Luke 6:17-26 - It's Not What You Think - February 13, 2022

The words before us serve as the introduction to what is commonly known as Jesus’ “Sermon on the Plain.” Whether this is the same event as the Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew’s gospel – we can’t say with certainty. What is certain is that in a series of four blessings followed by four woes, Jesus is stating categorically that in this life it’s better to have poverty than wealth; hunger than satisfaction; weeping than laughter; and persecution than poverty. And, let’s be honest, this sounds like absolute nonsense. It sounds like Jesus is describing an alternate, upside-down universe. Then again, you may have noticed that nearly everything we do here is considered by most of the unbelieving world as nonsense. We stand before living, breathing, newborn babies and declare that they are dead in sin (Psalm 51:5). We stand before the caskets and urns of dead people and declare that they are only sleeping (Matthew 9:24). We pour tap water into a bowl and call it the fountain of life (Titus 3:5-6), we eat and drink bread and wine and confess it to be the very body and blood of Christ (Matthew 26:26-27). You believe that your sins are forgiven before God in heaven when a pastor says so here on earth (Matthew 16:19). The point is that it’s not really about what you or I or anyone else thinks, sees or feels. It’s about what God says. God says that newborns are dead and dead believers are alive. God says that water and Word give life and bread and wine forgive sins. God says that guilty, repentant sinners are justified and self-righteous hypocrites are not (Luke 18:9-14). What God says: that’s the true reality – and not what you and I can think, reason, feel, or see. And who are we to argue? When God said let there be (Genesis 1) the universe and everything in it came into being! When God sent his Son to earth to make the lame walk, the dead come alive, and liberate those possessed by demons – that’s what happened. When God through his servant says that you are forgiven, justified, saved – right here and right now – you are.

“Fine,” you might say, “but that’s not what Jesus is talking about here. He’s talking about things that hit really close to home: our wealth, our health, our happiness and social status. These things are important to us – not just for one hour on Sunday mornings – but every minute of every day.” So just what is Jesus driving at? Consider the context. People had flocked from all over the region to see Jesus. Why? To hear him and to be healed of their diseases. But apparently not all in the crowds were believers because Luke remarks that Jesus lifted up his eyes to his disciples. The implication is that at least some were coming simply to benefit from his divine power, to have their earthly needs satisfied and be sent on their way healed and happy. Jesus recognized the danger: that his disciples might get the wrong idea about Christ’s mission and their own Christian lives from these miracles. So he presses pause on the healings and miracles to reveal the reality about the Christian life.

The Bible is perfectly clear that God didn’t send his only Son into the world to make you or me or anyone else rich, well-fed, happy, or popular. He didn’t come to establish a utopia – a paradise – on earth. Oh, it’s not that he couldn’t have; it’s not that he tried and failed. The One who created everything with just his Word, who cast out demons, healed the sick and raised the dead – certainly could have spoken and this earth would have become an instant paradise once again. Jesus could have established another Eden, planted the tree of life in it and put us there – and it wouldn’t have required him to die on a cross. We could have lived free of disease, crime, poverty, hunger and sadness and eaten from that tree of life and lived forever. “That sounds good – why didn’t he do that?” For the very same reason that God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden in the first place.

The only way to rightly understand life now is from the perspective of what happened in the beginning. God had given Adam one simple command: you may freely eat from every tree in the garden, but you shall not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die (Genesis 2:16-17). But Adam ate from that tree and the death he earned by his disobedience wasn’t just the inevitable separation of his body from his soul – it was separation from God. And his sin brought additional consequences: the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, so that he does not reach out his hand and also take from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever – the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the soil from which he had been taken (Genesis 3:22-23). God kicked Adam and Eve out of the perfect bliss of Eden so that they wouldn’t have to endure the curse of sin, of separation from him forever. The thorns and thistles of daily life, the pain of childbirth, the bitter enmity we see and experience between believers and unbelievers and the endless war between the sexes were to be a reminder to them that the world wasn’t the problem; they were. In other words, God kicked them out of paradise to lead them back to himself in repentance (Romans 2:4); he did it out of love.

Why doesn’t Jesus just give us everything we think could use for happiness in this life? Why doesn’t he just snap his fingers and turn this world into paradise once again? Because even if Jesus recreated the paradise on earth we desire – we would still be under God’s curse – not only because we inherited original sin from Adam but because we have not continue[d] to do everything written in the Law (Galatians 3:10). He could cause us to live here forever. But it would be an awful existence; because we wouldn’t be forgiven, we wouldn’t be justified, we wouldn’t be saved, we wouldn’t be right with God. Worse than the living dead, we would be the living damned. It would literally be hell on earth. It would be the very life God wanted to spare us from by driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden. That is why Jesus says that in this life poverty is better than wealth, hunger than satisfaction, weeping than laughter, and persecution than popularity: because that’s the reality of our standing before God. The broken world around us, the consequences of sin that touch our lives are concrete reminders that the real problem is not out there; it’s in here. Weeping, repenting, begging, hungering for God’s grace and mercy are the only proper response – because only then will we appreciate the real reason Jesus came to earth.

