Our gospel text today is known as the sermon on the plain, it is Luke’s version of Matthew’s sermon on the mount, both of which begin with what we call the beatitudes, Jesus’ teaching about what makes for a blessed or happy life. Luke’s version is shorter, harsher, more challenging than Matthew’s, with its four contrasting blessings and woes.
Jesus is reversing all our normal conceptions of what makes for a happy life – wealth, good food, enjoyment, entertainment, a good reputation, being spoken well of by others. All these are things which societies through the ages have said make for a comfortable, successful, happy and secure life. Christ instead says woe to people who have secured such earthly forms of happiness and pronounces a future reversal for those who have made such earthly good fortune their ultimate goal. The blessed life that Christ pronounces, by contrast, comprises all the things we consider make for a difficult, stressful, unhappy life; the very things that modern governments say they want to reduce or eradicate, with good reason: poverty, hunger, unhappiness and social exclusion and rejection. What on earth do we make of Christ’s challenging, counter-intuitive, provocative statements?
It is perhaps no surprise that the church has struggled with the beatitudes throughout the centuries. Many have dismissed them as impossible, as Jesus speaking only to his first century disciples, or a teaching that is more about the future heavenly age than now. Many have said that Jesus could not possibly have meant this teaching for the communities that would bear his name, what we call the church. The church has not known what to do with this teaching, it was hard to find hymns for today’s worship that focus on the beatitudes.
There is a tension here with other aspects of Jesus’ life that we hear about in the gospels that we are meant to wrestle with. Jesus was a teacher, a Jewish rabbi, who used rabbinic methods of contrast, paradox and hyperbole to shock, to disrupt, to shift his listeners out of their normal ways of thinking. He wanted to break open a new way of understanding God’s kingdom on earth, to deepen and challenge a lot of the inherited religious assumptions of his listeners.
So, is Jesus saying that good food, friends, possessions, material security, laughing, sharing a joke are bad, are cursed? Is he wanting to make us all miserable? Is that the kind of religion Jesus is advocating? At first glance, at a first reading of this text, we might think that is the case, but when we look at Jesus’ life in the gospels, we see him enjoying these things: food, friendship, good clothing, (he wore a special seamless garment). Jesus seems to have enjoyed the odd party and glass of wine, he was even called a drunkard and glutton by the religious people of his day because they wanted someone who led a more severe ascetic kind of life, was more strictly religious like them. Jesus instead was often found enjoying table fellowship around food, he had a sharp sense of humour, and he formed deep friendships with his closest followers.
Throughout the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, there is a strong understanding that God has created a good world, a good creation, that we are meant to enjoy, with gratitude, with thanks. He has made a world that can meet our needs for physical security, for food, shelter and clothing, for beauty, for family, for friendship, for belonging; these are all good gifts of creation, to be celebrated and appreciated and given thanks for.
What Jesus is challenging here is the spiritual danger to humans when we make these earthly things our only goal, when we set our hearts on accumulating wealth and power, with no reference to God or our neighbour, when we put how others think of us above our conscience, above how God sees us. The harshness of Jesus’ words here is intended to act as a corrective to the deep-rooted tendencies of all human civilisations to become corrupted, to become complacent and self-satisfied. Societies like ours easily forget that our wealth is dependent on the gift of creation, that without the creator we have nothing. Trusting in self-sufficient expressions of power, technology, and might are ultimately illusions, and one day this hard truth will have to be faced, when what we lived for is stripped away from us.
The Old Testament reading from Jeremiah is saying the same thing. To trust in the flesh is to trust in human power alone. When we make wealth, health, entertainment, popularity and success our gods, when these alone are our goals, then what Jesus and Jeremiah prophesy starts to happen; our society becomes spiritually and morally exhausted, parched and dried out, like the shrub in the desert. The wealth, success and popularity we are pursuing doesn’t make us happy, they actually become a curse.
Humans need a greater goal, a bigger vision, for true happiness. We need to understand that we were made for God and for right relationship with one another, to live out of gratitude and in harmony and balance with the gift of creation. In a world where money, luxury food, superficial happiness, social media following and popularity are made the false goals of life, Jesus’ reversal starts to make sense. Maybe it is those who don’t pursue success, popularity and security in worldly terms, but first seek the kingdom of God, maybe these are the ones who are truly happy and blessed. These are the ones that have an eternal, never ending source of security and life that outstrips all others. They are the trees whose roots are drinking from the stream, whose leaves stay green, who are not anxious and do not cease to bear fruit.
Jesus was not only a provocative teacher. Christians believe he was uniquely God, come to us as a human being, to rescue and save us, to break the power of our delusions and deceptions, to restore and heal our hearts, that as Jeremiah says are so easily corrupted and led astray. Jesus did not only bring a challenging teaching, he took all of our sins and woes on himself, by dying on the cross as one cursed and trusting God to raise him to new life. And he offers that possibility to each one of us. To each of us is given the possibility to find true happiness and purpose in the life of God, in the teaching of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Christ makes that possible, where human power alone cannot.
So today it is with great joy, appropriately through an actual Joy, (Revd Boyce baptising today) that we are going to baptise Oscar, into this promise of greater happiness and life that Christ died and rose again to give us. We are not baptising him into a life-denying form of religion, we are baptising him into the abundance, goodness, forgiveness, grace and love of God, into that greater happiness that Christ came to bring us.
Amen.
