READINGS

Luke 6:17-20 Teaching and Healing, The Beatitudes
Genesis 22:4,13 The Sacrifice of Isaac
1 Chronicles 21:16 David’s Punishment
Joshua 9:1 Deception by Gibeon
Deuteronomy 28 Blessings for Obedience, Curses for Disobedience

HOMILY

Remember last time after the miraculous catch the four boatmen - three of them mentioned and the fourth presumed, that Peter, Andrew, or Simon and Andrew, James and John - follow Jesus.

Today's Gospel begins after Jesus has chosen 12 of his disciples to become apostles.

Between the four starting to follow him and now, Jesus has been engaged in a whole series of activities: he's cleansed a leper, healed the paralytic, he's called Matthew, he's taught them about the Son of Man.

The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins - the beginning of the teaching that God is now sideways among you and God's power is to be exercised horizontally.

This is part of what He's bringing in and it's causing stuperfaction.

His teaching about fasting, which is not to take it very seriously, his dismissal of old wineskins and saying that people will like them, but it's the new ones that matter.

He's paying very little attention to the Pharisees concerned about his disciples eating.

And it's not as though each one is weighed up in its arguments as it is in Matthew's Gospel.

Each one of these issues is weighed up with arguments.

The lukewarm Jesus is pretty dismissive, doesn't bother with this stuff.

Cures man with a withered hand.

Now what all these incidents have in common is that they're all incidents which are also treated in Mark's Gospel with only very small verbal differences, so we get them during the year when we read Mark and in some cases with Matthew.

So I guess the compilers of the lectionary reckon we could jump that and get to some specifically Lukan themes.

In order to understand our today's specifically Lukan theme we need to just stand back a little bit and see his choice of the apostles because the apostle is not a common word in the New Testament, it's most common in Luke.

It means literally sent one. It's become a technical term.

But here Luke does make something about this and he also makes something about it in the Acts of the Apostles.

12 are chosen, and the number of 12 is fulfilled in the Acts of the Apostles when Judas has gone to his death.

So here it says: now Jesus during these days went out to the mountain to pray and he spent the night in prayer to God.

One of the things which Luke always does shows us how the dynamics of desire work.

For Jesus to keep doing what he did, he needed to be in constant prayer, his life, his soul, his heart needed to be constantly in touch with God so that he wouldn't be run by all the mimetic crowd activities around him.

It's after having chosen these 12 apostles that he then comes down the mountain to begin his preaching.

So that the sermon which is known from Matthew's Gospel as the Sermon on the Mount, in Luke's Gospel, is known as the Sermon on the Plain.

As everywhere with Luke, all geographical and directional hints are to be taken very seriously.

He's coming down the mountain. This is not supposed to be a piece of top-down preaching.

The choosing is top-down and we'll see that that's going to be something which gets repeated in Luke's Gospel and is absolutely central for Luke's understanding of what our vocation is.

Our vocation is the name we have in heaven. If our names are inscribed in, heaven up, then our living out of that is going to be the earthly iteration. The earthly working out of our real name, which is the name given in him.

So, chosen above, but then he comes down. He comes down with them, he comes down with the 12 and stood on a level place with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.

So a huge mixture of people: Jews, non-Jews, Jews of dubious heritage, Samaritans - in the verses which today's Gospel leaves out it says they'd come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases - so both the word and the healing - and those who are troubled with unclean spirits were cured.

Notice that all of these people are at the same level as him. He's not above them, which means He can't have been seen, it must have been tremendously difficult for him to be seen in their midst. That's a point that it's worth seeing.

Also, a crowd gathering together can very quickly become a lynch mob.

We've seen how Jesus had to sidestep that at Nazareth. We saw how that was enacted by an evil spirit in one of the synagogues he was at, but how he moved aside from the crowd to teach, from the boat.

But again: to try and be at the same level as them. Here, He's been willing to put himself in the midst.

Then: He looked up at his disciples. And the Greek says that literally looked up. Now, this is weird in a variety of ways.

First, it said He's standing in the midst of them. What does it mean in terms of communications that he had to look up to see?

Does it mean he was sitting down in their midst? In which case he was lower than them so as physically to look up.

It may mean that he was sitting in that midst unless they were much taller than He, but we've got no reason to think that that's the case.

Now, if you want to speak to a lot of people in an open place, you are much better to get onto something high and speak down to them.

Hence the Sermon on the Mount makes sense: Jesus is above, speaks, people can hear below.

If you sit in the middle of people and even sit below the people immediately surrounding you, what sort of active communication is being lived out?

Well, a very specific one: you're relying on people to pass the message outwards.

