Trust & Obey, Week 3: Luke 6, Part 3
Jesus knew what life was like for the people in the crowds that followed him, crowds such as the ones we read about Luke 6. He knew what their lives were like because he lived that life for 30 years before he started his ministry. Jesus was from a tiny town of Nazareth, in the region of Galilee, in Northern Israel. He was a working man.
Though tradition identifies him a carpenter, that doesn’t fully convey what Jesus did for work. Jesus was what the Greeks called a “tekton.” A tekton worked with their hands. A builder. A stone mason. Yes, a carpenter, too. He could probably create using any of the materials and techniques that were common in that area. As a tekton, he knew what it meant to work hard, long hours, sweat, be exhausted, and likely not get rich as a result.
Was Jesus’ family poor, were they middle class? We can’t say for sure. The general pattern, though, is that there was a wide gap between the rich and everyone else in society. The peasant class was large. The rich class tiny. Jesus was very likely part of the peasantry.
Jesus’ economic situation is similar to what we see happening in our world today. No longer can we say that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. What is more accurate is that the ultra-rich get even more fabulously wealthy, while the middle class shrinks and the number in poverty grows. Consider this: on November 6, 2025, automotive company Tesla voted to give CEO Elon Musk a compensation package of company stock that could make Musk the first ever $1 trillion CEO. That $1 trillion is entirely dependent on Tesla’s stock performance over the next decade. But it illustrates the point.
When we see the rich getting richer, we can sometimes despair. We can feel it doesn’t seem fair. We can wonder if there should be laws making it impossible for people to accumulate that much wealth. Does any one person really need a billion dollars? Let alone a trillion? If Musk does in fact make $1 trillion, he alone, one person, will be making a salary that is larger than the salary of every single American elementary school teacher combined.
Faced with that disparity, we can think, “It is wrong that one person should be so blessed! That much blessing in one person’s life? Not fair. Not right!”
To that idea of blessing, Jesus says something shocking about who is blessed. Before we hear his shocking statement about who is blessed, what does “blessed” mean? One scholar says “blessed” means this: “pertaining to being happy, with the implication of enjoying favorable circumstances.” (Louw & Nida). Jesus is making a clear identification, therefore, of just who it is that is in favorable circumstances.
Think about the possibility of one person making $1 trillion dollars. Sure seems like favorable circumstances, doesn’t it? Sure seems like that person is blessed. Obviously, it is the rich, the healthy, the powerful, the popular, the gifted, who are enjoying favorable circumstances. Right? That conception of who is blessed is our culture’s prevailing assumption. If we do not feel that we are in favorable circumstances, we generally want to be in favorable circumstances. That is totally normal for just about everyone in the world.
But to that totally normal perspective, Jesus says in Luke 6:20-22, “Blessed are you who are poor…Blessed are you who hunger now…Blessed are you who weep now…Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil.”
Jesus turns the prevailing cultural idea on its head. It is not the rich, but the poor who are in favorable circumstances. It is the hungry. It is the sad. It is those are persecuted and insulted. All of those, Jesus says, are favorable circumstances. Jesus looks around at the crowd that day, and he sees thousands of people just like him, peasants who have struggled all their lives with poverty, hunger, sadness, and persecution. He says, “We are the blessed ones. We are in favorable circumstances.”
Shocking, right? How are the poor in a position of blessedness? How are the hungry and the sad and persecuted enjoying favorable circumstances? It seems as though Jesus is wrong here. In fact it seems that he is obviously wrong.
But he is right. How? We find out in the next post.
Photo by David von Diemar on Unsplash
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