Blessed Are You

Text: Luke 6:17-26

Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

          Epiphany is an action-packed season of the Church Year. We began with the Magi who followed the star to Bethlehem to worship Jesus as their Savior. The heavens opened, God spoke, and the Spirit descended at Jesus’ baptism. Then He miraculously saved a wedding from disaster in Cana by turning water into wine, escaped murder by his friends and neighbors in Nazareth after preaching His first sermon, and filled Peter’s nets with fish. With this emphasis on Jesus’ power to perform miracles, to satisfy needs, to heal and provide and fix and solve, we might get the wrong impression. That if you follow Jesus all the problems in your life will suddenly disappear. That every problem will be solved and every need satisfied. That your life as a disciple will be one of boundless happiness and joy. Or, even worse, you might conclude that if those things aren’t true for you that either your faith isn’t strong enough or Jesus isn’t really God and doesn’t really love you. And so today, in Luke’s recounting of the Beatitudes, Jesus reveals the stark truth about this life. And it’s not what you think.

Jesus says that in this life it’s better to have poverty than wealth; hunger than satisfaction; weeping than laughter; persecution than popularity. And, if we’re honest, all that sounds like complete nonsense. It’s like Jesus is describing an alternate universe with no relation to our own. But you may have noticed that much of what we say and do here the world would call nonsense. We stand before living, newborn babies and declare that they are dead in sin. We stand before the caskets of people who have died and declare that they are only sleeping. We pour regular tap water into a bowl and call it the fountain of life. We eat and drink bread and wine and confess it to be the very body and blood of Christ. You believe that your sins are forgiven before God in heaven when the pastor says those words here on earth.

The point is that it’s not really about what you or I or anyone else thinks. 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 confessing sinners are justified, and those who believe they are righteous of themselves lack that same forgiveness. The thing is that what God says is what is the reality, not what you and I can think, reason, feel, or see. And who are we to argue? When God said “let there be” 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 free us all from sin and death – that’s what happened. So, when God through His servant says that you are forgiven, justified, saved – right here and right now – you are.

Maybe you can agree to all those things and then say, that’s fine, but that’s not what Jesus is talking about in this Sermon on the Plain. He’s talking about things that hit really close to home: our wealth, our health, our happiness and our reputation. These are things that are important to us every day. Not just when we gather on Sunday mornings. So, what is Jesus getting at? The text tells us that people had flocked from all over Israel to see Jesus and “to hear him and to be healed of their diseases.” But Luke makes it clear that not all of these people were disciples or believers. At least some were coming to have their temporary needs satisfied and be sent on their way happy. And Jesus knew that his disciples might get the wrong idea about the Christian life from these miracles. So, He pauses the healings and explains how the blessings of this life relate to the reality of life everlasting.

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 paradise on earth. It’s not that He couldn’t have, or that He tried and failed. The One who created everything with just his Word certainly could have spoken and this earth would have become an instant paradise again. Jesus could have established another Eden, planted the tree of life in it, put you there, and it wouldn’t have required Him to die on a cross. You could’ve lived free of poverty, hunger, sadness and a poor reputation. You could have eaten from that tree of life and lived forever. But He didn’t do this 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 understand life now is to remember what happened in the Garden in the beginning. God gave Adam one simple command. “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” Adam ate and the death he earned by his disobedience wasn’t just the separation of his body and soul – it was a separation from God. From the moment Adam ate of that forbidden fruit he forfeited perfection and lost his perfect relationship with God. And his sin had consequences. “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever. So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden. 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. All the curses. Pain in childbirth. Thorns and thistles. They remind them, and us, that the world wasn’t the problem; they were. In other words, God kicked them out of paradise to lead them to repentance – He did it out of love.

Jesus says that in this life poverty is better than wealth, hunger better than satisfaction, weeping better than laughter, and persecution better than popularity. Because that’s the reality of our standing with God. The broken world around us, the consequences of sin that touch our lives are vivid reminders that the world is not the problem, we are. Weeping, begging, hungry for God’s grace and mercy are the only proper response – because only then will we appreciate the real reason Jesus came to earth.

And Jesus didn’t come to get rid of poverty and hunger and sadness. He came to get rid of sin, death, and God’s curse. Jesus came to live the perfect life of obedience that we’re incapable of living. He came to take our sin and rebellion upon Himself, to the extent that when God looked down at earth on Good Friday, the only sins He saw were those that hung with Jesus on the cross. In that moment – by that sacrifice – all God’s wrath that is rightfully ours, was hung with Christ upon the cross. And only by this has the curse been removed. By His perfect life and gruesome death, Jesus won true life for you. Life in an eternal kingdom, filled with riches beyond imagination, where God Himself calls us His beloved children.

Yet in this life, along this path to that eternal kingdom, the devil schemes to throw us off course. To make us believe a reality other than what God has given us. He 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 benevolent wish-granter who came to give you those things. The devil wants you to believe that you are rich in good works, so you won’t notice your spiritual poverty. He wants you to be satisfied in your own goodness, so you won’t 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 about you. But the reality is that if we believe that because we’re rich, well-fed, happy and popular everything is alright between us and God – then the devil has won.

Because it’s all a delusion. Popularity and laughter and happiness are mirages that are gone as soon as you have them. Our bellies might be full after a great dinner, but we’ll have to eat again tomorrow. Money can’t buy everything. Especially the most important things. And, sooner or later it’s all going to be gone. Because we can’t take it with us. Most importantly, our circumstances of life now are not an accurate measure of our standing with God. Only the cross is. We deserved to hang there – because we are all poor, miserable sinners; but Jesus hung there in our place. That’s the truth the devil doesn’t want you to see or confess.

And that’s why Jesus, in this sermon, lets us in on the secret that what made Eden paradise wasn’t the climate, the food, the happiness, or the fact that everyone 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 followed the Law and then gave you the credit. He suffered the death your sins deserved, and your record is wiped clean. In Christ, 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.” If you were all-powerful, if you could give your child anything, I don’t think you’d give them riches, food, happiness, and popularity in a world that’s infested with sin and sickness and ends in death. You’d give them a ticket out of this world to a place where there is no sin, death, or the devil. That’s exactly what God has given us in Jesus. A one-way ticket out of this life to true life with God. That’s why He came.

In Luther’s day, when plagues and famine and disease and death were everyday realities, people would say “In the midst of life we are surrounded by death.” That’s what the devil would like you to think. That this is the life. That this is as good as it gets. Eat and drink and be merry because tomorrow you die and life will be over. Martin Luther turned that saying around. “In the midst of death we are surrounded by life.” This place – where sin, death and the devil stalk us, hurt us, kill us and our loved ones – this is not true life. It’s real life, but it’s not the true life that we’re promised. True life is with God and He gives us signs of true life even in this world of death. He gave you new life in the life-giving water of Baptism. He restores your life day after day with His forgiveness. He gives you the body and blood of His Son which preserves you to life everlasting. It’s not the good life this world says we need. It’s even better. Amen.

The peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.