Luke 6:17-26 Commentary

Along with a number of his others disciples, the newly minted inner twelve have come down the mountain with Jesus. The plain where Jesus stops them is full of people: great crowd of disciples, great multitudes from all over. They are all there because of Jesus.

The people have come to hear him and be healed by him. Jesus’s power is in both his words and his touch and people experienced this from the beginning. The order Luke says motivates the people, though, is the opposite of how Jesus acts: he first heals then teaches. Was the order a communication of his grace? Did Jesus know the people could hear better when their wounds were healed? Most assuredly, those who were “troubled with unclean spirits” could hear God speak more fully without the shadows of the enemy holding tight within them.

Jesus always acts with grace and wisdom towards us, and oh so very often, he reveals his compassion as he does. It seems to me that as he is walking among this great crowd and multitude of suffering people whom he is healing, Jesus’s blessings and woes are sparked by his compassion for them.

Having healed some diseases and exorcised some unclean spirits, Jesus speaks of other kinds of suffering now. Jesus calls blessed those who are poor, hungry, and weeping—all too often tandem sufferings. To those who are stuck in such despair Jesus promises the Kingdom of God, fullness, and laughter.

But Jesus also throws in another blessing—this one doesn’t have a promise but a command. (The part that looks like a promise is actually a command in the Greek: “surely your reward is great in heaven” is actually the imperative idou, which is usually translated as “See!” as in, Understand! Know! Accept as true! Behold!) Continuing the incongruous realities, Jesus says these people are blessed when others not only hate them, but exclude them and burn with some much disregard for them that they purposefully work to defame and belittle them in order to turn others against them. If all of this happens because the people have associated themselves with the Son of Man, then they should rejoice to be treated so, to leap for joy and look to heaven because they will discover that they are in a long line of people throughout history who have chosen to be on God’s side of justice, mercy, peace, and love that works for everyone’s good—even their enemies’.

But these are not the only wounds Jesus wants to speak of as he stands among the great crowd. Those who do the hating and exclusion, those who make up lies about others and act revulsed are also in need of healing. They will be healed if they heed Jesus’s woes.

For the rich who have literal wealth of unimaginable proportions and yet still fight to pay less…

For the full of themselves, who completely take up all the space wherever they are and expect others to treat them accordingly…

For those laughing at how successful they’ve been with their craftiness, coming up with new ways to skim off the top, steal from the masses, hide and hoard their gains…

For all of these, the promise is that right now is as “good” as it will get for them. Having heard the promises to the blessed, the warning is that their sight is lacking and a Kingdom is coming that will not belong to them—as long as they keep in the way they are going. Only false prophets receive ubiquitous praise because only false prophets know how to play the game.

But Jesus knows this isn’t a game, this is his world that he loves deeply. So, he will bring an end to our greed that causes our poverty. He will bring an end to my greed that causes someone else’s poverty. He will bring an end to all of the wrong we do to one another because of our short-sighted love of the wrong things. And he will introduce us to the beauty of Kingdom living.

Textual Point

Unlike in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), Luke does not present Jesus as spiritualizing the Beatitudes. Rather than “poor in spirit” Luke’s “poor” is an economic one. The same goes for “rich” in the Woes section.

Illustration Ideas

Bishop Ignatius of Antioch (d. 110) was an early martyr of the church. In one of his final letters to the Christians in Rome, he expresses a desire to be martyred that is hard for many of us to comprehend. His understanding of what was happening was quite common among the early church’s martyrs; it was an expression of faith that the Beatitudes are true promises from Christ. Here are some of the echoes of the Blessings and Woes in Ignatius’s letter to the church:

“For good does not reside in what our eyes can see; the fact that Jesus Christ is now within the Father is why we perceive Him so much the more clearly. For the work we have to do is no affair of persuasive speaking; Christianity lies in achieving greatness in the face of the world’s hatred.”

“All the ends of the earth, all the kingdoms of the world would be of no profit to me; so far as I am concerned, to die in Jesus Christ is better than to be monarch of earth’s widest bounds. He who died for us is all that I seek; He who rose again for us is my whole desire.”

“Earthly longings have been crucified; in me there is left no spark of desire for mundane things, but only a murmur of living water that whispers within me, ‘Come to the Father’. There is no pleasure for me in any meats that perish, or in the delights of this life; I am fain for the bread of God, even the flesh of Jesus Christ, who is the seed of David; and for my drink I crave that Blood of His which is love imperishable.”

Another idea: A friend of mine once described to me how the shelter she worked at offered meals and Bible studies. It was a Christian organization but they didn’t want people who were hungry to feel like they had to earn their hot meal so they intentionally scheduled the Bible study and prayer time to start after the meal time. Then, people could choose whether they wanted to stay or to go—no attendance keeping, no coercion, no expectation. I wonder if that was Jesus’s idea too—even though they “came to hear and to be healed,” Jesus healed the people before he taught them.