woe to the rich? Does God bless the poor in exclusion to the rich? Does the true God simply play our same games but in reverse order? Is Jesus still presuming a culture that divides between poor and rich but simply turns the blessings and woes upside-down? I think that Christian liberation groups have often assumed the latter, and so have even gone along with a violent overthrow of the rich of this world, an attempt to turn upside-down this world's order. And God is seen as justifying their brand of justice and the sacred violence used to establish it. In other words, God does end up playing all our same games, including the violent ones.
"I feel it is crucial to let the Girardian anthropology give us another angle on this passage. God's cultural order does not depend on divisions between rich and poor. The miracle of the fishes and loaves are among those signs from Jesus that God is a God of abundance. There is enough for everyone. We don't have to presume a scarcity (which capitalism, for example, still does presume), which also presumes that some will be among the haves and some among the have nots.
"Then why the woes to this world's rich? In the present tense, they are the ones most likely to continue to live by this world's consolations. They already benefit from this world's cultural order and are not likely open to living by God's cultural order. An order based on anything other than the current system, which benefits them, will be viewed as woeful.
"Gil Bailie‘s noticing of Jesus turning his attention to his disciples is also important here. Luke's audience of disciples is generally agreed upon to have contained the greatest number of wealthy folks, compared to the audiences of the other gospel writers. It is not a coincidence, then, that Luke's gospel has by far the most challenges to disciples about material possessions. It would seem strange for Luke to direct a message to his wealthy congregants that describes some new order that ultimately leaves them woefully on the outside. It makes more sense that he would lift up a pen-ultimate reversing of this world's order as a needed challenge to coax such members into beginning to live in God's order today. Their wealth is a woeful stumbling block to their opening themselves to God's cultural order. If they ultimately end up on the outside in God's order, it will be because they have refused to come in.
[...]
"My question about the reversal indicated in these blessings and woes is whether they indicate a reversal within the human world order: those poor who are indebted to the wealthy become their rich creditors. Or does the apparent reversal represent the advent of God's world — in which case it isn't really a reversal within the human order. Rather, the poor are blessed because they are much more inclined to give up living in the human order in favor of God's order. Woe to the rich because they are more inclined to turn down the invitation.
"But if Luke's Jesus is simply giving us a reversal within the human ordering of things, then this really isn't such Good News, is it? [...] My point is that the Good News is not so much about a reversal as it is about the invitation to enter a whole new ball game in which we leave our score-keeping ways behind."
- Paul Nuechterlein, from 'Reflections and Questions' on the Luke text on the Girardian Lectionary page for this week (link below)
~
"This is going to be a constant in Jesus' teaching, the binary is arriving, the sword has come, the criterion is in your midst: the Son of Man. That is going to be the criterion from now on. And [...] if you're poor, if you're hungry now, if you weep now, and if you're in this position because people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you on account of the Son of Man - in other words, because you have 'got with the program' of the realisation that the truth is going to be spoken from the victim, something which power never likes.
[...]
"[T]he interesting thing is that here Jesus is talking to a mixed national crowd and he's not trying to specify, if you like, the ethnic inheritance of the prophets. In fact, the suggestion is rather that this dynamic - “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man” - that is something which is available everywhere, and that's what happens to true prophets anywhere. And if you are rich and full and laughing now, then you're the kind of person who people will speak well of, and that's not [just] true of a Jewish or Hebrew culture, that's true of all cultures. In other words, the flattery of falsehood, 'spin' if you like, to stay in with the powerful, is the way of the world.
"So Jesus is announcing very very strongly here that the dynamic, the center of what is coming up on people is going to be very drastic. It's going to make a very strong alteration to how the order of things works. At the center is the realisation that this word is spoken from beneath.
[...]
"So the Lukan journey continues, which is strangely secularizing, strangely international. [It is] apparently rather binary, but not because it's trying to lock people into things here and now [...] but because it's aware of the dynamic of desire which works either towards building you up so that you are receiving who you are from your name in heaven, or for the one who is grinding people down into death and violence."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLMudK4siKU)
[Source of Paul Nuechterlein comments, and for further analysis and discussion on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/epiphany6c/]
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