Rev. Will Rice
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com
Who Was Jesus?
A Look at the Person of Jesus
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
Sermon 5 – “Jesus the Revolutionary”
Rev. Will Rice
February 18, 2007
Luke 16:17-26:
17He came down with them 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. 18They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
20Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 21“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 22“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. 24“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25“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. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. [1]
“Jesus the Revolutionary”
I have to admit, I wasn’t supposed to be preaching today. I had this sermon series all planned out that I got to end on the sweet note of “Jesus, Man of Prayer” and let pastor John take on this highly volatile piece of scripture and the topic of “Jesus the Revolutionary.”
What is a revolutionary? Merriam – Webster says:
rev·o·lu·tion·aryFunction: noun1 : one engaged in a revolution2 : an advocate or adherent of revolutionary doctrines[2]
Which begs the question, what is a revolution? There are two main definitions that share a similar meaning.
rev·o·lu·tion Function: noun1 a : the action by a celestial body of going round in an orbit or elliptical course; b : a progressive motion of a body around an axis so that any line of the body parallel to the axis returns to its initial position while remaining parallel to the axis in transit and usually at a constant distance from it.[3]
As in, “the earth revolves around the sun.” This first, physical sense of the word is about going around and turning around. The second definition is much more theoretical but carries the same idea.
2a : a sudden, radical, or complete change b: activity or movement designed to effect fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation
Jesus, as a revolutionary, then is someone involved in a sudden, complete and radical change, a turning around of things. So that is what we are calling Jesus in today’s sermon title, but can I back that up in scripture? I mean, honestly, that is a little different than the typical picture of Jesus and Christianity as being simply about values and morals.
Let me back up and put today’s scripture reading in context. So far in Luke, Jesus, the troublemaker has made a big scene in his hometown synagogue. Jesus, the rule breaker has gotten into it with some religious folks about interpretation of the law. Jesus has been doing some preaching and some healing. When we left him last week in chapter six, Jesus, man of prayer has listened to God’s direction and called his disciples “whom he also named apostles.[4]”
Just to clarify, there are three groups in this passage. There is “them” the newly appointed disciples/apostles. Then we have the great crowd of disciples, all the rest of the people that, although they were not chosen as part of the 12,are still disciples from the Greek matheteis – student, learner, follower. Group three is a great multitude, all the other folks that showed up.
17He came down with them 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. 18They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
Notice their reason for coming.
18They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
They came to hear him AND be healed. I am quite realistic about the fact that if all we did was preach and teach not all of you would be here. I wonder if there is a sermon right there. How many people come to us to be healed and all we do is try to teach them.
20Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Let’s look at this a little closer.
Makarios, which we translate blessed carries all sorts of implications. Makarios, in Greek, really came to hold a meaning of elite, rich, upper crust. Not lowly and poor or someone who had to toil to earn a living. You see, the philosophy of the age connected wealth and prosperity with blessing. If you were blessed physically and materially, that was a sign of God’s blessings and God’s blessings came through righteousness. The opposite was also true, if you were poor or sick, God was not blessing you and it was most likely your fault. Think of the exchange in the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus sees a man born blind and his disciples ask:
John 9: 1As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
The word for poor there is ptokoi. Don’t hear that as “poor in spirit.” In Matthew’s gospel it says “poor in spirit” but Matthew uses different words. Here it means poor, destitute and it even carries more meaning. It can convey a meaning of having little value, being worthless, being powerless.
So, blessed are the poor, in this context, is just crazy talk. There is nothing blessed about them. They are poor, they are worthless, they are powerless and in the common wisdom of the day, it was most likely their fault that they were like that. Really I hear the same sort of thinking these days. People often blame the poor for their poverty. We figure we somehow earn our prosperity and those who don’t have it must have done something wrong. This is America after all. Doesn’t everyone have the same chance at prosperity if they just work hard enough?
20Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
That would have sounded great for the poor, but anyone else there might have been thinking, “Wait, I thought the kingdom of God was for the righteous?”
And in case the crowd needed clarification. Jesus goes into the woes. He takes all the categories that would have made someone consider themselves blessed and turns them around:
24“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25“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. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
Remember, being rich, being full, laughing, being spoken well of, those were considered signs of being blessed and being blessed was a sign of being righteous, so Jesus is completely turning around, revolutionizing all the common wisdom about how God works, how the world works, who is on top and who is on bottom. That sort of thing will get you crucified.
This is no less radical of a thought now, except, we as modern people have learned how to separate religion from the rest of life. We can all hear this on Sunday morning, but think about it terms of the rest of your life. We are raised to tie success to material rewards and we have a sort of ambiguous understanding about how that ties into the blessings of God. We look up to those with material success and we strive to make more money, have food and comfort and to have others speak well of us.
I mean, just think about it. Say you are standing in the church parking lot and two vehicles pull up. The first one a 2007 Chevrolet Suburban, freshly washed the second a 1994 Ford Taurus that is missing its left fender. Out of the Suburban steps the sharply dressed anchorwoman from your favorite evening television newscast. Out of the Taurus steps someone else you saw on television, but he was featured on the newscast in a story about the homeless community and how they are causing problems for downtown businesses. Who is the successful one, who do you look up to, who is blessed? Calling that homeless man successful, one to be looked up to, blessed is completely countercultural, completely revolutionary and it implies a bunch of stuff that we aren’t really very comfortable with.
