The poet Rumi says, “This being human is a guest house.” He encourages us to show hospitality to the full range of our feelings and experiences. Today I want to consider what it means to “welcome and entertain” today’s text from Luke, especially the woes. “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 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.”
Let’s start with the lay of the land—literally. In this story, Jesus gathers with his disciples and the crowds on “a level place.” That’s in contrast to the version of this text in Matthew known as the “sermon on the Mount.” Whereas Matthew portrays Jesus as the new Moses, the giver of the law, Luke instead places him in the tradition of the prophets, like Isaiah, who speak truth to power. Here Jesus is with the people, at their level, addressing the “kitchen table issues” that affect their lives. Poverty. Hunger. Grief. In the bible, the plains are not a geography of blessing. Level places are associated in various passages with “corpses, disgrace, idolatry, suffering, misery, hunger, annihilation, and mourning.”[1]
It is into this level place of despair and death that Jesus speaks his surprising and prophetic words of blessing. In her book, Grateful, Diana Butler Bass unpacks the meaning of the word “blessed.” She writes:
Blessing is not just happiness, but favor. In the Christian scriptures, the word specifically means God’s favor, often called “grace” or “abundance.” “Favored are the poor” or “Gifted are the poor” would be equally valid ways of making sense of makarios. The sense of the Beatitudes is not “If you are poor, God will bless you,” or “If you do nice things for the poor, God will bless you.” Nor is it “Be happy for poverty.” Instead, “Blessed are the poor” could be read, “God privileges the poor.” If you are poor, you are favored by God. God’s gifts are with you.
Jesus’ blessings push back against the meritocracy of his time and ours. He is debunking the idea that some people don’t prosper because they aren’t working hard enough, the notion that the rich deserve a better life, the blasphemy that the poor are disposable, that economic exploitation is divinely ordained. Jesus is saying that God sees the ones who suffer and honors their dignity. And that God’s intention is to level the playing field. God’s agenda centers the well-being of the least of us, and, paradoxically, by doing so, provides for the well-being of us all.
Once, long ago, I had a debate with my best friend Elizabeth. I was arguing that anyone could become poor under the right conditions. And she said, “No, Jane, you could never be poor.” Even if you had no money and no place to live, you would still have a good education. You would still have a childhood in which you were secure, and your basic needs were met. You can’t change the color of your skin. You can’t give some assets away even if you want to. The more I’ve thought about this argument over the years, the more I’ve realized she was right. And that the reason I fought so hard against this awareness of my privilege was that I didn’t like the way it made me feel. Guilty. Responsible. And I think underneath that, afraid and sad. I couldn’t quite bring myself to welcome and entertain the possibility that I was not on Jesus’ list of the blessed.
We all want blessing. We all need blessing. We all deserve blessing. No one wants a “woe.” And yet sometimes, for the sake of our own healing, and that of the world, we need one. Sometimes the path to blessing leads through woe. The word translated “woe” in this passage is, grammatically speaking, an interjection. Like, “Hey!” The idea is not to issue a curse. These woes are a warning. They grab our attention. They shake us awake. The warning is: we can only find joy, fulfillment, peace and security together. The wake-up call is: the gifts of creation are here to sustain all of us. We are interconnected and interdependent. If we do not recognize these fundamental truths, then we are all doomed.
“Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” Jesus’ woes remind us that the poor are not poor, hungry, grieving, and persecuted in isolation. Economic exploitation is not a victimless crime. The poor are poor because of the behavior of the rich. Surely Jesus is warning the oligarchs who even now are consolidating their economic and political power so they can rule over everyday people. He’s talking to Elon Musk, who proclaimed on social media this week that those being affected by DOGE cuts are a “parasite class.” He’s talking to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. However, I believe he also wants to awaken the rest of us. A society oriented around the quest for profit tells us all lies about how to be happy and where to place our trust. Capitalism teaches us to value our lives according to what we can produce, to always be striving and competing for more, to never be satisfied, to choose isolation over connection, hoarding over sharing. The drive to build wealth tends to sideline all other values. And we mostly ignore the elephant in our economy—the way that theft, genocide, slavery and exploitation of the earth is the basis of inherited wealth passed on through white families from one generation to the next.
As the people gathered with Jesus in that level place, he healed them of their diseases, and cured those with unclean spirits. And yet Jesus didn’t just heal individuals; he created an environment of healing. “The power came out from him and he healed all of them.” Healing power flows from Jesus and gives humanity the ability to change unjust social and material arrangements. In our times, Bernie Sanders speaks to this collective healing that Jesus came to enact:
The worst fear of the ruling class in this country is that Americans—Black, White, Latino, urban and rural, gay and straight—come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few. Their nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation or country of origin and will, together, have the courage to take them on.[2]
Friends, what if we treat Jesus’ woes as an honored guest? None of us is at fault for the inequities we have all inherited. We are responsible only for what is in our power to change. We need not be afraid or ashamed to receive a “woe.” We don’t have to protect ourselves from the truth. What might be possible if we welcome the warning, and entertain the awakening? What new delight, what guidance from beyond, what divine healing might we make a hospitable space to receive even now in these perilous times?
[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-luke-617-26
[2] https://www.facebook.com/tom.adams.3762/ posts/pfbid02W216GXxFV8VKLuJqQDt8WUSWzedr8oH6YLQSQMdPv4Zc9DuebhAfHqfzbi2oXqiol