This Week: Epiphany 6C
Gospel: Luke 6:17-26
When digging into a passage, I always like to start with the context, and for us, this week’s passage comes immediately after Jesus names several of his disciples (twelve to be exact) as apostles. This is a whole thing that is worth delving into, but primarily because it is something so alien to our way of thinking, I suppose. And it sets up the sermon the plain with a kind of energy.
You are blessed! Yes, actually!
We certainly have plenty there, don’t we? Blessing is a whole thing. As is this strange way Jesus seems to use it, which frustratingly remains counterculture, even after two thousand years of near total dominance of the “blessing” space. There are few things more crazy than our reluctance to fully grasp what blessing means to Jesus. At least it is crazy from the standpoint that many of us call ourselves Christians and Jesus taught directly on this. Less crazy when we consider the implications.
I suspect this is the most generative territory for most of us this week — it is hard to imagine something that gives us more energy to write about than this seemingly backward view of blessing. That having good stuff in the here and now doesn’t mean that we are blessed by God. It means that we have already received our reward. Hold up. You’re serious? I don’t get to get in on this heaven thing because I made a decent living or I won the birth lottery? That doesn’t seem fair!
This exposes a second challenge of these beatitudes: we’re still thinking about it as reward, even when we’ve been disabused of that notion. We keep at it, looking for it, pissed we aren’t getting it, fearing we’ve already received it. But that doesn’t seem to be Jesus’s focus at all. It isn’t an all-or-nothing vision of this one, fragile life we live. He’s more into how we’re living with one another, isn’t he? Isn’t that the game — and how we play it?
The blessings of poverty is always relational, isn’t it? Poverty in the US looks different than in other parts of the world, just as most US citizens would be considered wealthy by international standards. We are always comparing ourselves and poverty itself is a comparison engine. The US government defines poverty at the ability to pay for necessary expenses, which for individuals in 2024 was just over $15,000.
Even this, whether it is enough to live on, is dependent on where we live, how we live, and around whom we live. Our access to public transit and increasingly, if we’ve ever been evicted.
We also know from Jesus that our relationship to our wealth is a relational concept.
Wealth as relational
There are few teachings of Jesus more scandalous and ignored by many than his teachings on wealth, and particularly, where wealth comes from.
Jesus wasn’t making anything up when he suggested that wealth was all built on exploitation. That was, more or less, the governing view of wealth of the Hebrew people at the time. This is why tax collectors were so despised — not just because they allied with Rome, but because their personal wealth came from exploiting the people.
Even many of those who are willing to engage with Jesus’s economics in their own lives have a hard time accepting that all wealth is exploitation because they don’t see it all coming from the hands of the many and directly into the hands of the few. But this level of abstraction is a kind of rhetorical convenience. Because many of us are willing to tolerate indirect flows of money, or as is most often the case, laws written and passed and enforced by other people and we’re just over here living our lives.
The same moral hazard from the above poverty discussion certainly applies to our living in the United States as well — that we’re living in a way that is relative to the rest of the world, so our personal accumulation of any wealth makes us rich, even if it is the pittance of a 401k.
But Jesus makes it abundantly clear that these abstractions and defenses are our own attempts to avoid responsibility. They really have nothing to do with the gospel, which involves bringing Good News to the poor. Why? Because they have nothing and we, in Jesus, have something. And not just something, the best thing.
The gospel, too, is relational. It is the antidote to the deprivational character of wealth by promising, not just a cosmic redistribution in the end, but willing distribution in the present, through the people. That we embody the Kin-dom here as in heaven, truly blessed.