Trust and Obey, Week 3: Luke 6, Part 4
In Luke 6, Jesus makes the shocking assertion that the poor are in favorable circumstances, because theirs is the Kingdom of God. The people in the crowd that day listening to his Sermon on the Plain would have been blown away by this. Jesus’ ideas sounded amazing, but in the “too good to be true” kind of way. Many, if not most of them, would have been thinking, “I’m poor, and that is evidence, Jesus, that I am not experiencing the Kingdom of God. You are wrong, Jesus.”
Poverty was seen in that era as a sign of being cursed by God, while wealth was seen as a sign of blessing. If you had wealth, most everyone assumed God was blessing you, that you were in a position of favorable circumstances. That assumption of blessing was not just in the physical sense of enjoying worldly comforts, but also in the spiritual sense that God was the source of the blessing. In other words, if you were enjoying favorable circumstances, it was assumed you were a shoo-in for the Kingdom of God. You must be in God’s favor.
But if you were poor, you were considered to be outside the Kingdom, and likely with very little opportunity to get in. You didn’t have much hope beyond scraping by in life. The prevailing cultural assumption was that your physical circumstances in life showed you what your chances were for entering the kingdom.
Jesus, however, smashes that false idea and says, “You poor, you hungry, you weeping, you’re actually in a better position than the rich! You are the ones who have the hope of the kingdom.”
To show how serious he was about this, he then proclaims some woes. Not “woah,” like a person would say to a horse to slow down. It is W-O-E. A woe is a proclamation of disaster. Or to put it another way, a person who is under a woe is not in a good place. This is the direct opposite position to blessedness. If a blessed person is enjoying favorable circumstances, a person under woe is in disastrous circumstances. To whom does Jesus proclaim, “Woe”? Look at Luke 6, verse 24:
“But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”
Once again Jesus turns things upside-down. He declares the opposite of each of the Beatitudes. Each of the situations we consider to be fortunate, he now declares situations of disaster.
What Jesus points out is the wrong assumption that a person’s physical circumstances revealed what God thinks of them.
Of course Jesus isn’t suggesting that all poor people are automatically good because of their poverty. And he isn’t saying that rich people are automatically bad because of their riches. I’m sure we all know poor and rich people who are miserable, selfish, and difficult. And I’m sure we all know poor and rich people who are loving, caring, and selfless.
Jesus is teaching the need for his followers to see things in the upside-down way that he sees things. In Jesus’ kingdom, there is hope for anyone in difficult circumstances. In Jesus’ kingdom, there is a real danger that the rich will actually miss the kingdom because they are focused on their earthly riches and not relying on God
So we as Jesus’ followers would do well to hold our earth riches and property and possessions very, very lightly. We as Jesus’ followers need to be exceedingly clear not to put our hope in earthly riches and possessions. No, our hope and reliance is in Jesus.
How do we actively place our hope and reliance on Jesus? What do we actually do? We find out in the next post.
Photo by Mihály Köles on Unsplash
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