Luke’s Sermon on the Plain
One of the buzzwords among fundamentalists is “inerrancy.” By this, they mean the Bible is without error, that every word is directly inspired by the Holy Spirit ( an idea that presumably extends to the act of translation), and that every single word in the Bible is literally true and should be applied directly to modern life. Of course, they then blithely ignore whole sections of the text they find inconvenient, the contradictions, the things about economic justice, about immigrants, about not judging others.
Progressive Christians, on the other hand, understand that the Bible is a human document that seeks to interpret one ancient people’s experience of holy mystery. We know, for example, that the four gospels cannot all be literally true, for they contradict one another, though they can all contain truths. And today is a perfect example of this reality, for Luke’s version of this great teaching is different from Matthew’s more familiar version in several important ways. And we simply don’t have the source text Matthew and Luke shared, commonly known as “Q,” to see which one is right, which one best reflects historic memory.
So while you may tire of my attempts to place scripture in context, I ask you to stick with me. We are going somewhere, somewhere relevant to today as the sermon title suggests, we’re just getting there on the slow boat.
To the early Christian community that produced the gospel attributed to Matthew, it was important that Jesus be understood as a new Moses, the one who establishes a new covenant. It is why they created the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, and packed the Holy Family off to Egypt, as we discussed last Sunday. It is also why in Matthew we get a Sermon on the Mount, for Moses received the Ten Commandments on a mountain. Luke sets this exact same sermon on a plain, “a large area of level ground” in the translation we are using this morning.
The differences go beyond the physical location. The authors of Matthew give us spiritualized Beatitudes. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Luke is concrete. “Happy are you who hunger now, because you will be satisfied.” This is true throughout the two gospels. Luke focuses on those at the margins and without power: women, shepherds, the poor. Jesus being on the plain makes more sense in the Lucan context than Jesus delivering the word from on high, for this Jesus is one with us.
Needless to say, those with power have always preferred Matthew’s version. After all, the Lord of the Manor didn’t have to worry that the peasants were going to take up their pitchforks and seize his storehouse of righteousness by force.
I tend to believe that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes is closer to the historic truth, and not just because I’m a lefty-pinko. Jesus led a mass popular movement in a region that was marked by extreme poverty, by famine and eviction, and the gospels suggest that many of those who followed Jesus were dispossessed and desperate. The historical record is filled with popular movements, from the Ancient Near East to today, and popular movements attract the dissatisfied, for the satisfied are not interested in changing the status quo.
If the powerful have always preferred Matthew’s abstract Beatitudes, the comfortable have always preferred to ignore the second half of the teaching, the “woes.” We like our Jesus happy-clappy, the “Sweet Baby Jesus” of Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights,” not this man who actually demands something, who suggests that there are consequences to our actions. We want Jesus as anesthesia, not as a way of life.
But there they are. “How terrible for those” in today’s translation, “woe to those” in others. This is the bad news. And we especially want to ignore them if we, like so many, read the gospels outside of their historic context. For while we are not rich by the standards of today’s gazillionaires, we also are not exactly hungry, we are sometimes admired by others, and we sometimes laugh, or at least we did before 2016.
So a little balancing good news: Jesus was not preaching in Upstate New York in 2022. He was preaching in Galilee almost two thousand years ago. And from his point of view, those who were thriving in a corrupt system must themselves be corrupt, for he saw so many good and decent people who were not thriving.
Jesus was political. Jesus was religious. Jesus was about justice.
He lived in a specific moment. Judea and portions of Galilee were still primarily Hebrew, but the entire region was under the thumb of an occupying army that collected back-breaking taxes. The Hebrew elite selfishly chose to cooperate with the Romans, and where taxes forced people off of their family land, they often bought it up. The big-wigs in the Temple added to the burden on the common folk, demanding their cut as well, bulls and bread and beer and sky-rats, as we discussed last week. Religion was a big business fleecing the masses.
To be sure, there were some folks who were managing even in that difficult context, families that could still put food on the table, could still laugh when mama told a joke. But everyone understood that when Jesus called out those who were well-fed and happy, he was calling out those who were thriving because of injustice, not those who were thriving despite injustice. He was calling out those who were corrupt, and those who chose to profit from corruption.
And the bad news: Jesus was preaching to those who were benefiting from an unjust system, and we do. Preaching to those who ignored the hungry, the broken, the sick, the imprisoned, and we live in an age where you can go bankrupt because of an illness, where there are no beds for the mentally ill outside of a prison, where our taxes go to making corporations and the rich richer, and I could go on.
For the truth of the gospel of Jesus is that it is not zero-demand anesthesia intended to make you feel good. This sort of fluffy feel-good nothingness, called “moralistic therapeutic deism” by the authors of the National Study on Youth and Religion, has no power to shape a life or to shape our world, and given that so much of it is based on myths and beliefs that are no longer credible, the entire system itself is no longer relevant in the lives of many.
People were attracted to Jesus because he spoke about changing lives and changing the world in which he lived, and people were miserable and the world felt pretty awful. He spoke about a social inversion where it would be terrible for those who profited from a corrupt system of empire and corporate religion and a blessing to those who were humble and kind and struggled to do good even when it was hard, and people were hungry, both for both this good news and for actual real live food in their bellies.
When we tell only part of the story, when we gloss over the challenging parts, when we spiritualize everything until it has no bearing on the real world, we end up with empty churches, Franklin Graham, and the pseudo-religions being manufactured by actresses and con artists. You end up with a lie. And Satan may be the father of lies, but he has some might powerful lieutenants.
A little self-delusion can serve a purpose, especially if it is aspirational, fake-it-til-you-make-it, or if it keeps us sane in the midst of insanity and catastrophe, but that is an extremely narrow window for falsehood. 99.9% of the time, it is the whole truth and the whole story that is required in order for us to advance the cause of human thriving, individually and collectively.
The Doctrine of Discovery that claimed white Europeans discovered a mostly empty continent is a lie. Manifest destiny was a lie. The “self-made man” and rugged individualism is mostly a lie. You’re not Mowgli. That the country was founded on loft ideals is mostly a lie, for America’s revolution was economic. That the 2020 election was stolen and horse dewormer can cure Covid is a lie. That attempts to lynch the Vice President and Speaker of the House are legitimate political discourse is a lie.
And while we are are it, prices are not going up because of supply chain issues and labor costs. Rapacious corporations are seeing record profits.
Race theory is critical not just because… you know… justice, which is not done when police departments act like occupation armies in a war zone. Race theory also is critical because all race theory means is telling the truth, the whole truth, and a self-serving partial truth is a lie, is like Jesus giving people with empty bellies righteousness instead of food, is like a Jesus who, instead of predicting that the Temple, the heart of Hebrew corruption in Jerusalem, would be destroyed, instead declares that the building and the blood-sucking priests were righteous, which simply ain’t what happened.
Telling the whole truth is uncomfortable sometimes, and the left can be just as guilty of erasing history as the right. There will always be some things that are a matter of interpretation. There will be things that are simply unknowable, like whether Jesus delivered this sermon from a mount or from a plain. But some things are true. Jesus was not preaching airy-fairy affirmation. He was preaching revolution in a time when people were hungry and afraid, a time not unlike our own. About that, I am inerrant.
Amen.