The sermon on the mount—Matthew tells us that Jesus spoke to the people on a mount, a big, high hill.  Maybe that would remind Jewish listeners of Moses on the mountain—authoritative teaching, covenant, Law.  As Luke tells it, Jesus speaks with the people “on a level place” (6:17).  So, which is it: mount or plain?  Maybe Jesus taught these things many times in many places.  Surely teaching this important, this core teaching, isn’t going to be a matter of one and done.  Luke also regularly shows us Jesus out among the people, all people, with them, touching, healing, teaching, blessing, inviting, on a level with all of us, God with Us, no one barred, too low or too far.  God’s way was open for all: no one starts off higher or closer than anyone else.  We are all equally close to God, and equally far.

Luke tells us there is a mixed group that has gathered to hear and be near Jesus: the disciples, of course, “and a great multitude of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear Him and to be healed of their diseases” (6:17-18).  Tyre and Sidon, recall, were in what today is Lebanon: Gentile territory, pagans.  Oh, those people will never be open to the Gospel!  Beloved, there are people all over the world, in every nation, who not only need the Word—we all do!—but who are also open to listening and receiving.  Some aren’t so far from these doors.  Would you pray that God would conduct you to them?  Let us be bold for Christ.  How beautiful the feet that bring good tidings.

High, low, man, woman, Gentile, Jew, sick, healthy—all came to hear.  Many came to be healed.  Luke, the doctor, knows about healing and how difficult some things are to cure.  He knows the blessings and limitations of the physician’s art.  We mostly regard medicine as a science; the science of medicine has made tremendous advances.  Healing, though—healing is an art, involving skill, experience, intuition, insight, sympathy.  Many came to Jesus with physical ailments: crippled, lame, blind, deaf, mute, paralyzed, bearing external, observable evidence of impaired health, disability, inability.  We’ve encountered such people during our own walk through this world.  Jesus healed them.  We’re told he healed their bodies.  That is miraculous—no one else could heal them; many had tried many supposed healers, many times.

Jesus healed them.  He could also heal their hearts: there’s the miracle of miracles.  The ancients believed physical maladies were often spiritual in origin.  They’d talk of demons and malicious spirits and were afraid.  We think that’s nonsense, I suppose, but we know there is a deep connection between mind and body that we don’t fully understand.  Now, add environment and genetics into the mix.  Then add to all this that other element that can’t be ignored and too often is: soul.  Our way of thinking prefers to confine the crippled, lame, blind, deaf, mute, and paralyzed to the category of physical ailments—treat the body, operate on the body, problem solved.  Scripture suggests ailments can be outward manifestations of spiritual maladies, heart trouble.  Healing must go deep.

Following Jesus, we take with us the life-giving Word.  It seems many don’t listen, won’t listen, maybe can’t listen.  Even if and when they do, they aren’t just outright persuaded.  Don’t get frustrated, but understand the condition: their soul is sick, deaf, blind, lame, paralyzed—has been for a long time.  It’s the Big Brokenness.  We of all people ought to understand it!  Be patient, compassionate, persevering, and always prayerful.  Our power is nothing; God’s power is everything.  God has a purpose for us and is fulfilling His purpose, in us, among us, and through us.

Jesus is healing power.  People soon enough figured that out, but they didn’t understand how, or why.  They didn’t stick around long enough to begin to understand.  So long as, that day, they could leave able to walk, see, hear, speak—so long as, that day, they left with a restored body, they were content.  They wanted a freed body.  Healing meant a freed body: freed to do as a body liked.  Had they stayed a little longer, or listened more attentively, thoughtfully, self-reflectively—maybe even prayerfully?—they would have left not only healed but changed, not only healed but saved, free indeed.  Salvation is God applying His healing—artfully, wisely, effectively, powerfully, where it is needed most—within.  A healed body is a blessing, oh yes.  What we need is healed living: healed to do as God directs.  The world makes its impassioned, amnesiac proposals, plans, policies, and programs for paradise on earth, causing devastations that are always somebody else’s fault.  God’s Word provides the way to healed living.

“And He raised His eyes toward His disciples and began saying, ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’” (6:20).  Stop there a moment.  All these people from all over, surrounding Jesus, seeing, experiencing healing, all these works of power, and Luke tells us Jesus directs his words to His disciples?  Jesus especially wants the disciples, witnessing all that is happening, to listen, consider, and think.

