Blessed

 The words we’re hearing today in our Gospel reading are words that sound vaguely familiar, but like they’re coming from the “wrong guy”. I’ve preached these sentiments many times before, and I quote them at nearly every funeral I preside over. You all have doubtless heard these words many times over, too, and heavily quoted in the public sphere for all kinds of reasons, good, bad, and otherwise. But most of us aren’t used to hearing these words coming out of Luke’s pen. Instead we prefer to hear these words as adapted by his near predecessor Matthew. 

First, you get some background information on biblical scholarship and criticism, courtesy of your nerdy pastor who needs to fully utilize that master’s degree, because it was very expensive. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what we call “the synoptic Gospels”, literally meaning that you can “look at them together”, and you’ll see giant chunks of words written exactly the same. We’re pretty sure that Mark, the shortest and hastiest of the four Gospels, was written first, likely immediately following Rome’s siege of Jerusalem in the year 66 CE. Since Matthew and Luke share so much content with Mark, but slow down and go into detail Mark couldn’t be bothered with, we believe Matthew and Luke’s Gospels were penned about ten to fifteen years after Mark’s Gospel. We also believe pretty strongly that Luke and Matthew each had a copy of Mark’s Gospel right in front of them that they directly copied from in their accounts of Jesus’ life. In today’s sensibilities, that sounds like a lazy case of plagiarism. Mark was that straight A teacher’s pet that finished the homework early. Matthew and Luke realized to their horror, while sitting around and playing video games, that the Big Paper was due the next day and they hadn’t started it yet. While sitting behind Mark in class, they casually peered over his shoulder and wrote down his answers as their own. Then they added a few things here and there, and turned in their work, only to get some major side-eye from their professor. But, in antiquity, using work that was already out there to help your own wasn’t considered offensive. If anything, this would have been understood as a tremendous implicit compliment to Mark. Way to go, nerd boy, you getting those Jesus stories out there first makes it easier for all of us to tell the Good News.

But Mark didn’t have these words anywhere in his Gospel. Nor did John, for that matter. Only Matthew and Luke did. When we look at a text that Matthew and Luke have in common that we don’t find in Mark, we work with another long-held assumption that Matthew and Luke had an additional, unnamed source sitting in front of them while they were both writing. But, no one has ever found any form of this source, and we don’t know that we ever will. In the meantime, our German friends started calling this presumed source Quelle, which just means “source”. Gotta love that logic. And since not all of us in America have an easy time pronouncing a word like Quelle, we’ve nicknamed this presumed source Q.

So Matthew saw some version of these words attributed to Jesus in front of him, in Q. And Matthew was a wordsmith. With a slight flair for drama. And he had a predominantly Jewish audience, and he had a vested interest in helping them see Jesus as the new Moses, with these teachings feeling like a direct response to the Law of Moses, first received on Mount Sinai. So as he authored his version of these teachings, he put Jesus and his disciples up on a mountain, and had Jesus begin a three chapter long discourse with these words, and he made them majestic and beautiful: blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

But then, only a few years after Matthew, Luke decided to pen his own account of the Good News, with a different audience and a different agenda. Luke’s audience was predominantly non-Jewish, and he had immense interest in putting the stories of Jesus forward as solidarity with the poor, the disabled, the sick, and women. So he put the same word in Jesus’ mouth that Matthew did, makarios, which we translate as “blessed”, that to Luke and Matthew leaned more in the direction of “fortunate, gifted, privileged.” He took out the symbolism and poetry. And he took away the mountain. Thus, a lot of biblical scholars call these words from Luke the “sermon on the plain”, in contrast with Matthew’s “sermon on the mount.” In Luke’s account, Jesus isn’t high above, he’s at eye level with you, face to face. And he cuts straight to a point he wants you to hear: blessed are the poor. Gifted are the poor. Privileged are the poor. The kingdom is theirs. Blessed are you who are hungry, or weeping now. You’re gifted. You’re the ones with the real privilege. You’ll be fed, your tears will be wiped away, and you’ll be cared for.

And then, because Luke really wanted to drive home his point, he added a section that Matthew didn’t: woes. Condemnation and doom. Woe to the rich. Woe to the ones with the full stomachs. And woe to anyone laughing right now.

Oh boy. It’s not hard to understand why so many people, including myself, prefer Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount to Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Matthew leaves me feeling empowered, and inspired. Because he uses the words “poor” and “hungry” as symbols of spiritual health rather than in the literal sense, I can much more easily imagine that Jesus would call me blessed, with my pretty house with a full fridge and 2 cars in the garage. I want the right things for others, so that’s enough, right? Right???

Luke makes me feel very unsettled by comparison. He makes me feel much more conscious of my life choices and privilege. He leaves me feeling like, no matter how much compassion I have for the poor and the hungry, it hasn’t been enough. But there’s good news here, I promise, because Luke gives us all the information we need to figure out what would be enough. In Luke, I hear that it’s not the way of Christ to stand on a mountain, peering at the hungry, poor folks way down below through my binoculars. It’s not enough to casually agree that they’re suffering, while staying a hundred yards away from their pain, behind my white picket fence. What will redeem me is to see my neighbor, the one who doesn’t have enough money to pay her rent this month and might get evicted, the one whose food stamps just got cut, the one whose Medicaid is in jeopardy, the one who has no idea where his next meal will come from, to get on eye level with my neighbor, right in the plain, face to face, and see that if my luck changed just a little, she’d be me. And then go fight for her welfare as if her family were mine.

No matter which version of the Beatitudes you prefer, the heart of Jesus is exactly the same–we’ve been looking at the wrong people as makarios, as the blessed ones. And Jesus’ message is as relevant now as it’s ever been. In a society rapidly whittling away at its own safety net, Jesus urges us to see nothing will catch us when we fall. And in a world where one politician used the word “parasite” to describe the poor, Jesus urges us to see that it’s not asking for help that makes you condemnable, it’s refusing to offer it. We owe eye to eye understanding, and true solidarity, to our most vulnerable neighbors, and we have a spiritual duty to stand up to all systems that would allow them to stay cold and hungry.

May it be so.

Amen.