Between what we last heard from Luke and what we just heard, Jesus has performed additional healings, called additional disciples, and established that he is the Lord of the Sabbath: all who would know and enjoy God’s rest can find and have it, in Jesus.  In summation, more healing, more disciples, and more discovering the greater depths, the greater reality of what God offers, who God offers us in Jesus Christ, God offering Himself.  What do people most want?  They want peace, so make peace their god.  They want love, so make love their god.  They want to play, relax, and have fun.  People fashion gods fit for what they want.  Different people want different things, certainly.

When people are hurting, lonely, dejected, they’ll turn to almost anything, anyone, who seems to hold out something to fill the void.  People go back, time and again, to what they’ve found to dump into the empty places in their hearts, which are the empty places in their souls.  I still have them, and so do you.  Start feeling stressed and depressed, there they are.  To what do people turn?  Food.  Drink.  Obesity is on the rise, worldwide; so, too, diabetes.  Manic euphoria.  If you can believe it, internet porn is a multibillion-dollar industry.  People turn to alternate realities—stories that sell themselves as explanations for their misery, stories to justify what people choose to medicate their misery.  Karl Marx, disaffected from the Judaism that was his heritage, much as Sigmund Freud, was convinced that the strongest dope around was the dope of religion, specifically Christianity.  The smart set remain convinced that Christians are dopes and dope peddlers.  What’s theirs?

Luke tells us many come to Jesus for help.  They might not know how he does it or why, but they have heard that Jesus can help.  That’s enough—all they want, all they need.  They want him to cure them of their cough, their bleeding, their aches; they want him to heal their blind eyes, their deaf ears, their stutter, their limp.  Lord, take away this arthritis.  Jesus, make the diabetes go away.  Jesus God, make the cancer go away.  Oh, we hear that.  We understand.

Scripture records that Jesus heals many.  How glad they were!  They got the healing they wanted, but did they get the healing they needed?  Luke adds that “Those troubled by impure spirits were cured” (6:18).  “Impure spirits”—perhaps those demons Scripture speaks of and that we wonder about.  Apart from Jesus Christ, everyone has an impure spirit.  What’s the opposite?  A pure spirit, I would think.  Jesus purifies.  Is that what people want?  Healing, yes!  Love, yes!  Recognition and approval, yes.  Indulgence.  But purity, holiness, godliness?  Suddenly, we’re no longer talking about the field of medicine; suddenly, we’re talking about something that goes beyond ethics, even: beyond good and bad, nice and mean.  Suddenly, we’re talking about the Spirit, God, ultimate things.

The people know there is power with Jesus.  They were all trying “to touch him, because power was coming from him and healing them all” (6:19).  They know this is power for healing, but they don’t seem to have grasped that this is, first of all and ultimately, power from God, the power of God.  In Jesus, people come into contact with God.  God wants more than contact; He wants relationship!  What can be seen and experienced happens in order to point us to what we do not, will not, cannot see with our eyes; what we see and experience point us to what can be understood only inwardly, only by grace, through faith: God is with us.  God is among us.  God is for us.  God is speaking.

Will they listen?

Luke tells us something a little unexpected.  He writes that, “Looking at his disciples, [Jesus] said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.  Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.  Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh” (6:20-21).  Jesus is speaking directly to his disciples, those who have chosen him, chosen to follow.  But who has chosen?  Whom God chooses choose Him.  God is with us.  God is among us.  God is for us.  God is speaking.  Poor, hungering, weeping—sounds miserable, and our hearts go out to anyone whom we see in such a state—how could we not want to help them?  I hope that, by now, we’ve started to pick up that when Jesus speaks of the poor, he isn’t only or even primarily referring to those who lack sufficient material means.

The hunger of our bodies gets our attention, but what about the hunger of the soul?  I’m not trying to be poetic.  Every man, woman, even every child has some lack, some hurt, that only Christ can heal, not because he is the power of God—we don’t stop there and neither does He!  Christ can heal because he is the power of God for relationship, connection.  People don’t mind the power, but they’re wary of relationship—relationship, to them, all too often means hurt, sorrow, trouble, expectations, and who needs more of that?

“Blessed are you who are poor.”  The poor lack and know it.  Now, the poor can allow this lack to overwhelm them; they also can strive to make do with what they have, with what they have been given.  They might even practice thankfulness.  The poor, if they will, learn and live perseverance.  Those around us, for the most part, have sufficient material means: a roof over their heads, food in the kitchen, clothes on their backs.  It’s not always abundance, but it’s sufficient.  They aren’t starving.  Abundance is especially a blessing for the poor.  The problem with material abundance is that it goes away, doesn’t last.  Boom or bust.  Feast or famine.  When people fix upon material abundance as the essence of blessing, they shall end up disappointed.

