In Good Company
Luke 6:17-26
February 13, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Doley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/yj42PSc15Kc
I asked Maria to read from the Message translation today because for many of us, this is one of those too familiar Bible passages, the kind that we may not really listen to because we have heard it so often before.
Eugene Peterson, who paraphrased the Bible into this updated the language and used some other expressions in many places, but there’s one word that he didn’t change and that’s the word “Blessed”. I kind of wish he had, because that’s a word that might trip us up. It’s a word that Jesus used, a word that Biblical people used, and a word that we use – but we don’t necessarily all mean the same things by it.
“The Greek word for blessed is makarios. In ancient Greek times, makarios referred to the gods. The blessed ones were the gods, beings who lived way up there in some other world. To be blessed, you had to be a god.”
“Makarios took on a second meaning. It referred to the ‘dead’. The blessed ones were humans who were now beyond the cares of earthly life. To be blessed, you had to be dead.”
“Finally, in Greek usage, the word came to refer to the elite, the upper crust of society, the wealthy people. It referred to people whose riches and power put them above the normal cares and worries of the lesser folk. To be blessed, you had to be very rich and powerful.” [1]
If we use that sense of the word blessed,
then we might read verses 20 like this:
You who are poor are like gods,
Or verse 21 like this:
How elite, how powerful are you who are hungry
To my ear, that sounds a bit different, from “blessed are you poor. . . . blessed are you who hunger”
Jesus uses the word within a honor-shame culture. In an honor-shame culture, your honor is everything. Your personal honor is your reputation, your social standing and the public recognition of it. The more honor you have, the more privileges you are entitled to. The opposite of honor is shame. The more shame that is attached to your social standing, the fewer privileges you are entitled to.
Some scholars suggest that this passage should be translated
“How honorable are the poor. How honorable are the hungry. How honorable are those who weep” and “How shameful are the rich, How shameful are the full. How shameful are those who everyone speaks well of.” [2]
We do not live in an honor-shame culture, so we do not have a concept that directly corresponds. The concept of privilege is perhaps the closest that we can come, keeping in mind that it is not quite the same thing. But if we think about honor as privilege, then we understand that some people enjoy certain perks, certain benefits without question because of their social position. That privilege may come with being male or having white skin or with education or with citizenship in a certain country.
And so, one more time, let’s try a new translation -- “how privileged are the poor. How privileged are the hungry. How privileged are those who weep.” And “how underprivileged are the rich, how underprivileged are the full, how underprivileged are the popular.”
It does not make much sense to say that the poor are privileged. Or to suggest that the popular people, the ones who everyone listens to, are somehow under-privileged. To make these claims is to call into question the meaning of the word privilege. By now you may be scratching your head. You may be saying to yourself, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
And that, is exactly how it was for Jesus’ first listeners. Jesus turned established categories on their heads. He completely rejected the established social hierarchy.
There is a large crowd around Jesus here. Within that large crowd, we can identify at least three audiences. The poor are present. The rich are present. And also present are those who would be Jesus’ most faithful followers, those who will suffer for the gospel. If we made a Venn diagram, the three audiences would overlap. The rich are in one circle, the poor in another, but those who will suffer for Jesus’s sake may come from either the poor or the rich.
Jesus manages to talk to everyone at the same time. He heaps honor on those usually considered to be without honor. He heaps shame on those considered to be without shame. Luke includes the detail that Jesus is speaking on a level place. Theologically, this sermon is one of leveling, Jesus upends the systems of privilege and power. He rejects what everyone else accepts as just the way things are.
He says that God understands reality differently. God sees that the poor know their needs, their emptiness and they have room to receive from God. That is their blessing. But the rich tend to be comfortable trusting their own resources and so their wealth isolates them from others, sometimes even from God. And so, as Eugene Peterson says “there’s trouble ahead” for them.
Here, in this room and in this Zoom space, there are probably also three audiences, the poor, the rich and those who want to be Jesus’ most faithful disciples. Most of us are wealthier; some of us are poorer. Or to put it another way, some of us carry more privilege, more honor, in our culture than others. And so, we each need to listen and receive the blessing or warning that Jesus offers us.
