Blessings and woes be unto you! When I read today's Gospel from Luke I thought, gee maybe I should look at the Hebrew Testament lesson and base the sermon on that. After all, in Jeremiah today we have that great line "The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse - who can understand it?" With Valentine's Day 3 days from now, what a great sermon that would make! As I thought about the Lukan passage it occurred to me that it would not be fair to ignore this seemingly difficult and erratic passage, but rather, maybe there is something else here then what we see and hear on the surface.

The Beatitudes Luke provides for us are not as familiar as those that we know from Matthew's Gospel. In Matthew, we have "blessed are the poor in spirit" not "blessed are the poor" as we have today. And in Matthew we don't have any woes, just the nine blessings. But Luke provides us with something different. This can be tough stuff to listen to: the poor, the hungry, those who weep, are hated, excluded, reviled, defamed are blessed. The rich, the full (satisfied), those laughing, those thought of well are castigated. Where's the epiphany there? Where's the good news there if we so happen to be rich or full or happy of thought of well?

There are lots of ways in which to read, to hear, to understand Scripture. Some take it literally and go no further. There are other methods thank goodness, but if we were to look at this passage from Luke today in a literal manner, we here are pretty much written off by Jesus. But that does not make a lot of sense if we look at this text keeping in mind the entirety of Luke's Gospel.

Luke is all about declaring the Kingdom of God happening here, now. Luke is all about blowing open the doors of that Kingdom allowing everyone, all, to enter. We see examples of that in our passage today: when Jesus "came down" to "a level place", people from "all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon" were there to see and hear him. Luke's mention of Tyre and Sidon may not mean much to us, but to the original hearers of this Gospel it would have been a vital clue: Tyre and Sidon were not part of the Jewish community. People from these towns would have been considered outsiders, foreigners. Right after Luke mentions Tyre and Sidon notice that Luke says "all in the crowd tried to touch him" so they could be healed by the power emanating from him....All of the crowd, and Jesus "healed all of them". So what is Luke doing providing us with these miraculous healings and then smacking us with these blessings and woes?