“Blessings and Woes from the Lord”
Luke 6:17-26
2/11/07
Today’s Gospel text might best be summarized
as a description of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. The
beatitudes are, after all, directed to disciples and not just
anybody. If we ask what a disciple of Jesus is, it is one who
hears the words of the Lord, believes them, and does them. That
is the way it’s always been with the people of God, including the
people of God in the O.T. They heard the Word of God, believed
it, and obeyed it. But it wasn’t their hearing, believing,
and obeying the Word which made them the people of God. They
heard, believed, and obeyed the Word because God had claimed them as
His own people. He had saved them from their slavery in Egypt
apart from any worthiness, works, or merit on their part, strictly on
account of the promises He made to their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. And so, God made it clear to His people at Mt. Sinai that
He was giving them His Ten Commandments not in order that they might
use them to work to become His people, but because they already were
His people by His having saved them all by Himself with His mighty
right hand and His outstretched arm. God gave His people the Ten
Commandments, so that they might now live as His holy people, the
people whom He had redeemed to be His own.
But it was because many of the people had forgotten
that God had saved them that they stopped hearing His Word, believing
it, and doing it. Moses knew the danger that the people of God
would become too comfortable under their new life of ease in the
promised land into which God was bringing them. The things of
this world would lead them to forget the God who had redeemed
them. They would not listen to His Word, and they would go after
other gods, live for themselves, and neglect doing works of love for
those in need. And so, just before they entered into that land
Moses said to them, “See, I am setting before you today a
blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you listen to the
commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you today, and the
curse, if you do not listen to the commandments of the LORD your God,
but turn aside from the way that I am commanding you today to go after
other gods that you have not known.”
Even in the O.T., then, the people of God (that is,
those whom He had redeemed to be His own) were those who listened to
His Word, believed it, and lived by it, showing themselves to be
God’s holy people. Today, too, disciples of Jesus (that is,
those whom He has redeemed and purchased to be His own with His blood
shed at Calvary) are those who hear His Word, believe it, and do it by
the power of the Holy Spirit. Listening to the Word means
hearing, reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting the Word of
God on a regular basis. Believing it means trusting in
God’s promises, embracing and holding fast the hope of the
forgiveness of sins and eternal life that are gifts to us through faith
in Jesus Christ. And doing the Word means producing the fruits of
faith - obeying to the Ten Commandments, loving God with all your
heart, soul, strength, and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself.
And so, the Beatitudes describe all those who have
been redeemed by Christ, who have been sprinkled with His blood and had
their sins washed away in the waters of Baptism, who have been released
from their slavery under sin, death, and the devil, who have been
brought from death to life and have been transferred from the kingdom
of the devil into the kingdom of God, all by God’s grace and His
work alone. Such people live under God’s blessings as they
hear the Word of God, believe it, and do it.
As a result, there are four characteristics that
describe them: they are poor, they are hungry, they weep, and
they are persecuted. Disciples of Jesus are poor. Matthew
records Jesus as saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,”
Luke records Jesus as saying simply, “Blessed are the
poor.” What’s the difference? Matthew
emphasizes the spiritual poverty that describes Christ’s
disciples, while Luke includes even physical poverty. The fact
is, Jesus came to release you from every kind of poverty, as all
poverty is the result of sin. Spiritual poverty is the lack of
righteousness that we all feel within ourselves on account of our
sin. We cannot perfectly keep God’s Law. We sin
daily, doing what we shouldn’t do, while not doing what we
should. But many Christians also suffer physical poverty, maybe
not so much here in the U.S., but around the world many Christians
suffer from a lack of the basic necessities of life. But
Christians can rejoice, because to them belongs the kingdom of
God. In this kingdom God gives you the riches of Christ’s
righteousness right now, and in heaven He will also do away with all
your physical want and need. And so, disciples may be poor, but
at the same time they are extremely rich in Christ, and for that reason
they live under God’s blessing.
The same blessing is spoken over disciples as they
hunger, both physically and spiritually. They may hunger now, but
they will be satisfied. Just as you confess yourselves to be poor
in and of yourselves and yet rich in Christ, so you hunger for the food
He gives, both the spiritual food of His Word and Sacraments as well as
the daily bread that He provides for you out of His fatherly divine
goodness and mercy. God satisfies both kinds of hunger - the
spiritual now through the proclamation of the Word along with the
feasting on Christ’s body and blood, and the physical ultimately
in heaven, where we will feast with Jesus face to face and no one will
ever go hungry again.
