Blessed Are The Losers--November 8, 2024

Blessed Are The Losers--November 8, 2024

Jesus looked up at his disciples and said:

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours in the kingdom of God.

 Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

 Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

 Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

 But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

 Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.

 Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

 Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets." [Luke 6:20-26]

There was a time when we settled matters of guilt or innocence with a "trial by combat," where two disputing parties would settle who was right and who was wrong with a duel (yes, like even to the death). And the combatant who won the swordfight (or whatever the weapon of choice was) was determined to be "right," and the won who lost was "wrong" or "guilty" or... dead.  You may have seen something like this in TV series like Game of Thrones or movies and novels. The underlying assumption beneath a "trial by combat" was that God (or the gods) would vindicate the winner, and that the divine hand must be condemning the loser.  In other words, there was a time in human history (perhaps more recently than we realized) when conventional wisdom said you could identify God's approval or disapproval based on who looked like a "winner" and who looked like a "loser." Hence the old adage "might makes right."

And then Jesus comes along and completely overturns that bad theology and faulty logic by declaring God's blessing, favor, and victory precisely on the losers... and speaking only a word of "woe" to the winners.

Jesus, of course, is doing this all the time in his ministry, but you see him say it with unflinching clarity here in this passage from The Sermon on the Plain/Mount as Luke gives it here.  Sometimes with Jesus' actions, you have to do a little thinking or interpretation to see how he upends conventional wisdom.  But here it is blatantly obvious.  Jesus says a loud and clear NO to the mindset that God backs the "winners" and opposes the "losers," and instead he offers his own view: namely, that if God is on a "side" at all, it looks more like the side of the loser.  The poor, the hungry, the heartbroken--in other words, precisely the folks who get labeled as losers by the world--these are the ones Jesus declares victory for. And the smugly self-satisfied, the apathetically affluent, and the well-heeled, well-fed "success" stories are the folks Jesus pities.  In the Reign of God, Jesus says, the tables are turned, the last are the first, and the losers are the real winners.  Jesus has not come to rubber-stamp the ones the world thinks of as "winners" with God's endorsement as well; he has come to declare God's blessing and share his victory with the ones regarded as "losers."

And, if we are honest, this is pretty counter-cultural--it was in the first-century Greco-Roman world in which Jesus lived, and it is still revolutionary today.  "Common sense" in the Empire said that being a "winner" was incontrovertible evidence that you had "God" or "the gods" on your side.  It was the same (flawed) logic that led to trials by combat where the winners were declared to be in the right because the "gods" had led them prevail.  So Rome assumed it had divine blessing precisely because it kept "winning"--conquering people left and right, overpowering other nations, and getting richer with every conquest.  Their wealth and status (from all that "winning") was seen as the golden age of divine blessing they called the Pax Romana--the "peace" that came from being subject to Rome.  All of it was reinforced by the unquestioned assumption that you could spot who was blessed by the gods by who came out on top.  The losers, of course, along with the hungry, the poor, the grieving, and the pitied, were assumed to be without God's favor because of those very conditions. And Jesus' way of seeing the world turns all of that on its head.  By announcing God's blessing on the poor, the hungry, and the heartbroken, Jesus utterly demolishes the "common sense" assumption that the "winners" in the world's terms are winners because God made them win, and equally wrong conclusion that the "losers" in life have been rejected by God. None of that misguided triumphalism is left standing after Jesus speaks the words, "Blessed are the poor."

So, what does any of this mean for us?  Well, for starters, I would be really cautious in this life before declaring that the seemingly successful got to the winner's circle because God favored them and not somebody else.  We would, I hope, be wise enough not to make a pronouncement that the Dodgers won the World Series because more people were praying for them to win, or that the Cleveland Guardians didn't win their pennant because of a lack of prayer warriors, or that the Detroit Tigers lost in the round before that because of insufficient piety.  That's just not how it works.  And similarly, I would hope that we are wise enough to know that the triumphant nation in a war does not get to claim divine-favor or "moral righteousness" simply on the basis of having won the war.  (Ancient Israel and Judah had to learn that lesson painfully when the Babylonians or Assyrians won and completely conquered them.)  So, similarly, before we go off half-cocked drawing conclusions about who has God's favor and who is on God's bad list, based on their apparent success or failure, it's worth hearing Jesus again.  Before we conclude that we can confidently label the favored or blessed ones of God based on their successes or write someone off as un-blessed because of what they have suffered, we need to let Jesus change our vision to see people the way he does.  And then we need to remind ourselves that when we Christians say that "Jesus has the victory," that does not and cannot mean that every victory of every kind on earth has come by Jesus' direct willing or with Jesus' personal endorsement.   So when we hear others who are certain they can spot the ones favored by God by virtue of their successes, we can be the ones to remind them, on the basis of what Jesus actually says, that it's just not how this works.

From there, we'll come to see God's presence and power at work lifting up the lowly, comforting the sorrowful, feeding the hungry, and blessing the ones labeled as "losers" in the world. That's where to look for God on this day--not at the end of a trial by combat.

Lord Jesus, show us where to see your blessed presence, and let us be a part of your way of sharing your victory with the ones called "losers" by the world.