Woe to the Rich. Woe to Those who are Laughing.

 Luke 6:20-31  February 16, 2025

 

What we’re hearing today

is called the Beatitudes or blessings.

It’s part of a larger sermon.

The sermon is only in the Gospels

of Matthew and Luke.

 

It’s called the Sermon on the mount in Matthew

because Jesus stands on a hill to give it.

And this one in Luke is called the sermon on the Plain,

or the sermon on a level place.

Which I think is more than just a statement

of where Jesus was standing when he delivered it.

I think Luke saw this sermon to be a leveling ground.

 

Luke’s gospel has that tendency right from

Mary’s Magnificat at the beginning  and on,

to level out society. To raise up

the poor and lowly and tear down the rich and haughty.

 

In Luke’s version of the sermon,

there are these blessings:

Blessed are you who are poor, hungry,  weeping, hated, excluded.

Matthew’s version, we get a softening up

of the blessings. We get “blessed are the poor in spirit”.

Which could and has been understood as a spiritual state.

 

But Luke doesn’t soften Jesus words at all.

Luke wants us to know that Jesus means that

the poor, the economically disadvantaged,

they are the ones particularly who are blessed by God.

 

 And there are  the woes.

Matthew, the accountant, skips the woes.

It’s only Luke who gives us the woes.

Woe to those who are rich.

Woe to those who are full.

Woe to those who are laughing.

 

This part of the Beatitudes always

conjured up in me almost cartoon visions

of kings who happily ate huge meals

while watching starving people 

Jesus in a Crowd
J. Kirk Richards

out their windows.

The cruel obliviousness of royalty before the

French Revolution saying that the

peasants should just eat cake

when there was no food to be had.

 

Or the gilded age in the United States,

where a few fat cat business owners overtly

lived opulent lives while the working class

they exploited to make their wealth,

lived in absolute poverty.

 

I thought those cartoonish scenes were behind us.

I thought that we had become better

That this was a thing safely in the past.

In crueler and more ignorant times.

if not in practice, at least in theory.

 

Even in the 1980’s and 90’s, the decades,

marked by selfishness and excess,

people still had to at least pay lip service

to caring for the poor to get anywhere in

politics or leadership.

  

Sure there was still greed, but nothing

as blatantly cruel and awful as those visions in the past.

I thought we were progressing

somewhere beyond the celebration

of blatant selfishness and greed.

I feel now I was wrong.

 

Today, the richest man in the history of the world,

whose personal wealth could

actually eradicate hunger in the US.

Has taken up a pet project to cut government spending.

Which is, in itself a good idea. But he’s decided to begin

his cuts with services that the poorest people depend on to survive.

 

In funding for hospitals, medication,

orphanages, senior care, food distribution.

Both abroad and domestically.

And he’s doing it with unbridled cruelty.

Cutting off funds instantly without any warning or ability

for service organizations to prepare.

And our government is letting it happen.

 

He called Lutheran Services and organization, 

that has helped so many for so long, a “money laundering operation”.

 

He even called people in poverty the “parasite class”

in a sarcastic social media post.

 

Woe to the rich. Woe to those who are laughing.

 

Even though this country is lacking in so many ways,

one crowning jewel of the United States,

the richest nation in the world,

was our generosity. We were the largest

giver of aid to starving, war torn, countries.

 

Now we seemed to have lost that jewel.

It’s not just the greed that scares me.

We’ve always had the greed.

It’s the celebration of contempt,

and the hatred of compassion as weakness

that scares me the most.

 

I have to admit it’s difficult for people like us with,

conscious, concern, and compassion

to be optimistic at times like these.

 

But the best place to find optimism

in the face of hopelessness, is in Jesus,

the one who was raised from the dead.

 

Jesus was living in time when the economic

disparity was far worse than we could even imagine now.

The prevailing theology across most all religions,

was that the poor were cursed and the rich were blessed.

And theology and religion was the biggest force

for personal and political choices in the world.

 

What you saw in the world was taken as evidence of

God’s will for us, so why should we fight it?

The rich have been rewarded.

They or their parents, or their parents before them,

did something that pleased God so much

that God has rewarded them.

The opposite goes for the poor.

They, or their parents, or their parents before

them were guilty enough of some unknown

sin to reap God’s punishment.

 

Then, giving money to the poor defied God’s will. 

Of course, this is a simplification

but I’ll stand by this quick summary.