Disciples of Jesus also weep now. They weep
over their sins, and they weep over the wages of sin - suffering,
sickness, and death. But they are blessed, because God will turn
their weeping into laughing. You can laugh now, because God has
put away your sins on account of Jesus, the sacrifice for your sins,
and you will laugh again in heaven when the old things have passed away
and the Lord makes all things new. You can laugh and rejoice
because your sins are forgiven; they can no longer harm you. You
can laugh and rejoice that you stand before God holy and blameless in
His sight for Christ’s sake. And even though you may still
suffer the temporal consequences of sin now, even though you may still
suffer both emotional and physical pain along with sickness and death,
the sting of death has been removed, and these things will be no more
in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus has overcome them all with His
bodily resurrection from the dead, which ensures your own bodily
resurrection from the dead, the perfect and complete healing of all the
hurt and harm caused by sin.
And finally, disciples of Jesus are
persecuted. Jesus says that in this world we disciples of His
will experience tribulation, and the Apostle Paul writes that all who
desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.
Here Jesus makes reference to the prophets of the O.T. who were
persecuted, excluded, reviled, and spurned for His sake, and He puts
all who suffer for His Name and the Gospel’s sake into the same
camp. Ultimately, all persecution is aimed at Jesus and His
Word. If they hated Jesus and His Word, they will hate His
disciples, who hear, believe, and do His Word. We should not be
surprised, then, if the world hates us, because it hates Christ.
But we can rejoice and leap for joy, because we live under God’s
words of blessing. He does not hate you; God is no longer your
enemy for Christ’s sake. You may have to endure the hatred
of the world for a little while, but you will not have to endure the
wrath of God. What can man do to you, after all? Kill the
body? God, on the other hand, can send both body and soul to
hell, and that He will do to all who hate His Son and reject Him.
So these are the characteristics of disciples of
Jesus, those who have been redeemed with Christ’s blood, who hear
His words, believe them, and do them. Such people live under
God’s blessing. But why, then, does Jesus gives us
woes? “Woe to you who are rich,” He says, “for
you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now,
for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall
mourn and weep. Woe to you, when all people speak well of you,
for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” Jesus
speaks these words of woe to His disciples, because though they have
been born again, born from above by water and the Spirit, and though
they have a new nature and the Holy Spirit working in them through the
Word to conform them to the image of Christ, they still also have their
sinful flesh to contend with in this life. This flesh does not
want to listen to God’s Word, does not want to believe it, and
does not want to do it. Like the Israelites who forgot that God
had redeemed them, we also too easily forget that we have been redeemed
with the blood of Christ and that we don’t belong to ourselves
but to Him. So, we live for ourselves, not for others, we make
gods of our possessions, and we deny Christ in the face of
persecution. Therefore, we must also hear the woes.
The woes are warnings to us when we are heading in
the way of death. The blessings show us the way of life, the way
of living as disciples of Christ. The woes show us the way of
death, the way of living for ourselves. As the O.T. lesson from
Jeremiah states, “Cursed is the one who trusts in man...
Blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD.” If we insist on
walking down the path that leads to death, we will die. God does
not want this for us, and so He gives us the woes as warnings, just as
a good parent warns his children of danger, so that we might learn to
die to ourselves, but live to Christ.
And yet, if we’re honest with ourselves
we’ll realize that we stray onto that path that leads to death
all the time. We do not hear the Lord’s Word, believe it,
and do it as we should. And so we deserve to hear woes, not
blessings. But when we find ourselves in such a state,
that’s the time we are to look not to ourselves or our own
efforts for help, but to Jesus Christ. When the guilt of your sin
causes you to confess, “Woe is me! I’m a
sinner,” then remember again the good news that God has redeemed
you for Himself with the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus
fulfilled God’s Law for you in your place. He became poor
for you. He hungered in the wilderness for your. He wept
for you. And He was persecuted and crucified for you. He,
the blessed One, put Himself under your woes, so that you might be
delivered from your woes and put under His blessings. And
that’s where you are now by way of your Baptism. You are in
Christ Jesus, so that what was said over Him by the Father at His
Baptism may now be said over you: “You are my beloved son;
with you I am well-pleased.” Now, empowered by His Spirit,
you too may walk as the holy children of God that you are, hearing,
believing, and doing the Word of God which has saved you and brought
you into God’s kingdom, where you live now and forever under His
grace, mercy, and peace in Jesus. Amen.