All tried to touch him.  O, to touch Jesus!  I suppose a number of them did.  We’re told a lot about Jesus touching others, but we don’t hear as much about those who touch Jesus.  There is something worth thinking about, in that.  Luke tells us the crowds are gathering to hear Jesus, “to hear him and to be healed” (6:18).  Is this cause and effect, or are these separate things?  To hear Jesus, to truly hear what he is truly saying, is to be truly healed.

What Luke writes can be read another way.  There were those who came to hear.  There were those who came to be healed of their diseases.  Some who heard were healed, and maybe some who were healed also heard.  Beloved, there was a time when people could see Jesus, stand right next to him, see his face, hear his own voice, and, yes, even touch him.  Seeing Jesus wasn’t enough to germinate the seed of faith.  Touching him wasn’t enough.  We do not now see or touch Jesus, though he touches us, right here, by faith.  Many of the people who saw Jesus, even those who touched him, did not come to faith.  Faith did not happen through seeing or touching, not even through the healing that came to those who touched him.  Faith comes through hearing, hearing by the Spirit.  Flesh and blood don’t reveal the truth to us; the Spirit reveals the truth.  Pray for revelation, beloved.

What Jesus says that day sounds very similar to what we hear in Matthew’s account.  The traditional church name for these words are the Beatitudes, from the Latin word for blessed.  Here, our translation and others say happy.  Happy, blessed—which is it?  The word Luke uses can mean either; at heart, the word means especially favored.   Especially favored are the poor; especially favored are the hungry; especially favored are those who weep, now.  When you’re driving in Houston and you come up to an intersection on one of the frontage roads, and there’s that guy with his cardboard sign, a shambles, are you really going to say to the person in the car with you, “That man is especially favored”?

Our lives are quite insulated, in these times.  None of us here are one step away from hunger or poverty.  A crop failure is not catastrophic for us.  Losing a home to a fire (or a flood) is a heavy sorrow, but we have bank accounts and insurance.  We have our jobs.  These are the blessings.  Being poor or hungry, weeping from deprivation, these are no blessings.

Jesus adds one more layer to what he has said.  In addition to the poor and the hungry being especially favored, so also are those who are hated and rejected because of Jesus (6:22).  I can’t say that I have been persecuted because of my faith, but being known to be a Christian was not an advantage to me in the academic world.  We live in times when, increasingly, what is expected of people known to be Christians is that they either toe the contemporary cultural-political line or they keep quiet.  That pressure will continue to increase.  The way to success, then, seems clear: toe the line, speak as the world speaks, or keep quiet.

Blessed are the failures.  Blessed are the losers.  How?  How so?  Your reward will be great in heaven (6:23).  Jesus tells us elsewhere to store up for ourselves treasure in heaven, not here on earth (Mt 6:20).  Have you spent your life storing up treasures in heaven, or accumulating treasure on earth?  Get; get more; have, do, enjoy.  I hear that.  That message is all around me, out there.  The getting isn’t treasure, isn’t money: walking around in your vault like Scrooge McDuck.  The getting is things, purchases.  One of the big contributors to the economic collapse we call the Great Depression was easy credit.  So far as that goes, with my limited understanding of the housing crash ten years ago, and the economic woes that came out of that, one of the big factors in that disaster was also easy credit: people buying homes far beyond their actual means, their actual means to repay.  How long can any of us live on credit before the third notice comes?  Because we get two notices, right?  My uncle, the Buddhist, went bankrupt several times.  Overcoming desire was not so easy.

Store up for yourselves treasure in heaven.  Do not look for an earthly reward.  The poor and the hungry—who are they?  My hunch is that Jesus means these groups figuratively and literally.  Literally, in poverty and hunger, there is a special opportunity to become specially attuned to God: the true, ultimate, and only source of all blessings.  “Give us this day our daily bread” sounds and feels different when you’re actually facing a lack of food, what gets called food insecurity, now.  These people have, by the Spirit, a way in to a much closer relationship with God.  But they can also, easily, reject God and place their faith in what the world tells them: you are a victim of an unjust society.  Don’t look to God!  Puh-leeze!  Look to Government.  We shall supply all your need.  The world shall supply all your need.  This is alluring not for the poor only.  Consider how many live to get, live to get what the world offers.  Jesus lived among us to give.

We remember these words of Jesus: woe to the rich, woe to those who are full; woe to those who laugh now, to those who are praised and adored, now (6:24-26).  Is it a sin to be rich?  Becoming wealthy is a great mystery to many people.  Mystery breeds resentment; perceived lack breeds resentment.  Why should he have so much and I so little?!  Why should she be having all the fun?  Nothing in Scripture says it is a sin to be rich, to have money, to be wealthy and comfortable.  Those who have wealth may reflect with some awe upon their success—God-willing, reverent, worshipful awe—but how they became wealthy is not a great mystery to them: many worked hard, are still working hard, making sacrifices, taking risks, trusting a dream more than most of us are comfortable doing.

No, it is not a sin to have wealth.  Sin comes when we forget the true, ultimate source of the wealth: not us, God.  God’s plans, God’s way.  If the wealth comes to us from God, what does God want?  What does God expect?  If you’re asking those questions, you are on the way of blessing.  If you’ve never thought about it that way before, maybe God is saying that it’s time you did.

If you find yourself richly rewarded here on earth, while you enjoy such blessing tremble, too, and pray for particular guidance.  Sin comes when the focus shifts from treasures in heaven to the treasure in our hands here on earth.  Jesus says to the rich young man, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mk 10:21).  Give up all you had relied upon, taken pride in, all you had staked your future on: get rid of it, for me, in favor of me—there’s true treasure.  Jesus is saying your true and only treasure is him.  Pastor and biblical scholar William Barclay interprets Jesus this way: “What Jesus is saying is this: ‘If you set your heart and bend your whole energies to obtain the things which the world values, you will get them—but that is all you will ever get.’”[1]

Hold out for the joys of heaven.  When we focus our heart and energies upon that joy, we realize our spiritual poverty—and the Spirit shows us the way to spiritual wealth.  When we focus our heart and all our energies on heaven, eternal life with our eternal God, we become hungry, we hunger, we desire that life more and more; the Spirit speaks to us of fulfillment and provides tastes of that fulfillment all along the way—as when we eat the bread and drink the juice offered from this table, offered from the hands, the heart of Christ himself—he touches us!

When we look at all the world offers and then, in the Spirit, consider all that God offers, we are likely to weep, spiritually, if not with physical tears—though there are those, too!  We also sorrow because we see all that we used to desire, to value, for what it is—nothing, empty, emptiness.  We had been pursuing emptiness with devoted hearts and determined wills, convinced that emptiness would fulfill us.  Nothing crazy here, doctor!  Ecclesiastes calls it vanity; the word might also be translated wasted breath.  Wasted spirit; wasted life.  Get, have, enjoy.  And we are smothered with our things, and we suffer lifestyle diseases that devour our bodies from the inside; we sink in a sea of consumer debt, and inflation outpaces income.  What are we working for?  What are we living for?

Only, the Spirit speaks to us by many ways, to say to us, What has never been the right question.  Who.  Who are you working for?  Who are you living for?  Where is God, on your list of top priorities?  Is God on your list of top priorities?

When we put God at the top of the list, the world starts changing, which is to say we change.  Christians aren’t so popular in our times—I’m not sure true Christians ever have been.  Firm Christians are more and more reviled and rejected: so it will continue for the foreseeable future.  Are you ready?  Jesus says we are specially favored when the world speaks ill of us—I suppose because our choices and our lives are speaking, in such a way that the world can hear.  The world does not like what it hears.  We are supposed to keep quiet.  Jesus cautions us: beware when the world is speaking well of you, for they said the “same things about the false prophets” (6:26).  Scripture tells us about the false prophets.  Their message was: “No cause for concern!  No need to change!  No need to be any more faithful and obedient than you are right now.  What you are doing is good, and what you’re desiring is fine—blessed!  Don’t listen to the hard things those other prophets are saying!  Listen to the easy things I am saying.”  The message of the false prophets was a message of cheap grace, grace that had no cost.  Easy credit.  It sounded like comfort.  It sounded like compassion.  False prophets speak what sound like godly words, words in godly garb, words the world teaches us to desire.

Paul warns us against the powers of the air (Eph 2:2), and we think, What could that mean?, or, Oh! What a quaint, primitive view!  Consider the power of the airwaves.  What message gets broadcast?  Success is prestige, power, big, more, fast—a big house, cars, trucks, boats, a big TV, a big fridge (or two), full; success is health; that is, a fit body: toned, smooth, no flab, no sag; a perfect face, a beautiful body, desirable; success is to be adored, a celebrity; success is vacations, lots of disposable income; success can involve hard work (though it’s more successful if someone else does that for you); success is play, being able to play.  A heaven on earth.  The power of the air-waves.

What does Scripture speak of as success?  I’d like to take you to a Catholic church for this, or show you Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, but meantime, engage your imaginations: Scripture shows us success—Jesus, on the cross, nailed to it, bleeding, dying, with no possessions, practically naked, rejected, loathed.  No beauty, that we should desire him.  Scary.  Undesirable.  Makes me want to run away and surround myself with things, fill myself with stuff.

We live in a world that tells us to work hard and play hard: just do it.  Let us rather worship hard.  Let work be worship.  Let play be worship.  The end comes, beloved.  It isn’t death that is the saddest thing of all.  It isn’t living without many things.  It isn’t knowing food insecurity.  It isn’t sorrow.  It isn’t long years of sickness, whether in body or in mind.  The saddest thing of all, sisters and brothers, is not to have lived for Jesus.

I know people—you know people—who live very comfortable lives, who enjoy an abundance of good things.  And there is no Bible in their homes, no prayer, no church attendance, no thanks to God, no thought of God.  All their thoughts are upon this world: work, projects, plans, getting, having, doing.  They are not evil, not remarkably wicked.  They are lost.  They are dead to God.  They seek their reward here.  The reward they obtain here is all the reward they shall ever have.  Is it worth it?  I wonder if they wonder.  Is it worth it?  What would you say to them?

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

                [1] William Barclay, Gospel of Luke.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975.  76.