Jesus seems to be saying that those who long for abundance will be blessed.  It’s not a long leap to see that Jesus is speaking of spiritual matters.  It may be hard or it may be easy to admit, confess, our innate spiritual poverty, our innate lack of spiritual abundance.  The greatest fulfillment anyone can have in this life is to have a healthy, growing relationship with God.  God is abundance!  But if that’s not the relationship a person is seeking, if someone does not value that relationship, no matter whether that person lives in a mansion or a shack, he or she must remain poor indeed: the inevitable consequence of ways that do not lead to God.

Those who long for the abundance of God hunger for God, the one who can give.  We look around at the mess that’s been made of this world; we know, by the Spirit, it doesn’t have to remain this way.  There is hope!  God is near!  The power of relationship!  The Word is a sure, reliable guide to enjoying the blessing of God, yet God’s Word is held in disdain, disregarded, and not just by the smart set.  Seeing the mess we’ve made, knowing the solution to the mess, can we really wonder why Jesus says to his disciples, “Blessed are you who weep now”?  The tears of anger, hurt, and frustration that come with seeing how people treat one another, and the tears of joy, release, relief, knowing God is with us, to save, heal, to bless and to change.  Yet how many there are who find us foolish, or hypocrites—most likely both!  And what shall we do?  Huddle and hide?  Dismiss our critics as beneath our contempt or concern?

It may be that reports of our persecution here in the United States and in the West are exaggerated, but I think it’s no overstatement that contemporary society and culture are not pro-Christian, not Christ-friendly; honestly, I’m not even sure they’re Christ-neutral.  What’s on sale is the Cult of Self.  Jesus loves me, this I know, and I do, too.  Lutheran pastor, theologian, and Nazi prisoner and victim Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it cheap grace.  Cheap grace is a graceless fiction.  The grace of God is costly, for it is Christ.  By grace through the Spirit, you and I are growing up to the measure of Christ: a measure society and culture neither encourage nor value.  “Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man” (6:22).  If my information is correct, some of our young disciples have encountered this in our junior high school—persevere, young sisters and brothers!  Jesus himself says of such insult, “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven” (6:23).  Strange to say, hard to see, I know, but such rejection and exclusion here is counted as blessing for you in heaven!  Find Christian friends; always be inviting your peers, even if only one at a time, to get to know Christ with you.  Be part of God’s plan to make Christian friends.  The institutions of this fallen world are and will be against you.  God is for you.

The great danger with which we must daily contend—I’m not excluding myself!—is to continue to claim Christ while adopting a faith of accommodation: you know, reasonable adjustments that are so easy to make, so as not to be reviled.  So soon as we give faith into the hands of culture and await it back from culture, we replace Christ with a very small, flamboyant and fickle god.  But that way feels easier and seems to make life a little easier—happier, hopefully!—and isn’t that what Jesus wants for us, after all?  An easier, happier life?

Jesus wants us to be blessed by his Father in heaven.  There’s one way to that, God’s Word sings it continually: stand firm for the faith given, given by God.  It is blessed to suffer for the sake of the faith, for living according to the faith, even when, especially when, all the perks and rewards seem to be in doing the opposite.  Nobody wants to be rejected as evil, hard-hearted, unkind.  Oh, those material, earthly, fleshly rewards can seem very desirable, very pleasant, yet they fade and become bitter because at heart and in spirit, they’re only ashes, dust and ashes.  How is it kind to kiss lies?  How is it tender-hearted to snuggle with sin?  Long for what endures; yearn for what abides; hunger for true food; strive for true drink.

For those who worship the little gods of this world’s making, Jesus has no words of encouragement—he wants to wake people up!  Contact with the power of God is for relationship with God.  Jesus wants people to know where true healing can be had—healing for the spirit, health for the soul!  For those who seek their reward in this life, Jesus offers no encouragement: “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” (6:24-26).  Jesus would have no one believe it is enough to be comfortable here, approved of by the tastemakers and influencers here below.  The world seems to offer wealth, rank; the world holds out the promise of approval—how we want to be liked!  And if to be liked means we have to be like those around us, like those who seem to hold the keys to our advancement and prosperity, our happiness, if it means tell them what they want to hear, is that such a hard sacrifice?  For popularity?  For prestige?  For happiness?!  It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.  That old saying is truer than we like to confess for getting ahead in this life.  It is also truer than we like to confess for getting to Life.

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.