But all of us here are part of the third audience. All of us are in that overlapping section in the Venn diagram. I trust that we want to follow Jesus faithfully. To that audience, Jesus directs verses 22-23. In the New Revised Standard translation it reads:
‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.’
As we heard it in The Message version:
“Count yourself blessed every time someone cuts you down or throws you out, every time someone smears or blackens your name to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and that that person is uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—skip like a lamb, if you like!—for even though they don’t like it, I do . . . and all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company; my preachers and witnesses have always been treated like this.
“Know that you are in good company”, Peterson puts it. This is where it gets problematic. We want to be in good company with Jesus.
We know that there are places in the world where it is illegal to be a Christian, where you face serious consequences like being disowned by family or having your business blacklisted, effectively depriving you of a living. We know that some are actually killed for following Jesus, for putting his teachings into practice. That’s persecution.
When retail workers wish you happy holidays and not specifically Merry Christmas, that is not persecution.
When American Christians are encouraged to follow public health practices, to wear masks even when they gather for worship, that is not persecution. When public schools are forbidden from leading students in prayer, to avoid state-sponsored religion, that is not persecution.
We want to be in good company. We want to suffer for the gospel, not too much, mind you, but enough for it to count. And so, there are some who hold up the slightest insult or inconvenience and claim that they are persecuted just as the prophets were. The more that others suggest that isn’t actual persecution, the more put-upon they feel, and that just reinforces the idea that they are truly suffering for Jesus.
American Christians are deeply divided around this kind of question. It comes out, sometimes, in the conversation around persecution, but it really boils down to what it means to stand with Jesus.
Jesus said that the last shall be first. Jesus said to care for the last and the least. Jesus included the outcast, the disabled, the ill, the marginalized, women, children and foreigners. Jesus upended the systems of privilege and power. He subverted the hierarchical categories that everyone accepts as just the way things are.
So, here’s a way to evaluate persecution -- if we are facing pushback for upholding the status quo, then we probably aren’t suffering for the gospel. If we are defamed or rejected because we are clinging to practices that perpetuate the last remaining last and the least remaining the least, then that does not put us in the good company Jesus described. If, however, someone seeks to discredit us because we are standing up against the way things are, against the systems which continue to disempower people of color and women and immigrants, against practices which diminish the self-worth of queer and trans people, against structures which perpetuate injustice generation after generation, then we are in fact in good company with Jesus.
Dom Helder Camara, a Brazilian archbishop famously said “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”
Another South American priest, Segundo Galilea, said, “If you make an option for the poor, if you call in question the wealth of the rich and the power of the mighty, . . if you are on fire for the justice of the kingdom, sooner or later you will pay the price. And the price is persecution.” [3]
A few years ago, there was an episode of This American Life which was focused on children’s logic. One of the stories went like this: A man said that, when his daughter was four, Christmas came along, and she suddenly had lots of questions about Jesus. The dad answered her questions, but his daughter wanted to know more. So they read a children’s Bible together. He summed up Jesus’ message on her level by saying: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love others the way you want to be loved, and treat others the way you want to be treated.
One day, a large crucifix outside of a church caught the girl’s attention. He realized that he had avoided telling her the Easter story, so the dad told his little girl that some people found Jesus’ message too troublesome. They decided that he must stop, so they killed him.
Some weeks later his daughter was out of school for Martin Luther King Day. They went out to lunch and there was a picture of Dr. King at their table. She asked, “Who’s that?” The dad wasn’t sure how to explain the Civil Rights Movement to a four-year-old, so he decided to simply say that Dr. King was a preacher. “Oh, for Jesus?!”, she said. He replied, “Yes.”
He told his daughter that the reason she didn’t have school that day was because it was a day to remember Dr. King. He had an important message: That we should treat everyone the same no matter what they look like. The four year-old said, “That’s the same thing Jesus said. Did people kill Dr. King too?” [4]
Beloved ones, if we are on fire for the justice of the kingdom, sooner or later we will pay the price. That is our high calling and Jesus says ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice on that day and leap for joy . . .”
May we be found in that good company. Amen.
[1] http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/luke6x17.htm
[2] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 250
[3] Megan McKenna, Blessings and Woes: The Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), p. 94.
[4] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/605/transcript