You may remember The Life of Brian scene were mocking the Matthewian version of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus announces: Blessed are the peacemakers and a game of Chinese whispers follows and ends up as blessed are the cheesemakers.

Joke aside, from a mountain top or from a high place people can hear something of what comes down which is why there were pulpits in churches before the existence of microphones so that people could speak from high down and be heard.

But if you're speaking in a flat place and you are indeed even below the people, you're speaking in such a way as to rely on others to spread out what you have said.

Jesus is taking it very seriously indeed.

And not only is he putting himself in the midst of them at the same level as they, so that these words do not come with miracle importance from some up-above figure, but from in the midst.

He places himself under them in the position of somebody who could easily be trampled by them, who could easily become a victim of a fast-moving crowd.

But then there's another sense of the word 'looking up' in the Septuagint, which is the looking up of eyes suggests a prophetic looking up.

When Abraham lifted up his eyes, prophetically he saw mount Moriah and knew that that was the place of sacrifice.

So he tried to sacrifice Isaac there.

But that was going to be the same place on which King David later would set up or point to where the Temple should be, and where Solomon set up the Temple.

In other words, Abraham was prophesying the site where God would provide.

I think David lifts up his eyes on the threshing field, which is a plain. It's a flat thing. It's actually the same word in Greek: lift up his eyes and see the Angel of the Lord who's going to judge everybody in the midst of that plain.

And that's why that becomes the place on which the Temple is going to be built.

So Jesus here is lifting up his eyes - a prophetic gesture - almost as though He's also saying: listen, the place that's going to be everywhere from now on.

He looks up at his disciples who are going to have to spread this word around and then He gives these blessings and these curses, blessings and woes.

In Luke, they're very punchy and there are really two: there's one blessing and one curse. With each of the next lines being a working out of what is meant.

So the blessing, the principal blessing is: Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are hungry now for you will be filled; blessed are you who weep now for you will laugh.- Very strong.

The first one doesn't have the word now but the descriptors do.

And then the woes on the other side: Woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation.

You have received your advocacy, your defence, because it's the same word paraklesis which can mean comforting, it can also mean advocacy.

It's the word which John uses to refer to the Holy Spirit, parakletos.

But what does this mean? Won't you hear it? It means:

Woe to you who are full now for you will be hungry.

Woe to you who are laughing now for you will mourn and weep.

Woe to you when all speak well of you for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

And in the middle, the third blessing which goes along with describing the poor:

Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you on account of the Son of Man.

And then the line in the middle: Rejoice on that day and leap for joy for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

So that's the central line, that's this rejoicing.

This is going to be a constant in Jesus's teaching: the binary is arriving, the sword has come, the criteria is in your midst - the Son of Man. That is going to be the criteria from now on.

And that's up to you if you're poor, if you're hungry now, if you weep now, and if you're in this position because people hate you, when they exclude you, revile you and defame you on account of the Son of Man.

The truth is going to be spoken from the victim - something which power never likes.

Rejoice on that day and leap for joy for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

And here's another curiosity: for surely your reward is great in heaven for that is what THEIR ancestors did to the prophets. In other words, the ancestors of the prophets.

And then he says: Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. So the ancestors of the false prophets.

But what is really interesting is He doesn't say YOUR ancestors did to the prophets, though a surprising number of liturgical translations do translate the word THEIR, which is quite clear in Greek as YOUR, as though this is something to do with something Jewish.

But the interesting thing is that here Jesus is talking to a mixed national crowd and He's not trying to specify the ethnic inheritance of the prophets.

In fact, the suggestion is rather this dynamic:

Blessed you when people hate you and when they exclude your value and defame you on account of the Son of Man - that is something which is available everywhere, and that's what happens to true prophets anywhere.

And if you are rich and full and laughing now, then you're the kind of person who people will speak well of - and that's not true of only a Jewish or Hebrew culture, that's true of all cultures.

In other words, the flattery of falsehood, to stay in with the powerful is the way of the world.

So Jesus is announcing very very strongly here that the dynamic, the centre of what is coming upon people is going to be very drastic.

It's going to make a very strong alteration to how the order of things works.

At the centre is the realization that this word is spoken from beneath.

It's going to replace the threshing floor that was also the basis of the Temple.

These dramatic blessings and curses which is rather similar though more drastic than the equivalent in the Book of Deuteronomy where Moses offers similarly a bunch of blessings and cursing as he gets the people going.

The Lucan journey continues, which is strangely secularizing, strangely international, apparently rather binary: not because it's trying to lock people into things here and now in some sort of locked-down way, but because it's aware of the dynamic of desire, which works either towards building you up so that you are receiving who you are from your name in heaven, or for the one which is grinding people down into death and violence.