February 13, 2022 + Smithtown.
I.
Jesus is up on a mountain. After a night in prayer, he chooses twelve of his disciples to be apostles. A disciple is called to be a follower, while an apostle is also sent out to spread the word. The Lord and his new apostles come down off the mountain to a level place where there are many other disciples and even more just regular people from all over, who have come to Jesus "to hear him and to be healed of their diseases." One of the main things for which Jesus was best known in his own time by his own people was his healing. He was considered a health care provider.
What he does here is an extension of the calling and ordination, as it were, of the apostles. It is the setting for what he is about to do and say. Luke takes this as an opportunity to give us what amounts to Jesus' "stump speech," the summary of the kind of thing he says all the time. Here it functions as the basic message the apostles need to have down when they undertake their own ministries in his name. They are to understand that his mission is not just words, as important as those words are, but he frames his words in the context of healing. He heals in verse 19, then in verse 20 he starts to talk.
I think we like to imagine that the provision of health care is more or less apolitical. When I go to the cardiologist or the dentist, I don't expect a sermon about politics. Even these days, when it is becoming more difficult to maintain that separation, it would still be somewhat unusual for my doctor to tell me whom to vote for or which government policies to advocate. I mean, she might advise me on what to eat. And I might decide to take that politically. I might wonder if she is getting paid off by big fruit and vegetable companies, or if she has something against the salt industry. I once went to a chiropractor who, I could tell from the posters in the waiting room, had political views diametrically opposed to mine. I had to wonder during the rather vigorous treatment whether he was trying to paralyze me so I couldn't vote....
We try to keep these areas separate, but I suspect that this is another of those luxuries from yesteryear that has evaporated. I mean, vaccines used to be non-political too. I remember, when I was about seven, everyone in town dutifully and without question, even enthusiastically, going to the school gym on a Saturday, lining up to get a shot. But those days are over.
Health care is actually very political, like it or not. And for much of history, it has been. It was certainly political in Jesus' day.
Jesus was going around Galilee and Judea healing people. For free. It was making him very popular. And I imagine it might have been making him increasingly unpopular with the national and religious leaders. Aside from the fact that people who make money off health care might not appreciate someone undercutting their profits by giving it away, in Jesus' day health care was political in another way. The prophets predicted that the Messiah, when he comes, would be a healer. And Messiah is a political title; it basically means king. So, if the country already has a king, that's a problem. So there was a built-in tension surrounding anyone going around healing people like Jesus is doing. And he knows this because he mentions having to deal with persecution. He knows that his actions are offensive to the people in charge.
II.
When Jesus is finished healing people, he sits down and starts interpreting for his disciples what he has just done. This is instruction for the disciples, including the twelve newly minted apostles. The rest of the people can overhear what he is saying, and from that they may glean some idea of what his movement is about. His teaching is not a secret. At the same time, he is mainly addressing his followers. Which is to say, us.
When he begins, "Blessed are you who are poor..." the "you" is the disciples. He says they are blessed when they share in the low economic status of the people. Then he goes on and repeats the same thing about other difficult and painful situations. "Blessed are you who are hungry," "blessed are you who weep," "blessed are you when people hate you...."
In other words, he declares that the disciples are blessed by God when they are needy, broken, and marginalized... when they take on the material conditions of the people to whom he has just spent the better part of a day ministering.
Indeed, theologically, in the Incarnation, God self-empties, taking on the liabilities, pain, fear, sadness, and dependent relationships of us humans. It's as if Jesus says to his disciples: "I came down from heaven to serve needy people by becoming one of them. To illustrate this, we have just come down from the mountain to the level of the common people in order for you to do the same thing: to heal people by sharing their lives, their poverty, their hunger, their sorrow, and their rejection by others. This is to be the shape of your ministry in my name going forward. Like me, you will also heal from within and among the people; you will heal and save what you take on yourselves and share."
God does not use a paternalistic, condescending approach to us. Neither are his disciples and apostles to employ this superior attitude in healing others. The mission of the church has always been most fruitful when identifying with, living with, standing with, crying and hurting with people in their pain and losses.
At first glance, this doesn't make any sense. It can be hard to see how simply being poor and hungry with someone changes anything. But what it does is create community. It creates relationship, and because it is done intentionally it automatically conveys value, welcome, acceptance, and love to people. It eliminates injustice and inequality by refusing to participate in judgment and subordination.
This is itself empowering and enlightening. We witness to the truth that, before God, there are no differences between us in status or privilege. As Paul says, there is no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male and female. There is nothing that makes anyone higher or better than anyone else in God's sight. When we create a community of equity, healing can happen because so much of what is impoverishing and starving us and causing us grief are these distorted, stratified, adversarial, exploitative relationships.
