Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

Will the real Jesus please step forward? I say this because there’s one Jesus who is doing all the miraculous healing, feeding, driving out demons and attracting huge crowds of followers, while the other Jesus, so it seems, is telling you that life as you know it right now is not going to be all that good, and yet you’re supposed to be somehow happy about that? And to top it all off, this second Jesus says that it’s wrong to laugh and be well fed and to have a good reputation! I don’t know about you, but from the sound of it all, the two Jesus-es are at odds with each other. Look over the reading from Luke 6 again real quick. One Jesus acts like the victorious Son of God taking over the world He made and He has come to flex His powerful God-in-flesh muscles over the devil and the sinful world. But the other speaks like He’s sadistically obsessed with pain and suffering, like that’s the proper response to His loyal followers, and He’s a fanatic who is opposed to the enjoyment of all life’s simple pleasures. How could these two different characters be one and the same Jesus?

To be sure, most of the people who first listened to Jesus and watched His miracles had the same confusion. Crowds were streaming in from all over the place, some traveling for days just to spend a few moments with this Man, who is the Son of God. Of course, the crowds got bigger when a free meal was being handed out, or when a dangerous demon-possessed person is healed. Sure, there were those who rejected Him and accused Him of various nit-picky things like healing on a Sabbath day when, according to the Pharisees’ law, absolutely no work was supposed to be done on the Sabbath. But that bit of opposition certainly wasn’t keeping the crowds away.

The disciples who were with Jesus all the time were in on the excitement too. Sometimes these were just the Twelve whose names we have recorded. Other times the disciples of Jesus included others, especially when He sent seventy or so of them to go ahead of Him and preach and perform the same miracles He was doing: healing the sick, feeding the poor and hungry and so on. All of this popularity of Jesus might have gotten to them, too. Perhaps these disciples were beginning to think that following Jesus would mean a life constantly in the praise and adoration of a forever grateful public.

And then you hear what Jesus says especially to those disciples. “Blessed are you who are poor, who hunger now. Blessed are you when men hate you and exclude you and insult you.” How could He say such things at the height of His popularity? Come on, Jesus! Being a Christian is going to be great! Sins are forgiven, the dead are raised up, you’re doing wonderful things for my life! I don’t have to do anything to be saved—it’s all by your grace! If there were a choice those disciples had to make between the miracle working Jesus and the Jesus who preaches about suffering, it would be the first one hands down.

No doubt that would be the choice you would make, too. After all, it’s this miracle-working Jesus that you pray to when you want your loved ones who are sick to be made well. When problems and crises come up in your family or in the church, you pray for a quick fix to end the conflict, right? After you’ve come to the point that you can’t help yourself, you turn to this miracle-working, magic Jesus to pick you up and help you. You completely forget or even avoid the other things Jesus says, that following your Lord will include hardship. That you might not see any fringe benefits to being a Christian. That you might pray and pray for the specific answer that you want and either nothing happens or the opposite thing happens.

Then you fall into the devil’s trap that plants doubt in your mind, that suggests to you that God is not seeing to your best interest, or that the Father has turned His back on you. It becomes easy to believe that He is somehow pleased with seeing you squirm with uneasiness because things just don’t seem to work out right for your life. Armed with this complacent attitude, you throw up your hands in despair and say there’s nothing you can do for God’s kingdom either because you’ve done plenty enough in the past, or because you’re just too busy, or worse, it just doesn’t do any good for you anyway, so why bother? Brothers and sisters! Avoid this attitude! Listen to what Jesus says, along with the miracles that He does. Do not think you are here today to get richer or to attract a record-breaking crowd in here or to get along better with any other aspect of our fallen, sinful world.

For the apparent difference between those two Jesus-es is solved when you understand the cross. It is one and the same Jesus. This Jesus who performed all those wonderful miracles was Himself rejected, beaten, excluded, left hungry, and full of sorrow, all the way to His bloody crucifixion and death. When He speaks these words of blessing to those who are poor in spirit, who are slandered and afflicted, Jesus is saying you are going to go through the very same things that He went through. Yet He says rejoice and leap for joy because you’ll get the reward for all that suffering that Jesus endured in your place, when He suffered and died for your sins.

Jesus was the one who truly deserved the blessings of heaven and had every right to bask in heavenly glory, not only because He is the Son of God, but because He lived a perfect, sinless, holy life while He was visible in the flesh here on earth. That bloody death, being nailed to a criminal’s cross, suffering the insults, the cuts, bruises, and crown of thorns, and most of all, when He suffocated under the punishment of God the Father against the sin of the whole world on the Son’s shoulders—that very suffering and death is the reason for you to rejoice. That is the reason you are blessed even in the middle of your own trials and griefs. And to seal that blessing as your very own, and to destroy all doubt and selfish attitude in your heart, your alive and victorious Lord Jesus miraculously takes His own Body and Blood and sticks it into your own mouth, so that your sins are forgiven and you are strengthened in body and soul to life everlasting. You also have the assurance that the very moment you hear God’s Word of forgiveness, you are not just reminded of some blessing that’s out there, you are truly blessed, right now, even though right now you don’t always feel like you’re being blessed.

Since you have such a blessing from this one and only Jesus, He invites you to stop looking for happiness and blessing from anyone or anything else. Compared to His precious gift of eternal life, you now look with scorn upon the things this present world values so highly. In light of Christ’s baptismal word of blessing spoken upon you today, who cares if those who reject Him say mean things about you? It won’t even matter. True, you may not laugh quite as you did before, especially if it meant laughing at something that hurt someone else, or laughing at something that angers God in breaking His commandments. However, the joy and laughter of heaven over a sinner who repents far outshines and drowns out the crass humor that you find on this earth.

And when you pray, you realize you cannot do anything on your own without Him. You look instead to the one Jesus who has power over heaven and earth, but who also for your sake said in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Father, not my will, but Thy will be done.” In His own way, and in His time, your heavenly Father will answer your prayer, in fact, He has already answered it, in sending His Son Jesus Christ. And one day this same Jesus will gather you, along with believers from all over the world, to welcome you in His Paradise, where the blessings that are yours now, but hidden in suffering, you will finally see and experience those blessings fully, and without end.

In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Readings:
Jer. 17:5–8 Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD
Psalm 1 Blessed is the man who walks not…
1 Cor. 15:1–20 I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you
Luke 6:17–26 Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.