In the first installment of this series I mentioned that the Sermon takes place in the context of the miraculous. Jesus has gathered a large crowd, no doubt many of them troubled and needy in various ways, and Luke tells us that he healed many, for "power went out from him." We can only imagine what that must have been like, but it reminds me of another story: when the woman with a 12-year bleeding disorder presses through the crowd surrounding Jesus and simply touched his cloak and is healed. [Mark 5:25-34]
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?"
The woman answers, trembling, that it was her. And Jesus responds:
"Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering."
Now we see one potential parallel between these two Jesus stories. The woman who sought to touch Jesus' garment and the crowds surrounding Jesus in the Luke passage both received healing when power goes out from Jesus. Only in the case of the woman we have a single isolated incident, and in the case of the crowds we have, apparently, many.
My point is to emphasize that as Jesus' sermon begins with these miraculous events having just happened, and it is in this context that he opens his sermon with several startling declarations.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.
A few things worth noting. First, the people to whom Jesus is speaking are, many of them, the poor, the hungry, and the weeping. We see this phenomenon time and again. The people who come to Jesus are the needy ones.
Second, Jesus' great theme throughout his early ministry is the presence of, the availability of, the kingdom of God. This is his great overarching message, and here in the Sermon on the Level Place he gets right to it. I am not going to detour into an explanation of this concept here, but suffice to say that God's reign, God's Lordship, is available, Jesus says, to the poor. Not only available to them, but it "belongs" to them. And Jesus follows by saying, in essence, that when God reigns, the hungry are satisfied and weeping turns to laughter.
Needless to say, but the poor, the hungry, and the weeping are not normally considered blessed, and they might even scoff at such language under normal circumstances, but they have just seen, time and again, power go out from Jesus and heal many of their number. Jesus is now explaining how that could possibly be. As he says often in other settings, "The kingdom of God is among you."
So I just want to emphasize that the kingdom of God is sort of a controlling idea, the key to explaining what has happened, and the key to understanding what Jesus will now teach in the Sermon. We do not understand Jesus at all if we do not understand this idea, this thing, the kingdom of God.
A final point. We should not spiritualize these "blessed are" statements in order to explain them away or make them less shocking. Jesus doesn't say "blessed are those who are poor in spirit," as he does in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount. He does not, here in this context, speak of hunger for righteousness or mourning over sin. All we have here are these three simple descriptors: poor, hungry, weeping.
There is much more to be said than this, but not less: Jesus has come for the troubled, the needy, the wanting, the hurting, the wounded, the starving, the broken, the sad. Many chapters of the four Gospels seem to make this point emphatically. This is a fundamental point that we should always remember, and when we speak about Jesus to others, we should not forget to mention. This, in fact, is a very good place to start.
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