How much of what is harming people's health today is a result of systemic poverty and bias? If I can't afford health care, or decent food, or if I'm under constant stress because I'm liable to lose my job, or get arrested, or evicted, I'm more likely to be sick. It's going to affect me physically. If we intentionally share people's lives as equals, creating communities of love, compassion, and care, we go a long way to healing or preventing even things like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, addiction, suicide, maternal and infant mortality, poverty, and hunger.
III.
Maybe the disease beneath a lot of other diseases is injustice: maybe bigotry, exclusion, rejection, and condemnation of others are what is killing people. Maybe that is the unclean spirit that is troubling us all. And maybe the response to which the Lord calls his church is to come down off our comfortable, affluent mountains and empty ourselves of a lot of what we are hoarding out of our egocentric greed and fear. Maybe we need to find ways to share the lives of needy people, creating communities of acceptance and love, forgiveness and peace, hope and joy. How many times does Jesus make a condition of discipleship the selling of everything one has and giving the proceeds to those in need? "Then come and follow me," he says. We can't follow Jesus weighted down with all that expensive baggage; unload that, and then we can walk freely together with him and with others.
Jesus chooses to join people in their poverty and hunger, and therefore he can say with integrity, listen, because I am with you, your poverty is actually a blessing, your hunger is really a benefit, your sadness is in fact good, because through those experiences and through me, and through my disciples and apostles, you are in touch with God. You have a future. Together there is room in your life for God to act. In me you have everything to gain. You may look forward. In this connection, we can connect with and feed and enrich and empower and and enjoy each other.
Because the folks who allowed that disease of injustice and inequity to fester in them and dominate their thinking and their whole lives? Those are the people who sadly have no future. Their lives are shrinking and collapsing. They see connecting to others as a threat. They think they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by following Jesus, if it means having to be involved as equals with those other losers.
So Jesus continues and states who is, well, not blessed. "Woe to you," he says to them, and then gives a list of exactly the things we all have been trained by society and even our families to strive for! The things we are taught we are supposed to achieve: wealth, popularity, safety, happiness, security. Jesus means that if we strive for these things we lose them, because in the process of getting them for ourselves we have created a society of inequality and injustice, where our life is evaluated on the basis of how much stuff we have. No matter how we got it. Or who is left behind with too little.
If being blessed is about solidarity with others and community formation and living in relationships of sharing, acceptance, forgiveness, and listening, then being cursed has to do with the opposite. It is individual autonomy, relationships of superiority and subordination, inequality, judgment, condemnation, blame, cheapness, separation, competition, and animosity. It is get whatever you can for yourself. It is suspicion and fear of the others, especially those poor and hungry people Jesus blesses. It is about walls and exclusion. It is about segregation, caste, and class. It is about repression and suppression. It is about canceling books, because they threaten us. It is about how everything threatens us! I know people who are threatened by Starbucks' coffee cups! I know people who are threatened if they see the wrong two people holding hands! How is that not some kind of curse?
These are precisely the characteristics of a sick soul and a sick society that literally makes people physically and mentally ill. That drives people to addiction, that destroys souls, families, communities, nations, and the planet itself. That's why Jesus says they are cursed. They invite hostility and catastrophe on themselves and on everyone. In God's economy, to curse is to be cursed, to exclude is to be excluded, to condemn is to be condemned.
IV.
I don't hear Jesus yelling here. I think he is very sad. He is profoundly heartbroken that people in their deluded egocentricity, choose to curse others by enforcing a toxic inequality, and so bring a worse curse on themselves. By grabbing more and more for themselves, and carelessly leaving their neighbors in need, they generate generation after generation of woe, misery, illness, resentment, violence, paranoia, and death.
Jesus gives us a way out of woe. He offers a path out of this curse that afflicts people and societies, and now the whole planet. Stop cursing and start blessing! Put yourself in a position to receive the blessing of Jesus by identifying with and taking on the condition of others, especially those in need, and creating together a beloved community of sharing and acceptance.
The Lord indicates that his Church is supposed to be a healing ministry. It is supposed to be a place where people can find integrity and wholeness together. That is what he shows the apostles when they come down from the mountain.
The Church is supposed to make people whole. And it makes people whole by connecting them together in networks of solidarity and equality, beginning at the most basic, common, sensory places of loss, hunger, abandonment, poverty, grief, and extremity. We see this in Matthew 25 as well. The Lord builds this community up from the very bottom of our creatureliness, our humanness, our physicality, our liability to loss and hunger and pain and death. Then together, in him, we spin and knit, and weave together the antidote to woe, which is blessing. We become people of blessing. We finally inhabit God's call to Abraham and Sarah where this whole thing began: we become a blessing to all people and the whole creation.
The fruit of such blessing Jesus says is the emergence and realization of the Kingdom of God. It is a dawning of prosperity and nourishment and satisfaction for all. It is an awakening to laughter and joy.
+++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment