Blessings And Woes
BLESSINGS AND WOES
LUKE 6:20-29
Jesus’ message is revolutionary, as it is the direct opposite of the worldly standards we’re used to.
This is not the Sermon on the Mount reported at length by Matthew. Luke is clear in 6:17 that “He came down and stood in the plain.” Some of the same sentiments find expression, but what preacher uses a sermon only once, and surely this address was worth repetition? Hence, too, some slight variety of utterance. The poor and the hungry, for example, find fuller definition in Matthew, but no Eastern listener, in the context of the speech, would misunderstand the briefer words. They are “the poor in spirit” and “the hungry for righteousness.” The Lord was not promising a social and a material millennium, true though it is that his message came to the scorned and rejected of society, those neglected by the remote and aristocratic custodians of a corrupt religion.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have thrown some light on the meaning of the former expression. The “poor in spirit” are the tender-hearted. In one of the scrolls they appear as the opposite of the hard-hearted. There is no blessing in God for those who lack pity and mercy, and are not moved by the spectacle of human sorrow, the pathetic helplessness of little children, the sight of suffering and pain, and the pathos of man’s plight. The imagery of the Bible sometimes loses its cutting edge outside its context of time and place. Palestine was a stricken land, with deep need in its little towns and villages, and the power of the alien heavy in the life of men.
It was also a hot land. It is still a hot land, with water so precious that international strife between Arab and Israeli has frequently loomed over its distribution. Real thirst, when the sun dries the very fibers of the body, parches mouth and tongue, and fills the whole person with a longing for relief, is a commoner experience in Palestine than in more rain-blessed lands. But is it thus that we long for the will of God in our lives, is it with such insistence, passion and desire that we seek for righteousness?
Christ had little comfort for those who thought they had all life could give, or for the worldly popular. “What have I done wrong,” said Socrates once, “that this bad man should speak well of me?”
Notes A “saying” of Jesus, found in 1897, runs, “I found all men drunken and none found I athirst among them.” (See John 7:37: Matthew 5:6.) 6:22: “hate … separate … reproach … cast out your name”—the four stages whereby a Jew was excommunicated from the synagogue. 6:24: the word for “have received” is that used to receipt a bill in the Greek of the period—“They are quit, their reward paid in full.”