Jesus didn’t come to get rid of poverty and hunger and sadness – no lofty State of the Union addresses or Build Back Better bills for him – he came to get rid of sin, death, and God’s curse. Jesus came to gather up the pieces of the commandments we have broken and put together a perfect life of obedience. He came to take our sin and guilt upon himself to the extent that when God looked at earth on Good Friday, the only sinner he saw was his only-begotten Son (2 Corinthians 5:21). When he was nailed to a cross and God unleashed all of his wrath over sin, all of his curses meant for sinners on Jesus – then, and only then – was God’s justice satisfied, his wrath quenched, his curse removed. By his perfect life and hellish death, Jesus won true life for you; life in an eternal kingdom, a kingdom filled with riches beyond your wildest dreams, an endless, all you can eat feast hosted by Jesus himself, a place of unbroken joy where God himself is reunited with us as his beloved children.

But here’s the danger: in the meantime, the Devil either wants to fill you so full of wealth, food, happiness, and popularity now that you don’t see or feel the real misery of your sin or he wants you to see Jesus as nothing more than a cosmic genie who came to give you those things. The devil wants you to believe that you are rich in good works; to deny your spiritual poverty; to be satisfied in your own goodness; to not hunger for God’s righteousness; to laugh at your sin, not weep over it; to value what other people say about you more than what God says. But the awful reality is that if we believe that because we are rich, well-fed, happy and popular everything is right between us and God – then the devil has won and we are lost.

Because it’s all an illusion. Popularity and laughter and happiness and satisfaction are mirages that are gone as soon as you have them. We may eat at the best brunch buffet in Madison this morning – but we’ll have to eat again later today. Money can’t buy everything – especially the most important things, the things that last beyond death. Happiness happens in a moment and then it’s gone. Our current “cancel culture” has proven time and again that popularity and societal approval can be yours one second and lost the next. Most importantly – and this is Jesus’ main point here: our circumstances of life now are not an accurate measure of our standing with God. So what is? The cross. We deserved to hang there – because we are all poor, miserable sinners; but Jesus hung there in our place. That’s the ultimate truth, the one thing the devil doesn’t want you to see, believe or confess; the thing he wants to hide and obscure behind wealth and satisfaction and laughter and popularity.

And that’s why Jesus preaches this shocking sermon, awakening us to the truth and turning the world upside down for us. He lets us in on the secret that what made Eden paradise was not the climate, the food, the pleasure, or the fact that men and women got along. What made Eden paradise was the fact that Adam and Eve were perfect and had a perfect relationship with God. That’s what Jesus came to restore. And he has. He kept all of God’s commandments perfectly – and gives you the credit. He suffered the death your sins deserved – and your record is wiped clean. In Jesus, when God looks at you, he’s as pleased with you now as he was when he first created Adam and Eve and called them very good. (Genesis 1:31) Now, if you were all-powerful, if you could give your children anything, would you give them riches, food, happiness, and popularity in this broken world that is infested with sin and sickness and inevitably ends in death? Of course not (Matthew 7:9-11). If you could give someone you love anything at all – it would be a one-way ticket out of this world to a place where there is no sin, death, or the devil. And that’s exactly what God has given us in Jesus – a one-way ticket out of this life to true life with God. That is, finally, why he came.

In Luther’s day, when plagues and famine and disease and death were realities people just had to live and deal with – not hide in their basements from – some would say “In the midst of life we are surrounded by death.” That’s what the devil would like you to think. THIS is THE life. This is as good as it gets. Eat and drink and be as merry as you can now because tomorrow you die (1 Corinthians 15:32). Luther flipped that proverb on its head. “In the midst of death we are surrounded by life.” [1] This place, this existence – where sin, death and the devil stalk us, hurt us, kill us and our loved ones – this is not true life. True life is peace and harmony with God. That’s what Jesus came to bring us. And in his grace he gives us signs of the true life that is ours even as we live in the midst of this world of death. He gave you new life, rebirth, in the life-giving water of Baptism. He restores your life day after day with his absolution. He gives you the body and blood of his Son which preserves you to life everlasting. By his resurrection he has kicked open the door of death which kept us from experiencing true life with God. All of which is evidence that following Jesus, this Christian life of ours, is not what we think; it’s even better. Amen.

[1] LW 13:83