This week, we continue our journey through the Gospel of Luke with a discussion of Luke 6:17-7:23. You are welcome to drop in anytime. In the readings, Jesus continues his teaching and healing ministry in Galilee. Here, we find Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain and his ministry to a Gentile.
The Sermon on the Plain, generally: (vv.17-49)
The Sermon on the Plain is Luke’s version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) which we have previously studied. (Neither Mark nor John have anything similar.) The two sermons both appear early in Jesus’s ministry and have the same general outline. Matthew’s sermon is much longer at 106 verses as opposed to Luke’s 29 verses. Matthew has the Lord’s Prayer in his Sermon, whereas in Luke the Prayer goes later in Luke 11. Both Sermons offer us a summary of Jesus’s moral and ethical teachings. If you have time before Tuesday, read the Sermon on the Mount before our readings from Luke to see the differences in information and tone.
Most of the differences between the two are owing primarily to the different emphases they place on who Jesus is. Matthew’s Sermon takes place on a mountain (where Moses received the Ten Commandments) with only his disciples present and often begins with a quote from the Ten Commandments or another provision of the Law. Luke’s Sermon takes place on level ground with everyone present, reflecting the socio-economic leveling of the Gospel that we first saw in the Song of Mary or the introduction to John’s ministry. Luke 1:52, 3:5. Luke also does not have introductory quotes from the Law reflecting Luke’s more Gentile audience.
Overall, both Sermons offer us a summary of Jesus’s moral and ethical teachings and are likely different versions of Jesus’ standard sermon as he travels throughout Galilee and as were passed down to the gospel writer.
The Beatitudes: (vv.20-26)
Matthew gives us eight Beatitudes beginning with the words “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Matt. 5:3-10. Luke only gives us four Beatitudes beginning with “Blessed are the poor,” and ending with four Woes. vv.20b-26. Luke’s Beatitudes are less (explicitly) spiritualized: being poor, hungry, weeping, and persecuted. The Woes are the mirror image: Woe to you who are rich, full, laugh, and spoken well of. Jesus addresses the Beatitudes/Woes to “you,” i.e. members of his immediate audience who are present. Those present do include men such as Levi, the tax collector who threw Jesus a banquet at his home, and Peter, Andrew, James, and John who (until very recently) had owned their own fishing boats, all of whom may be classified as rich.
In commenting on this difference in language in the first Beatitude between Luke and Matthew, Kenneth Bailey in his book Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes, writes that for the Old Testament prophets, “poor” means the humble, contrite, and pious. Isa. 66:2, Ps. 51:17, 86:1. Therefore, even Luke may be talking about spiritual, not economic, poverty. However, as later seen in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus or the story of the Rich Young Ruler, economic wealth and spiritual wealth are often inversely related. Luke 16:19-31, 18:18-29. If you have time this weekend, please read through these two latter stories in Luke and see how a deficient spiritual character (for example, humility/pride, mercy/entitlement, etc.) is strongly correlated with material well-being.
Love and Mercy: (vv. 27-36)
Within this middle section of the Sermon on the Plain, Luke gives us the meat of Jesus’s ethical and moral teachings built around a strict application of the golden rule of loving your neighbor as yourself. These teachings are similar to those found in Matthew 5:38-48 and 7:1-12.
Jesus begins with the most difficult love (vv.27-31) – loving our enemies and doing good to those who hate us. Think about applying the description of love in 1 Corinthians 13, not to your spouse, but to someone who actively hates you and wishes you harm. This is the standard that Jesus teaches us to live up to.
Jesus goes on to teach that love cannot be based on reciprocity. vv.32-36. Love is always a shall. To truly love, means to love without any expectation of that love being returned. As Jesus points out, everyone loves those who love them, but we, his audience, are to be different. Love’s power derives from the fact that it is unilateral and is not dependent on anyone or anything other than our decision to love. Our love is true and pure when we expect nothing in return. Therefore, true love can be kind to the ungrateful and merciful to the merciless. The identity, character, and behavior of the beloved are immaterial.
Jesus takes his teachings of love and mercy one step further by instructing his audience (the apostles, disciples, the crowd, Theophilus, and his readers) that we may not judge, may not condemn, and must always forgive. Within the Eastern Christian tradition, judgmentalism and condemnation are seen as the greatest sins because these attitudes remove the “grace of the God from a person just as surely as water extinguishes the fire.” As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard writes: “It is also conceit to believe in one’s own forgiveness when one will not forgive, for how in truth should one believe in forgiveness if his own life is a refutation of the existence of forgiveness.” Not judging, not condemning, and forgiving others is simply another way of the outworking of loving your neighbor as yourself.
Concluding Proverbs: (vv.39-49)
Jesus concludes the Sermon with a series of illustrations and proverbs which generally follow the conclusion of the Sermon of the Mount in Matthew 7. Jesus begins this section by pointing out that his disciples must learn from him so that they do not become self-conceited and fall into the hypocrisy of pointing out a splinter in their neighbor’s eye while having a log in their own. vv.39-42. Jesus’s next illustration is that a good tree produces good fruit and a bad tree, bad fruit. Therefore, his audience must learn to produce the good fruit if we are to call ourselves his disciples. vv. 43-45. Finally, Jesus gives the illustration of a house built on a rock and that built on sand. If we, his audience, are going to follow him, then our lives must be firmly grounded in Jesus and his teachings. vv. 46-49. We must love our neighbors, even those who are our enemies, and we cannot judge others by pointing out their sins when we still have sins of our own. Rather, to be a follower of Jesus, we must always have an attitude of spiritual impoverishment borne of humility and contrition.
Dinner is at 6. The menu is shrimp and grits. Discussion about 6:45. Compline around 8. Please join us!
When a certain brother had sinned, a council was called to judge the matter to which Abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone to say to him, ‘Come, for everyone is waiting for you.’ So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said to him, ‘What is this, Father?’ The old man said to them, ‘My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.’ When they heard that they said no more to the brother but forgave him. Sayings of the Desert Fathers