Community Church Sermons
February 11, 2007
The Sixth Sunday of the New Year
Luke 6:17-26
Listen To This Sermon
The Jesus who curses.
It’s probably a good thing that my mother is not around to hear today’s sermon. She’d be very upset just to read the title: The Jesus Who Curses. My mother, who passed away a year ago, was raised a very conservative Baptist and could not even bring herself to accept the idea that Jesus drank wine! It was, she used to say with the sound of absolute certainty in her voice, non-alcoholic wine. I used to shoot back at her a quote from Jesus in Matthew 11:18 where Jesus says that John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking and people thought he had a demon, but Jesus came both eating and drinking and people called him a glutton and a drunk. “What do you make of that, Ma?” I would gloat. And then my mother and I would argue! What great fun that was! And I miss that now that’s she’s gone. But, still, if my mother could not accept the idea that Jesus drank real wine, I’m sure she could not handle the idea that Jesus cursed.
But he did.
There are in the Bible many passages that list certain blessings and then corresponding curses. The blessings are called “beatitudes”, and the curses are called “woes.” You may remember being a kid in Sunday School and learning the beatitudes in Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount – “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted…blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth…etc.” There are eight beatitudes in Matthew 5, and they are some of our most loved and favorite verses in the Bible. We can all find ourselves somewhere in that list of life conditions, and it is a wonderful feeling to hear Jesus tell us we are blessed.
But Matthew is not telling us the whole story.
It is almost as though Matthew doesn’t want to ruin our day in the same way that our childhood Sunday Schools didn’t want to ruin the tender little psyches of us children. Both Matthew and the Church have tried their best to clean up Jesus for us and take away the rough edges that we might find objectionable.
So they gave us this softer version of the Beatitudes - all blessings and no curses – and never told us about the other version. The version just read for us from Luke, chapter 6:
“Blessed
are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God
Blessed
are you hungry people, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed
are you who weep, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people exclude you, insult you, and reject you as evil because of me.”
And then the hammer falls:
“But
woe to you rich people, for you’ve already received your comfort.
Woe
to you who are well fed, for you will go hungry.
Woe
to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.
Woe
to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how your fathers treated
the false prophets.”
No one ever told us about this Jesus – the harsh, cutting, jagged-edged Jesus who wasn’t afraid to bless those the world thinks are cursed, or to curse those the world thinks are blessed.
I was at a meeting a while ago and ran into a minister
friend of mine. “How are you?” I asked.
”I’m blessed!” he replied. Now, I have to admit that I don’t really care
for religious answers to non-religious questions like “How are you?” A
simple “I’m okay, how are you?” would have been fine. After all – when
we ask someone HOW they are, we really don’t want them to TELL us, do we?! It’s
just another way of saying, “Hi!” with no expectation that they are
going to give us details about their hemorrhoid surgery, or share the latest
misery inflicted upon them by their rascal spouse, or a rundown on the
performance of their stock portfolio. And maybe its just me, but when I say “Hi,
how are you?” I’m definitely not inquiring about the religious condition of
their soul.
“I’m blessed!” he said.
Now if I was Jesus in Luke 6, I would respond in a really obnoxious way.
“Blessed? No you’re not!”
“What? I’m not blessed?”
“No, you only think you are.
You’re actually cursed!”
“Cursed? How can you say that, Jesus? I mean look at me – my needs are all met, I’m obviously well-fed, I’m happy, I get along with others and people seem to like me…I’m definitely blessed!”
“No you’re not.”
“Am too!”
“Are not!”
“Am too!”
“Are not!”
And before you know it,
Jesus would be dragged out to Calvary, nailed to a cross and crucified. After
all, it was not the poor people, the hungry people, the grieving people, or
even the excluded people who ended up killing Jesus.
No, it was the supposedly
“blessed” people – the rich people – the well-fed people – the happy people –
the popular, well-spoken-of people who put Jesus to death on the cross.
People who thought they were blessed, but who actually were cursed.
After all, how could anyone be truly blessed by God and then feel righteous by
putting God’s son to death?
Why do you think Jesus slaps
us affluent, well-fed, happy, well-liked and respected people around like this?
Why do you suppose he speaks to us so sharply, and turns the tables on us? We,
the blessed, he says, are cursed. And they, the cursed, he says, are blessed!
Maybe Jesus says these
things to us because our ears have become deaf to our own voices and our own
words.
Have you ever listened to
yourself when you talk about poor people? What do you say? What do you think?
What images come to mind? Do words like “no good”, or “lazy”, or
“irresponsible”, or “welfare baby-factories” or “losers” ever come up? My
experience, as a middle class American, has been that we who are relatively
affluent have all sorts of things to say about poor people – and most of the
things we say are disparaging. Out of our position of “blessedness”, we who are
well-off, well-fed, well-feeling, and well-liked quite often see the poor, the
hungry, the miserable, and the hated people of this world as less than
ourselves.
And we have committed a
very grave sin in the process. We have taken a beautiful word from the Bible
and converted it into something terribly destructive and self-serving. To
people today, to be “blessed” means to be happy and to have received good
fortune. In fact, in some modern versions of the Beatitudes, the word “blessed” is translated as “happy.” But that is not what the word means.
In Jim Forest’s marvelous
little book “The Ladder of the Beatitudes”[1] he tells about a rabbi friend who once said about
the idea that “blessed” means “happy”:
“The biblical translator who uses
such a word should change jobs, maybe write TV comedies with nice happy
endings. The problem is that, if you decide you don't like 'blessed,' there
isn't a single English word that can take its place. You might use a phrase
like 'on the right track' or 'going in the right direction.' Sin, by the way,
means being off the track, missing the target. Being 'blessed' means you aren't
lost -- you're on the path the Creator intends you to be on. But what you
recognize as a blessing may look like an affliction to an outsider. Exchanging
'blessed' for 'happy' trivializes the biblical word. You might as well sum up
the Bible with a slogan like, 'Have a nice day'."
And then Forest goes on
to describe the meaning of the Greek word makarios, which is the word we translate as “blessed”. It simply means “sharing in the life of God.” Or, if I may
turn that around, “God sharing in the life of people.”
There is an old Jewish
story that goes something like this:
The old Rabbi said, "In olden
days there were men who saw the face of God."
"Why don't they anymore?" a young student asked.
"Because, nowadays no one stoops so low," he replied.
Have you ever stooped
that low? Have you ever stooped low enough to see the face of God in the poor,
the hungry, the sad, and rejected? If not, you are missing out on true
“blessedness.” To not see and encounter God among those who need God the most
is to not see the essence of what it means to follow Christ. And that, if you
ask me, would be like living under a curse – apart from the presence of God.
So do we rich, well-fed,
happy and well-liked people have a chance with this harsh, cutting,
jagged-edged Jesus who is not afraid to tell us that blessing has nothing to do
with good fortune?
No. Not a snowball’s
chance in hell! We don’t stand a chance at all! It is harder for people like us
to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle. That’s another one of Jesus’ irritating statements that I just hate to
listen to.
“Well then, who can be saved?” they asked back then. Maybe you’re asking it today.
“People can’t save themselves,” says Jesus. “But with God, all things are possible!”
Do you want to find true blessing?
Pray for grace. Pray for God’s grace to bring you to it. And remember that you
won’t find blessing in affluence, in plenty to eat, in being able to laugh, or
in being well-liked and respected.
You will only find
blessedness among those with whom Jesus walks.
“Blessed are the poor…blessed are the hungry…
blessed are the
sorrowing…blessed are the rejected ones…”
And cursed are those who
think it’s the other way around.