Luke 6:17-26
Epiphany 6 / Year C
Jesus said,
Blessed are the
poor.
Blessed are the
hungry.
Blessed are those
who weep.
Blessed are those who are hated and
persecuted on my account.
Woe to those who
are rich.
Woe to those who
are full now.
Woe to those who
are laughing.
Woe to those of
whom all speak well.
Unlike the 10
Commandments, as best as I can tell, no person, group, or organization is lobbying
to have these words put on display in classrooms or courthouses… and for good
reason. If you take them at face value,
they are enormously disconcerting because, if we are honest with ourselves, the
lifestyle most of us enjoy in this world means we fall under the category of
the woes.
Because Jesus’
teachings here makes us uncomfortable, we tend to do one of two things with
them (or perhaps both). Either we tell
ourselves Jesus is not referring to us or we attempt to soften the bluntness of
what he says. To do the first, we might posit
other people have more money than we do, eat better than we do, and are happier
than we are, and we have our fair share of pain and sorrow in life. To do the second we need look no farther than
the Gospel of Matthew. His account has
Jesus saying “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are those who
hunger and thirst for righteousness,” while all together omitting the corresponding
woes.
Yet Luke, which we
read from this morning, weaves God’s purpose and Jesus’ teachings in a way with
which we must wrestle. When the angel
Gabriel tells Mary she will give birth to God’s child, she responds by saying
(in part) this:
God has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
Luke records Jesus’
parable of The Rich man and Lazarus (16:19-31) where a rich man continually ignores
the pleas of a poor, starving beggar, even as he himself lives in comfort and
dines sumptuously every day. Yet in the
end, Jesus says, the two find their stations reversed in the next life.
This parable gives
us an excellent entry point for the teaching we hear this morning. The rich man deserves woe, not because he is
rich, but because he does not ‘see’ Lazarus.
He has made the poor beggar invisible. Those times he is aware of him, no doubt he
dehumanizes him, perhaps even contending his misfortune is a punishment of his
own making. He considers not Lazarus’
pain, only how his mere existence is an inconvenience to him. The rich man no longer sees Lazarus as a
person. If he sees him, he only sees him
only as a thing.
Those who are
blessed, in Jesus’ estimation, are not so because there is something inherently
virtuous in poverty, hunger, sadness, or being hated. They are blessed because he sees them, values
them, understands them, identifies with them, and ultimately loves them.
Today we would say Jesus
has empathy with them. Unlike sympathy,
which involves feeling sorry for the misfortunes another experiences, empathy
involves the ability to do several things:
· To feel what the other
is feeling (like when we blush when we see another person being embarrassed).
· To understand why
another person thinks or feels the way they do (to be able to grasp the world
from their perspective).
· To discern the
emotions driving another person and to respond appropriately.
· To desire to do
what is within one’s power to improve the lot of another person.
· To recognize how
our own words and actions affect people different from us.
The rich man in the
parable, lacking all of these qualities, is completely indifferent. Jesus says woe will come to such a
person.
If you want to know
what the opposite of empathy looks and sounds like, turn on any cable news show
and you will find people screaming to be heard as they labor to discredit and
demonize those who do not think as they do.
It is a 24/7/365 contest to prove they are right and the other is wrong,
never once seeking to learn what makes the other person tick. Woe to us when we saturate ourselves deeply
into this worldview of Me & Mine vs. Them & Theirs.
The Westminster
Confession is a doctrine of faith drawn up by an English assembly in 1646. One section addresses God’s Impassibility,
the belief God’s essential nature and being cannot be altered or influenced by,
among other things, emotions. In the
language of the confession, God is “without parts or passions.”
This implies God is
wholly unlike us; not given to fluctuation or feeling. Given this, why do we even bother to come
here to worship, to pray, to pour out our hearts? Why?
Because Jesus demonstrates God sees us.
Jesus reminds us God is empathetic, able to be as we are, able to join
our place and state, able to see things from our perspective, and able and
willing to respond.
We seek to be
empathetic because God empathizes with us.
We seek to see others for who they are, as they are, because God sees us
for who we are, as we are. God looks
upon us and blesses us, therefore we are called to look upon others and be a
blessing unto them.
