A level place
Luke 6:20-31
20 Looking at the disciples, Jesus said: “You who are poor are blessed,
for the reign of God is yours. 21 You who hunger now are blessed,
for you’ll be filled.
You who weep now are blessed,
for you’ll laugh. 22 You are blessed when people hate you,
when they scorn and insult you
and spurn your name as evil
because of the Chosen One. 23 On the day they do so,
rejoice and be glad:
your reward will be great in heaven,
for their ancestors treated the prophets the same
way. 24 But woe to you rich,
for you are now receiving your comfort in full. 25 Woe to you who are full,
for you’ll go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you’ll weep in your grief. 26 Woe to you when all speak well of you,
for their ancestors treated the false prophets
in the same way. 27 “To you who hear me, I say: love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. 29 When they slap you on one cheek, turn and give them the other; when they take your coat, let them have your shirt as well. 30 Give to all who beg from you. When someone takes what is yours, don’t demand it back. 31 “Do to others what you would have them do to you.
Priests for Equality. The Inclusive Bible (pp. 2233-2234). Sheed & Ward. Kindle Edition.
Interestingly, the gospel reading today is the opener to Jesus’s sermon—the sermon on the plain—and he starts off by addressing the deepest suffering of the masses around him and flips their world upside down —what an opener!
Jesus delivers a radical message in this section we call the beatitudes,
And it starts in his posture.
Look how this passage starts—it says "Jesus looked up at his disciples.”
He’s preaching from below, not above.
Jesus flips everything upside down in this sermon on the plain—this physical position is just the start.
In the verses just before this in Luke’s gospel, Jesus was on top of a mountain where he appointed the 12 apostles,
and together they all descended the mountain to meet the rest of his disciples (who are already kind of a crowd, )
and a massive crowd who came to him from all over for healing.
Luke says Jesus stood on a level place,
And the power came out from him, and he healed all of them.
And then he looked at his disciples above him, and began to teach them about the path to God.
Blessed are you who are humbled by life—for the realm of God is available to you.
Blessed are you who hunger and crave—for you will know what it is to be satisfied.
Blessed are you with the courage to lament and weep aloud for the pain of this life—for you will find laughter even in your sorrow.
And you are blessed when other people hate you, reject you, insult you—cancel you—because you follow the Way of Love,
Let it be an encouragement to you if this happens,
because this is how people always treat their prophets and truth-speakers!
You may be misunderstood now, but Your reward is far beyond this material realm.
Do you see what’s happening here? He’s taking every experience of pain and bringing it to life, breathing into each pain
the presence of God.
He’s encouraging his disciples not to back away from the intense experiences of life!:
- Christ encourages those in humble conditions to seek the realm of God in ways that we cannot when we believe things are working fine as they are just because they are working for us.
- Christ shows them that when they feel hunger, desires, longings—these are all blessed. These signals from our bodies lead us to life and show us what we love. They’re sacred.
- Jesus tells them not to shy away from their sorrow—to let it out, to really weep and mourn—
because in moving through the depths of grief and pain, we open pathways in our hearts to more love,
we find our way back to love’s joy and laughter, even when we’re hurting.
Jesus reaches down to the bottom, picks up the people who feel like they’re in the very pits of life—written off, outcast, ignored, stigmatized—and brings them right up to this level place with him, as the blessed ones.
Jesus doesn’t stop there in this version of the beatitudes. He’s got some warnings to issue—mostly to those who have found their contentment in their circumstances.
Woe to you, he says.
Be warned, those of you who are comfortable with things as they are—because in the realm of God, all of that is going to change.
Everything is going to change. That’s the only thing constant in life.
You who laugh now, will one day weep
You with full bellies will soon be hungry,
Beware depending so heavily on your own power and wealth that you resist the Holy Spirit’s winds of change—or you might miss the realm of God altogether.
Jesus reaches up to the people on top in society, and pulls them right down to this level place with him.
Here, together, at this level place, Jesus shows us what the realm of God is like.
He levels the playing field, where the people on the bottom don’t have to scramble to lift themselves up anymore,
where people on top don’t have to be afraid of falling and losing rank anymore—
where the whole hierarchy of status and power is turned on its side,
Imagining a world where there is no norm of climbing the ladder to have power over another—
Where the power is shared, there is no ladder at all!
Standing at this level place, we remember that we are—each of us—equal tiny, fleeting organisms in the grand scheme of this expansive universe.
We are each a remarkable expression of the Life that brought us into existence and will continue on after us.
I think each of us is born with the seed of sainthood planted in our hearts, and every time we receive love from another, that seed blossoms into life, and we fulfill our unique expression a little bit more wholly.
Every exchange of love causes us to grow toward God, as it connects us to the life and love of all the saints.
Each of us is 1 of almost 8 billion humans alive on earth today.
We are a part of the 117 billion people who have ever lived!
No two ever the same—expressing the diversity of Christ,
And no one worth more than another—the equity of Christ.
But this equity and diversity isn’t reflected in our world, is it?
Our society functions on a body hierarchy
where some bodies are more valuable than others, and the bodies on top get to direct the culture.
Every physical body falls in a sort of rank in this system, where ethnicity, gender, age, and physical and mental ability all factor into where one falls in importance to our culture.
What if we turned this hierarchy on its side and met Jesus on level ground?
What would change?
What if we challenged our assumptions that the best ideas come from the top? What if we value the countless other perspectives of those who have stood in a different position in this hierarchy?
We are each a small part of the same greater whole—
humans make up one tenth of one percent of life on Earth.
In Western thought, we humans are at the top of a hierarchy of beings on this planet. What if we turned this on its side and humbled ourselves on level ground with the birds and trees, coral and oceans? What would change?
Everyone would have clean water and a safe place to sleep. The global temperature would stabilize and the ice caps would recover their mass. The birds would fill the air with their songs and forests would grow old and wild. Soil would come back to life. Differences in culture, gender, and giftedness would be celebrated—we would sing each others’ songs and tell each others’ stories.
Our lives, our communities, our wisdom would be a part of Earth, not separate from her.
We would join the number of saints who offered their lives to bring this realm of God’s perfect Love to fruition on earth.