Jesus Always Levels With Us!

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God …. But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort [Luke 6:20b, 24, NIV].

Jesus’ extended “Sermon on the Mount,” transcribed for us by St. Matthew (see chs. 5-7) takes place—rather obviously—on a “mountainside,” with Jesus assuming the rabbinical, seated position [Matthew 5:1]. St. Luke’s extended recounting of Jesus’ sermon [Luke 6:20-49], a portion of which—Luke 6:17-26—is the Gospel reading appointed for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany [RCL, Year C], takes place after Jesus went down from the mountainside and stood in the plain [Luke 6:17, KJV]. Hence, the sermon in Luke is often called, “the Sermon on the Plain”. All this begs the question: Did Jesus preach to the multitudes from a seated position on the mountainside, or did He stand while preaching to the crowd on the plain, near the mountain? The answer, of course, is …, wait for it, wait for it—“YES!”

To my mind, we have two sermons, not just one. To be sure, both sermons have “Beatitudes,” but there are some not-so-subtle differences in the two Gospels’ wording and emphases. Matthew offers us what a pastor friend calls the “housebroken” version. Thus, while Luke’s Sermon on the Plain quotes our Lord as saying, “Blessed are you who are poor” [6:20b], Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount tones things down a bit, blessing not only those who might be poor, but also many of the rest of us who feel that we qualify as being “poor in spirit” [5:3a, emphasis added]. Another difference: the Sermon on the Mount appears to be limited to Jesus’ disciples [see Matthew 5:1], whereas Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain is delivered within the full earshot of the crowd [Luke 6:17].

The Sermon on the Mount is delivered in the cool, clean air on the mountainside. That isn’t the case with the Sermon on the Plain. As you know, I don’t do Greek, but those who do teach us that the word Luke uses here—pedinos—is best understood not so much as “plain,” but rather as “level.” In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the original Hebrew Bible), pedinos typically describes places of corpses, idolatry, suffering, hunger, and death. So, instead of being delivered on a bucolic, grassy hillside, like those near Lake Junaluska or Montreat, the Sermon on the Plain—what we might accurately call, “the Sermon on the Level”—is delivered to those for whom life is gritty. Put another way, the Sermon on the Mount is delivered as if at St. Peter’s, in Rome, while the Sermon on the Level is delivered as if in Durham. Those of us who live in the trenches, who face the hostile, self-centered world around us—i.e., those who live in Durham, Charlotte, Southport, and Atlanta—need someone to level with us, someone who will hold no punches, someone who will tell us the truth.

And so, Jesus, the Truth-teller steps forward and He levels with us. He pronounces blessing upon the poor, and unlike his sermon in Matthew, woe upon the rich. He does so, not so much because the poor have accomplished great things in having nothing, but because it is in the lonely places inhabited only by those who have no worldly resources that one easily comes to see that his or her only hope is in God. The poor look at their problems, their foes, and their resources, and see that without God, it is all hopeless. The rich, those more like you and me, we look at our challenges and we say to ourselves, “I’ll figure this out.”

Here, I think, both the Sermon on the Level and the Sermon on the Mount can be misunderstood. Jesus isn’t saying, “I want you to be poor.” Jesus is into excesses, if you believe scripture. He turned six jugs of water into almost a thousand bottles of fine wine. He looks at the hungry crowd, sees their need, and feeds them all with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Oh, and then he has the disciples collect the left overs—enough to feed an army. Jesus looks at Peter and Andrew’s empty boat; they’ve been fishing unsuccessfully all night, and tells them to cast their nets in deeper water, and the result is a harvest of fish that stretches their nets and almost capsizes their boats. No, Jesus doesn’t wish poverty onto His people.

If that is true, then why does He say that the poor are blessed? It is because Jesus knows that those who live on the edge of poverty also live on the edge of the Kingdom, because the poor, unlike the rich, have already come to understand that without God, there is no hope. Without God, there is no future. Without God, there is no salvation. Those who are rich, like you and me, we’re all too often trying to come up with a plan.

I hope I’m not rationalizing things too much here, but in his “Woe to the rich” statements, Jesus isn’t so much saying that the rich are beyond salvation as he is saying the rich are all too often lulled into the misunderstanding that what we have accumulated has been achieved through our own effort and merit. We who have much can become convinced that we can sustain ourselves; we can be self-sufficient. And it is in being self-sufficient that we turn to ourselves for fulfillment, and not to God. That’s the danger in riches, says our Lord.

“That’s not me,” some of us say. “True, I may have some financial resources; I’m no pauper. Yet, I’ve spent my adult life developing my scholastic skills. I’ve read all the right books. I’ve studied under the masters. I have earned my theological degree and I’ve worked hard. You can’t be saying that there is no blessing in that.”

But Jesus is leveling with us here. He’s saying, “I understand your yeoman’s effort. I recognize the hours you’ve spent pouring over the commentaries, or the scriptures themselves. I know the tedium you’ve expended tweaking your manuscripts. But I want to level with you: you pretend that you are self-sufficient. You tell your friends and parishioners that they’re just aren’t enough weeks in a day. There isn’t any committee meeting that is too lowly for you to attend and contribute your 2 cents worth. There isn’t an issue upon which you should not pontificate. There isn’t a soul who could not profit from your point of view. In a word, my devoted servant, my rich devoted servant, you are too quick to look to yourself, and not nearly quick enough in looking to God.”

Many us us find it uncomfortable when Jesus levels with us. We’re so used to the ways of the world, which is essentially a meritocracy, that we bristle when He tells us that the Kingdom is otherwise ordered. Having to stand on the same level with those whom the world has deemed to be less important and less competent, we’re frustrated; we thought it would never come to that. We thought the Kingdom would be like the Medicare ads, where we’re admonished to call the 800 number, so that we can be assured of “getting all that we deserve.” Only Jesus reminds us that we best not ask for what we deserve.

When Jesus levels with us, he seems intent on telling us things that we know in our hearts to be true, but which nevertheless go against the grain of our society. He tells us that those of us who have carefully managed our resources, who have studied hard, who have attained much, who have carefully calculated our careers, who have been to the right parties and joined the right clubs, that we may face woe, rather than blessing. And he’s telling us that the poor, the folks our world of competency has ignored and/or forgotten, are closer to the kingdom than some of the rest of us.

Later in His ministry, Jesus will offer us a parable, the one that if completely understood, tends to stick in our craw. It’s found in Matthew 20:1–16. It’s the one about the landowner who hires on some folks early in the morning, hires on others still later, and hires on another group just before quitting time. Then he pays them all the same, making the ones who worked all day stand there while the late-comers get their pay envelopes first. We, who knew the landowner’s schedule, who researched his tendencies, and who knew through experience that he’d be offering work at 6:00 a.m. are incensed when we see that those who didn’t avail themselves of our advantages receive the same pay.

In the parable, the workers are asked if we begrudge His generosity? [Matthew 20:15]. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that for many of us the answer is—perhaps with just a bit of hesitation—“Yes.” And that’s when Jesus steps forward, gives us a loving smile, but he nevertheless levels with us, saying, “Woe to those of you who think you are self-sufficient.”