This isn’t the first time we have seen this sort of strangeness in Luke’s gospel. The week before Christmas, I brought this same thing up preaching from the first chapter of Luke 46-53:
Luke 1:46-55
46And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, 47and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 48for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; 49for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. 50His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 51He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. 52He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; 53he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
This isn’t the first time we have seen this in Luke’s gospel. In my sermon on Jesus the Troublemaker, we read from Luke chapter 4 and heard Jesus quote Isaiah saying:
18“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Jesus’ ministry, even before his birth, was framed as a turning of the world upside down. His first sermon spoke of the good news he was bringing to the poor. Jesus was a revolutionary in the true spirit of the word, one who calls for a radical change that will turn everything we know it upside down. If we don’t see this side of Jesus, we risk letting religion do the opposite, maintaining the status quo where the poor are just poor, probably because of something they did, and where we are always the blessed.
But is this good news to us? I mean what if we consider ourselves as the blessed by the world’s standards? Can we hear this as good news?
24“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25“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. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
Yes. Yes. This is good news for us, because God wants us to be part of this. God isn’t casting us away because of what we already have. God gave us Jesus. God has given us the Gospel so that we can be part of the revolution.
I was listening to a sermon the other day from a pastor named Rob Bell. He is the pastor of one of the fastest growing churches in America, Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Mars Hill is probably the only fast growing thing in Grand Rapids besides the unemployment rolls.
Before he started the announcements, Rob said this,
“Some of you thought you came to a church service, but this actually a subversive, underground insurgency that is hell bent on the healing and restoration of the whole world.”
This sounds like a pretty revolutionary statement. Notice he doesn’t say “judging the world,” not “escaping the world,” but “healing and restoring the world.” And healing the world starts with asking the question, “who, by the world’s standards, is not blessed?” Because those are the people Jesus is calling us to bless.
Who are the poor, who are the marginalized? Who is suffering, who is hungry, who is hurting physically and emotionally? Who is on the bottom by the standards of the world and what can we do to put them on top?
That same church I just mentioned, Mars Hill, has this statement on the front page of their website:
We are joining God in the restoration of all things by completely giving ourselves to a revolution of love. Our desire is to bring hope and justice to our neighbors and our world.
And they are doing this not but just giving handouts or simply telling the government to fix the problem, but by getting involved with those who hurt, whether by providing food and shelter and safe recreation to kids or by giving the poorest in their community a chance to work by providing job training. They are not just talking about what is wrong with the world, but providing support in the church for people struggling financially, people living with aids, people struggling with dependency and addiction issues, , people living without a home and on and on and on.
And you know what, we do the same sorts of things here at Grace, but often we fail to see their centrality to our calling, how they are part of the calling of Jesus the Revolutionary. A couple members of our church have taken it upon themselves to teach anyone who will listen about the trap of generational poverty and how we can actually pull the poor out of the trap the keeps them poor. Our mentoring program tells kids who live on the margins, in words and actions, “you are valuable and important.” We have people involved in Kairos Prison Ministries that go right into the prisons to say, “we don’t care what you have done, you are still a child of God.” We have people in this church who take time to visit the elderly members of our church and community, some of the most marginalized people in our society, just to take the time to say, “you are important.”
We have a lot of great ministries at Grace, but these I just mentioned are revolutionary ministries, ministries that follow Jesus’ call to take the ones who are the bottom and put them on top.
20Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
This is good news for us. Not only is it good news for us because any one of us is never more than two bad breaks away from being on the bottom and because we get to be part of this revolution, a revolution that begins by seeing this larger image of Jesus that we have discussed over the last five weeks, and then listening and discerning about our place in the revolution. Some will be called to play a seemingly small part, bringing God’s grace and mercy to one hurting person. Others will have a much more involved calling.
As we have looked at Jesus over the last five weeks, we have seen Jesus who got himself in trouble for being too generous with God’s grace, a Jesus who causes trouble in our hearts by making us consider the limits of our own grace and compassion. We have met Jesus the party-goer who would rather hang out with the riff raff and have an abundantly good time than sit in judgment with the religious elite; a Jesus who continues to change the stale water of religion into the flowing wine of Grace. We hung out with Jesus the rule breaker who helps remind us that the rules were never meant to limit God’s love. We met Jesus, the man of prayer who, who although he was God stayed connected to God to discern where God was calling him. Jesus, who calls us now to be prayerful and discerning, always listening for God’s call on our lives. And this week, we met Jesus, the revolutionary, the one who called for a radical change that puts everyone from the bottom on the top. Jesus, the revolutionary who calls us to join, not a religion, but a revolution.
Jesus is a little more complex than that man in the nice white robes that we learned about as children. Isn’t that wonderful? I hope that the Jesus of history in all his complexity will live in us, change us and make us part of this new thing that God is creating in our world. Amen.
[1] The New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
[2] “revolutionary” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2006. http://www.merriam-webster.com (17 Feb. 2007).
[3] “revolution” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2006. http://www.merriam-webster.com (17 Feb. 2007).
[4] Luke 6:13
