I can’t quite escape the irony of ascending this pulpit, when we’ve just heard about Jesus coming down from the mountain to teach. Luke’s version of the beatitudes parallel Matthew’s account of the sermon on the mount, but here his teaching is delivered on a plain. On the level ground, where you might say that the mountain and hills have been made low for the way of the Lord. Luke adds even more emphasis to this act of coming down, this leveling of Jesus with his congregation, by calling attention to the direction of Jesus’ gaze. The gospel tells us that he looked up at his disciples. I’m not sure why he had to turn his eyes upwards; perhaps he had been kneeling in response to the great multitude who had come looking for healing. But what we do know for sure is that, in Luke’s version, Jesus wasn’t looking down on anyone.
But here I amin the only place in the sanctuary with amplification sufficient for preaching. And since I can’t exactly look up at you, I’m going to take advantage of the opportunity to ask you a few questions. How many of you have trusted in people? Think about it for a moment. Well then, woe to you. How many have trusted in God? Blessed are you! How many of you are, or have been, poor or hungry or sorrowful? Blessed are you. How many have ever been rich or full or happy or admired by people? Woe to you.
And for those of you who find yourselves in categories of both blessing and woe, I’d like you to take a moment and see if you can draw a mental border between those aspects of yourself. Could you build a wall between them? Could you say that one part of yourself is inside the community of the blessed and one part of yourself outside of it?
What about the person sitting nearest to you? Is theirs the kingdom of God, or have they been excluded? Watch out, that’s a trick question. Because the moment any of us move to exclude another, Jesus is right there, reminding us that the excluded are the blessed ones.
But wouldn’t you like to know who’s included among the blessed? Wouldn’t you like to be sure you’re included? The Bible is full of the kind of social categorization that human minds like. It simplifies the cognitive load to be able to identify who are the blessed and the cursed, the male and the female, the Jew and the gentile, the clean and the unclean. And lest we think that was then and this is now, take a moment to consider the social categories that make a complicated world understandable to you. Red and blue, black and white, immigrant and citizen, Episcopalian and Southern Baptist.
These are all useful shorthand; a necessary tool, even, for codifying the complexity of the world, as cognitive scientists remind us. The problem is that these categories have the potential to harden into biases so entrenched that we may no longer even be aware of them. The rich enjoy God’s blessing, the reviled do not. East Asians are good immigrants, but Muslims are not. Evangelical Christians are right wing fanatics. Choose your favorite category stick with it, and pretty soon it defines your reality.
Enter Jesus the teacher, who not only lifted up entrenched social categories into the light of day, he also reversed the biases attached to them. Luke’s Gospel, especially, showcases God’s preferential option for the poor, beginning with the Magnificat of Mary and continuing with Jesus’ first public teaching at the synagogue in Nazareth.
“He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty,” said Jesus’ mother. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,” said Jesus. Little wonder that today we would hear him teaching that the reviled are the blessed, the revered and the rich are the woeful ones who need to be healed of their selfishness.
Thank goodness, then, that these words were uttered by a healer. Power came out of him and he healed all of them, the text says. All of those who had come to hear him, including the disciples to whom the beatitudes and woes seem to have been addressed. Blessed are you who are hungry, woe to you who are full. Who among that crowd was hungry and who was full? The disciples were surely both; feasting and fasting along the way with Jesus. Laughing and mourning, sometimes at the same time. As Stephen Colbert reminded us in his spectacular and spontaneous interview with Dua Lipa last week. I commend it to you.
I wonder if that’s a way of understanding Jeremiah’s lament that “the heart is perverse—who can understand it?” By the standards of the beatitudes, I don’t fare so very well. I am not poor or hungry. I like it when people speak well of me. I say that I trust God, and yet I still try to hide my woeful side from God. But there’s good news to be found in the prophet’s Jeremiah’s very next line. “The Lord tests the mind, and searches the heart.” What I’d rather not know about myself, God already knows. And will reveal it to me—and heal it for me—if I am brave enough to face my own truth.
To be searched by God is not a search and destroy mission, it is a search and restore mission. When Jesus lifted his eyes upon the disciples, he did so as God among us, not God above us. Blessed are you, woe to you, righteous are you, wicked are you, he said to his followers. Eye to eye among friends, he told the truth that healed them; all of them, the gospel says. And this is the truth that heals us still: God sees the whole of us. God sees what we are, sees what we are not, sees we’d prefer to remain hidden, sees what we long to be. And to be fully seen by God—to be searched and known by God—is the freedom to be transformed by God.
Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.
I have the privilege of praying this at the beginning of every Sunday Eucharist, inviting us to open our hearts to the God who knows all our desires. Whatever mixture of woe and blessing is yours today is already known to God. Know yourself, then, so that you may choose the way of blessing. That’s what Christ asked of his followers then, and of us now. Our weekly ritual at this table is an enacted reminder of God’s perfect love for us, unbounded by our categories, by our woefulness, unbounded even by death. In fact Christ has been raised from the dead, as St. Paul reminded the Corinthian church. So even the most fixed of binary categories—the dividing line between life and death—is no longer definitive. All are welcome at God’s table, and none are excluded from God’s reconciling grace:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,”
wrote the Persian poet Rumi in the 13th century,
“there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.”
