Today is a difficult gospel, because it’s one where we encounter a Jesus who wants our attention for something he knows will be hard for us to hear. But before we take this pungent little sermon by Jesus head on, let’s take a minute just to reflect on the Jesus who is giving this sermon, and why he feels so strongly about this message he is trying to give us that really turns the world as we know it upside down.
Here’s one thing that should always strike us about Jesus, in all the stories we hear about him, and it’s this: Jesus understood how people hurt and what they need. He didn’t know it intellectually, just in his head, knowing sure, of course people hurt; he didn’t know it through supernatural powers, because God knows everything. He knew it because he was out living with and touching the life of every sort of person, no person was foreign to him or not worth his time. He was surrounded by the poor and the rootless and people whose life was nothing but hardship, whether they deserved their lot in life or not, and of course this was by his choice, and also because he himself lived their life, he wandered from place to place and depended completely on the kindness of others. And around him, in all these poor and sick and neglected people, he saw God’s grace active in a way that God was not present anywhere else.
Look at how he reacted in all these gospel stories to people who had been left with nothing, the list goes on and on, he reacted to a crowd that was hungry, a blind man, a mother whose only son had just died, a boy tormented by an evil spirit, a man left half-dead by robbers, a beggar who had nothing, a whole series of outsiders that most Jews wouldn’t have anything to do with. He was attuned to everything that is human, and their suffering was his suffering. Wherever he went, he seemed to know what people needed before they even said anything, and his desire was that they should experience love and be given what they most need.
This leads us to today’s gospel. It starts out sounding a little like the famous beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel, you know, which of course begins blessed are the poor in spirit, a little like this one does, but this is another sermon, from Luke’s gospel, and this one has more of an edge to it, doesn’t it? First of all, this isn’t about the “poor in spirit” being blessed, we sometimes think that phrase means just about all of us, but this time, no, it’s the real poor, the materially poor: those are the people to whom God is promising current and future blessedness. And after three more reminders of who God looks at with particular favor, the hungry, the weeping, those who are excluded and shunned, Jesus adds a reminder that the way he sees the world, there are also people who are at great risk of losing everything, and in fact they may have already lost without knowing it: and those groups are the rich, people who have what they need, people whose laughter shows a neglect of this world, and people this world thinks are successful.
They are not lost because of who they are, but because it’s so hard for them, for us, so hard to find a way to do what Jesus did, which is to know at a personal level what it is to be one of the forgotten, and not only not to judge them, but to understand what they need and serve them. It’s as if any form of riches and satisfaction with our own situation means we just can’t see people the way we need to; we see people who are life’s outsiders as a problem that won’t go away, not as the place where our salvation is going to be found.
Notice that by saying that the poor are blessed Jesus doesn’t mean that in the long run they’re blessed, that there will be a great reward for the poor after they are dead. That would let the rest of us off the hook right now, and Jesus does not want to. He means they are blessed now, that they are where God is active. And until we see that, we’ll never be able to imitate this way Jesus had of understanding how people hurt and what they need, and then doing something about it. We all find plenty of ways not to do this. We worry about which of the poor deserve whatever it is they need. We worry about problems in general without personally touching any one person in particular. We reject outsiders, instead of seeing them as messengers who have been sent to us to save us. All these are representative of the way the world mostly works, but for people like us trying to come to grips with the gospel, it’s not what Jesus is pushing us towards, and today he is pushing hard.
That having been said, like most of Jesus’s sermons, there isn’t anything here about where you or I, specifically, need to go looking for these people where God has told us that we can find him. That’s privileged communication between each one of us and God, and we all have our own path. But to say that it’s privileged communication doesn’t mean that it’s an impossible secret. The world around us is one message after the other, one person after the other passing through our sight, all needing a human touch and human help. They are blessed, Jesus says, because they are in need, and blessed are we, it turns out, because we have the privilege of knowing it, and finding God somewhere where we have never looked.