We’re all in this together
Epiphany 6C | Luke 6:17-26
I took German in high school, which was forever ago, but I still remember that first year vocab list had Gesundheit on it. Besides being one of the German words most familiar to me, I became very attached to its wish. Gesundheit means “good health” and you say it when someone sneezes. Achoo! Gesundheit. Good health! It relates to the moment and feels so generous. Who doesn’t want someone to wish for their good health?
We in the US inherited a tradition of saying something else. Bless you. Which is short for God bless you. And we have a righteous indignation that at least one person in the room must acknowledge when a sneeze has taken place and request God’s blessing be upon them. It is a rule. And if it is you who sneezed? And nobody says it? That is unconscionable. They all must hate you. There is a great scene in the movie Dogma about this: what is the angel of vengeance supposed to do when he sneezes and nobody says “God bless you”?
Our tradition of blessing a sneezer is more superstitious than it is generous. Whatever demon is inside you, spiking that fever and making your nose leak like a sieve needs to stay away from me because you’re in God’s hands now, my friend!
#blessed
“God bless you” isn’t our only common reference to blessing, however. It is just our most ingrained. Another is more closely aligned with the social media era. We might simply call it #blessed.
And like the fear of the demons living inside the bodies of our neighbors, the notion of #blessed is that, thankfully, they are not so possessed by demons. We are possessors, instead, of the blessing of God that we so generously wish upon other people. But, you know, not too much. If other people were blessed the same as us, well then, we might not actually feel blessed. And you don’t want me to be sad.
#blessed is the modern mutation of blessing as durable good or romantic gain or financial windfall that befits our being such a good person that God just wants us to have stuff. We might consider this along prosperity gospel lines, of course, but also more traditional protestant beliefs about hard work and personal faith.
Notice, too, how #blessed feels so dependent, not just on the goodness of God as manifester of one’s individual gain, but relative gain. That blessing cannot truly be a common experience because it is dependent on the existential persistence of other people’s suffering. In this way, one’s own sense of blessing becomes entirely dependent on someone else’s woes.
I will note that such a response is a particularly white or upper-middle class phenomenon, because those who are used to experiencing a difficult life aren’t tied to the idea of seeing blessing along such binary lines, attaching it to some just reward. For many, blessing within poverty is no paradox.
The problem with blessing as reward
There is tradition in the church for seeing blessing in these ways, but like a good many things, relying on it as the tradition is deeply problematic. The most obvious example of this comes from the Hebrew Scripture with the story of Job. Its titular character is cursed throughout in a rhetorical debate between God and Satan; then, in the end, when Job stays true, God rewards Job with abundant blessings — which amount to wealth and possession, including livestock and children, by the way.
Greek scripture takes a different approach to blessing — particularly through the nature of possessions and wealth as corrupting things. A tradition our evangelists learned from Hebrew Scripture outside of Job, by the way. Wealth and possessions are not present signs of our inherent goodness, given to us by God, but are the ill-gotten gains of exploiting other people.
Throughout the whole life of the church, the bulk of tradition has rejected the vision of blessing as reward, but it remains an opportunity for personal growth and alignment to systems of wealth creation: think televangelists and prosperity preachers who need your generous donations to buy them another private jet.
Jesus Blessings
Always missing from these conversations is how Jesus talks about blessing. Which is both convenient and theological malpractice for Christians.
Jesus reveals the blessing of God in acts of healing and teaching. Even before he speaks of blessing, we witness that the blessing emanating from Jesus is not material wealth given by God, but the healing of people’s sickness, the exorcizing of demons, and remission of sins. In a real sense, we can see that blessing is related to peacemaking, which is a central tenet of Jesus’s teaching to the disciples. The peace he speaks of, Shalom, is not only the absence of violence, but the presence of peace, justice, health, and wholeness. We are to be a people who make wholeness happen.
Then Jesus starts speaking of blessing in a way that is directly opposite to the vision of blessing-as-reward model. He offers an image for blessing that would never lead an influencer to snap a picture of themselves with an attached #blessed sticker.
“Blessed are you who are poor…hungry now…weep now…when people hate you…”
These don’t feel like blessings, rewards — they’re not supposed to! That’s not how it works! Jesus isn’t saying these are blessings — he’s saying you are blessed by God in light of these things. That you will be taken care of, fed, comforted, and protected — that the world is your inheritance. You are the Lord’s possession.
There is no merit, no deserving, no reward or prize inside the cereal box.
We are all #blessed. But our world and its priorities get in the way.
From Woe to Blessed
These Beatitudes in Luke’s telling of the Sermon on the Plain are similar to the more famous ones in Matthew’s gospel, but they aren’t the same. Here, Jesus’s blessings are accompanied by woes. Woes that would seem like condemnation if we were still thinking about blessing as reward, which would make woes into punishments, ostensibly for being bad people.
Again, that’s not how Jesus rolls.
If wealth is problematic (and not a “blessing) then being wealthy is problematic in the Kin-dom. You know how Jesus says it is hard to serve two masters? This is why! It is hard to be blessed by God, acknowledge that everyone else is too, and then exploit them for personal wealth. That is not Kin-dom behavior. That is empire behavior.
And that means we are cursed with woe, not by God, but ourselves and our neighbors. If you are suffering, it is because somebody has either chosen personal wealth or protected their power. And if you are doing great in this world, what then could God offer that is any better? You’re winning the race here already! Way to go! Now guess what you’ve left the world? Rising temperatures and more devastating storms.
The Kin-dom View
If we step back from this swirling conversation about blessing and woe, we can get a little respite from the incessant question we all keep asking each other “but what can I do?” or “What then am I supposed to do?” so that we can see that Jesus’s purpose isn’t merely to create a theology of blessing for 21st Century Christians to mull over, right? We get a vision for what the Kin-dom is — that Jubilee-infused transformation of the world that involves us sharing and creating and blessing and enjoying a common life together in our shared cosmos.
He sets up the picture for us so we can see that blessing, too, is about relationship and commitment to a more caring world. That selfishness and wealth accumulation lead to woe and prevent common flourishing here. That the priorities of the world we live in are antithetical to the dream God has for creation — and are quite literally anti-Christ in their selfishness, obsession with power and control, unwillingness to share in grace and hope. That people suffer here because of this and those who benefit from it will suffer, too — there is no escape from it. We don’t get to ruin the planet and escape to Mars.
Jesus’s vision is for life. Here. With one another. In a way we will all be blessed. Because, with Christ, we are a blessing to one another already. And in God’s grace, there is an endless supply.