The Greek word that Luke records for poor, as one student of the language notes, refers to “the idea of roving about in wretchedness.”[1]  Not just poor but p-o-o-o-o-r.  Distressed, afflicted, without the means necessary to enjoy a flourishing life.  In serious need.  We typically think of the poor as those barely scraping by, even more those who don’t have enough income to meet common, daily needs.  We wouldn’t be shocked to see a poor person standing at some intersection with one of those crumpled, woebegone cardboard signs: “Anything helps.  God bless.”

Knowing their own poverty, Christians historically have taken a special interest in the plight of the poor.  Some get mightily impassioned about relieving the material distress of our fellow human beings.  For those whose passion is the poor, it is enough for the kingdom to be justice here.  They often also seem to know what justice must look like.  And the spiritual distress?  We may not think of those around us, the unsaved, as “roving about in wretchedness.”  Sounds a little dramatic, after all.  Some rove not knowing they are wretched, though they’re looking for something, too often the wrong things in the wrong places, but the world tells them happiness, fulfillment, purpose, is to be found, there . . . oh, there and maybe in some spiritual-ish experiences that don’t really ask or require anything of us in return.

Others know their need and understand, bitterly or just sorrowfully, that they can’t fill the need.  A job won’t fill the need.  A lover won’t.  Another motorcycle or rifle won’t.  A well-furnished home won’t, nor another getaway to some exotic corner of the world, or just out to the cabin for the weekend.  Jesus is not saying the kingdom is the promise of fulfillment here on earth in this life now.  Some will stop listening at that point, for it is precisely that aim of fulfillment here and now for which they toil and about which they dream, plan, and weep.

A lack of what is necessary for flourishing, coupled with an insurmountable inability by one’s own efforts or ingenuity to obtain what is necessary—that’s also the poverty Jesus means.  Blessed are those who are poor like that.  Oh really?  I can’t supply my own deepest need.  Who can supply that need?  Is there anyone who can supply my need?

There is a kingdom way to live, God’s way of life, which is our way to life.  Kingdom life brings many blessings, for us and for others.  Yes, the poor will be always with us, but, in the kingdom, these need not rove in wretchedness.  They, also, receive their daily bread; they offer heartfelt thanks to God.  This daily bread isn’t for the stomach only.  We would probably be shocked to learn how little physical food a person actually needs: what’s truly sufficient.  Who wants to eat that way?  For those who listen to Jesus and continue to listen, there is hope: sore trials here, as we know, and after, the kingdom.  And what is that?  Life the way God has always meant for it to be.  Only God can bring that about.  God can and shall supply all our need.  We can live in such a way as to resist and reject this truth—that’s our natural state.  By grace, we can live more and more in harmony with God’s sure provision, daily bread, daily grace.  We think we need many things.  God knows what we truly need, and He gives it without grudge or reluctance.

Finding ourselves as we do in the midst of scarcity and hardship, spiritual and material, how shall we occupy ourselves, until the kingdom comes?  In bitterness and resentment, the violence and anger of rebellion?  Many do; we see the result.  Wait and see the salvation which the Lord has prepared for you.  But you’ve got to wait.  There is a constructive, a fruitful, a blessed way to wait.  We’ve all got to wait.  Jesus invites us to wait, faithfully: the kingdom of God is for those who do.  We don’t wait in idleness.  We wait, we pray, and we work in faith, hope, and love.

“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be satisfied” (6:21).  As we hear him in Matthew’s telling, Jesus says blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Luke does not disregard or neglect that; he helps us understand that the scope of the hunger is broad: health is not a matter only of the body; salvation is not just a matter of the soul.  Suffering physical hunger puts life in an entirely different light.  Historically, famine has been common enough, even through the mid-nineteenth century: recall the Irish potato famine that sent so many from Ireland to seek a better life in America.  If you were paying attention during the ‘80s, you’ll remember the Ethiopian famine: the video footage of walking skin skeletons, huge, distended bellies.  How could that be?  How could that happen?  My suspicion is that about 99.5% of us have never gone hungry.  We’ve been blessed, and why—because we deserve it, and they don’t?

Poor, hungry—sounds sort of miserable.  Serious need.  I’m glad I’m not poor, or hungry!  So also say many whose souls are starving, or living on junk, who go about their lives looking for something that’s missing, to fill them, the priceless treasures of peace, of joy, of contentment.  These don’t come by material abundance.  We know, yet even we can still live as if they did.  If only I had more money—I’d know joy!  If only my house wasn’t so outdated!  If only my vehicle were new, and bigger!  If only my health wasn’t so broken down—I’d have true peace!