 

Now Judaism, with its many writings

that honored the poor, that showed

God having mercy for the poor,

and that said helping the poor was a good thing in God’s eyes,

stood squarely against this prevailing understanding.

 

BUT you can still see the theological

wrangling over wealth and poverty

being fought over and over again in the scriptures.

The book of Job is really THE book that deals

with it head on, and the moral of the story is that

poverty and misery are not curses from God.

 

But in many other places

the Hebrew scriptures this theology

of the rich, wealthy, victors being blessed

and the poor and defeated being cursed

comes roaring back time and time again.

 

It is a sentiment that is stubborn,

and humanity seems unwilling to shake it

no matter what God keeps telling us.

 

And then we come to Jesus.

And in the relatively little preaching we have from him

in the scriptures, he says this kind of stuff:

Blessed are the poor, the hungry,

the weeping, the hated, the excluded.

 

And over the years, since then, especially in the last

100 years or so, I believe led in many ways by Jesus

and Christian ethics, the prevailing understanding

is that poverty is not a curse from God on individuals,

it’s not even mostly a personal problem

of laziness or bad planning or ignorance.

  

Poverty is a systemic, economic problem.

That has mainly been caused by bureaucracies that

basically benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping.

Woe to the rich, the full, the laughing.

 

So you think that the subject would be closed.

Especially in a country that espouses

Christian values so highly. But no.

Many of the biggest and loudest Christian churches

in this country have kind of made a sport

of avoiding Jesus’s words entirely

in place of something else they find more

appealing and easier to digest and live by.

 

The prevailing theology of Christian nationalism—

the Christian churches that quietly or overtly

espouse the prosperity gospel— keep reverting

back to this theology over and over again in our history.

The rich are blessed and the poor are cursed.

 

And society and the media and people

of every ilk – religious or not, love to

praise and fawn over the rich and powerful,

and tend to hate, avoid, and speak ill of the poor.

We do this naturally and easily

 

It is a sentiment that is stubborn,

and humanity seems unwilling to shake it

no matter what God keeps telling us.

 

I promised you optimism and I’m getting there.

  

I have had a theory about the Beatitudes,

And it’s just my personal directorial, editorial take

on the story –no authority in it at all.

 

I like to think that when Jesus got up to preach,

he was going to preach something else.

He was going to tell them all some direction,

maybe lay down some guidance and rules,

which he does later on, and we’ll hear next week.

 

But when he saw all of these poor, hungry,

hated, reviled people looking at him,

with sadness in their eyes, he pivoted.

He knew they needed a word of grace right there.

 

They needed to know they were loved by God.

And not just that they were loved by God.

But that God saw the people who

laughed at their plight, who took from them,

who sought to keep them exploited and

oppressed, God saw the cruelty of others

and God would fix this.

 

It is comforting to know that God’s

judgement is on those who laugh and scoff

at your sorrow and pain.

 

And Jesus knew that the plight of the poor

wouldn’t change without a substantial

change of behavior from the rich.

 

So here’s a little bit of optimism:

I think that even the woes that Jesus

shares in Luke are said out of compassion too.

Those woes aren’t condemnation,

as much as they are an invitation

to a new way of living.

The way that understands that mercy

is worth much more than possessions.

A way of compassion instead of cruelty.

A new way of being where all will be blessed.

where all will be full, where all will be laughing together.

 

And here comes another sliver of optimism.

Maybe the tragedy that is happening now

will wake us up to what is really important.

We, the conscious, concerned, and compassionate,

have become complacent too, haven’t we?

We have taken things for granted.

We have though that someone else

will figure this out without us.

Our country gives so much, they’ll take care of it.

 

And now we have to be part of the solution.

We who have enough –

enough money, food, time and energy,

need to actually work for those who

are poor, and hungry, and tired.

 

Unfortunately, the lessons for the living

sometimes come on the backs of those

who suffer or die.

And we shouldn’t waste their suffering.

  

But the real optimism is this:

We can trust Jesus words.

God will repair this breech.

This chasm between poor and rich.

The one being created now,

and the one that has existed

since the beginning of time

and humanity.

 

This setback that we feel so acutely now

I really feel, is just part of God’s slow,

arduous plan for resurrection.

And we are part of it.

 

As people of faith, we should never

resign ourselves to what is,

or what false idols say it should be.

We need to always keep Christ’s

vision front and center, and we should work

and fight for that vision

of what can be and what should be

and what God’s will is for this world.

 

Despite the signs to the contrary,

We have to trust that God will get us there, 

to a time when the poor are truly blessed.