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh” (6:21).  We love good news!  The bad seems so common, so big.  Pain, hurt, sorrow, grief—is this all there is?  Is this all life amounts to?  Your happiest day: it came to an end, didn’t it?  Your happiest time of life: it did or will come to an end.  You’re born, you suffer, you die.  So encouraging!  More than half a century ago, Peggy Lee sang why not end it all, if that’s how you feel.  The English Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy, who always managed to see the sorrow in the sunshine, ended one of his long novels with the words: “happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”  Not far from my parents’ former home in Portland is the Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother: weeping Mary.  There are sculptures of Buddhas bent over weeping.  We want someone over us who feels the hurt, too, who has been there.

Hurt can harden us.  It can also, by grace, soften our hearts, build bridges of sympathy, call forth gestures, words and deeds of comfort, solidarity.  Kingdom living now, as we already know, does not abolish hurt or sorrow, but such living does provide some help and some healing when hurt and sorrow come.  In the kingdom, no one need suffer alone.  So many shut the door on the kingdom.

We weep because life is not so kind.  People weep because they have a vision of how life and the world might be, ought to be, and it isn’t.  To weep over the brokenness of this world, of human lives, and of our own lives, is an opening for the Spirit to speak.  Blessed are those who weep, who see, who feel; for these there will be joy.

Poverty, hunger, sorrow—who does Jesus have in mind?  Everybody living cut off from true wealth, true food, true comfort and joy.  Ah, but what are these?  Where can they be found?  You and I know the answer, by grace through the Spirit.  Many don’t.  They know we say so, but they aren’t convinced.  I fear they sense that, if they were to believe Jesus, trust in Jesus, follow Jesus, they sense this would mean sacrificing their will for God’s will, sacrificing their way for God’s way, letting go of fulfillment as they want to define it for fulfillment as God defines it and wishes to teach us.  We understand when someone tells us we’ve got to struggle.  Yes, fight, resist!  When someone tells us we’ve got to surrender . . . that we don’t quite understand.

Jesus has been saying, all along, blessed are you who will listen and receive my teaching, blessed are those who receive me, who, surrendering themselves, follow.  “Blessed are you when the people hate you, and when they exclude you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man” (6:22).  Blessed are you who follow even when it hurts.  No one says, “I want to be hated.”  No one says, “I want to be regarded by those around me as a harmful, poisonous influence.”  In this life, among our fellow, fallen, broken, misguided, deluded human beings, there’s a cost that comes with receiving and accepting Jesus.  If we devote ourselves to Jesus, here and now, we can be sure of this: we will experience varying degrees of exclusion, insult, and scorn from those who reject Jesus.  Indifference and lack of interest are but milder versions of rejection.

Just like everyone else, we know Jesus is all about love, but are we sure we know all about love?  It doesn’t seem to me that God’s love much looks or sounds like love as we’re taught it by our fellow, fallen, broken human beings.  Our culture knows as much of God’s Word as it wants to.  Love must have a source and a shape: love looks like something.  So do its substitutes and impostors.  Why such adamant not to say vehement insistence that traditional, historic, orthodox Christian faith, with its two-thousand-year history of consistent teaching, is not really love but hate?  Why such adamant not to say vehement insistence that the truly Christian person is one who thinks just like a Democrat (or a Republican), a Progressive (or a Conservative)?  Maybe you’ve seen this saying on the internet tides: “biblical Christianity is unpopular and popular Christianity is unbiblical.”  It was so, is so, and will be so, until Christ comes again.

What is the kingdom?  Blessedness, flourishing, glory, grace, and compassion, comfort and consolation, refuge.  The kingdom is for those who know they need a kingdom, who know they cannot be or build their own kingdom.  The kingdom is for those who know that the powers here below can offer no true kingdom, human beings being what we are: poor, hungry, sorrowful, roving in wretchedness.  The Spirit says, Follow me; I shall give you true food.  Trust me: I am true comfort, true joy.  Here before us today, through the Spirit, is our great treasure and sacramental food: Christ in his suffering, his sacrifice, his glory and power—God’s love for us—new hope, new life.  Here, God gathers us up to gather us in.  Christ is for those who know they need Christ.

[1] Harvard Divinity School professor Joseph Henry Thayer, in his Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, a translation originally published in 1886.