6 Epiphany Year C 2025: Luke 6:17-26

When you begin seminary, there is a whole host of new vocabulary to learn. My friend Fr. Stephen calls them “Ten Dollar Seminary Words”. For example, if you want to get lunch, the place to go is not the “cafeteria” but instead the “refectory”. If you are writing a paper on some scripture, it isn’t a “section”, but rather a “pericope” - a word that you have to be careful with, because Microsoft Word will auto-correct it to “periscope”. And if you are in a Bible class and looking to talk about someone’s method of biblical interpretation, the Ten Dollar Seminary Word there is “hermeneutic” - a word I had to look up every time I encountered it for a while. It just wouldn’t stick, because I could not understand why we needed another word when “biblical interpretation method” was working just fine for me.

There are four main schools of hermeneutics: literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical. What is important to know is that any time you read scripture, you are approaching it with a hermeneutic, even if you don’t sit down with the text thinking “today, I’m going to read Luke through an allegorical lens”. Sometimes different hermeneutics overlap with one another, because outside of a textbook one rarely looks at scripture with only one lens, rather using layered lenses to deepen understanding of our scriptures. One of those layered hermeneutics we like to use when faced with a difficult teaching of Jesus is one I like to call the “weaseling” hermeneutic.

We use a “weaseling” hermeneutic when Jesus says something that touches a nerve too close to home. Sometimes it’s something that’s hard to do or that requires us to reevaluate how we live our lives. Something that indicts us for our treatment of others or for the things in our lives that we might value over God. And therefore, we pick whichever hermeneutic is most convenient to weasel our way out of doing whatever it is that Jesus is telling us to do.

For example, when Jesus says, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to get into the kingdom of heaven”, we use a literal hermeneutic to miraculously find a gateway called “the needle” that camels could get through if they tried really hard (there was no such gateway), thereby weaseling our way into permitting ourselves to hoard our wealth. Or when Jesus says, “the poor will be with you always”, we use an anagogical (or spiritual) hermeneutic to spiritualize “the poor” who will be with us, thereby weaseling our way out of reading it as an indictment of the poor being with us always, even when we have the means to alleviate their poverty.

It’s why we prefer Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes over Luke’s. Matthew throws us the lifeline of writing “blessed are the poor in spirit” instead of Luke’s “blessed are the poor”, thereby giving those of us who are objectively not financially poor a way to weasel ourselves into the blessed category without doing what Jesus is calling us to do: reevaluate our lives with the arrival of Jesus, knowing the kingdom of heaven is here and now and we ought to live our lives accordingly.

Jesus’ “woes” are pointed at the rancor triggered among the affluent among those to whom Jesus was speaking, ourselves included. Throughout reading Luke, Luke seems to regard the very possession of wealth, unless distributed to the poor, as corrupting one’s relationship with God. Luke’s ideal was the Jerusalem community of those believers who gave their possessions to the common fund as he described in Acts 2 and 4. Each of the Gospel writers had their own hermeneutics through which they interpreted Jesus’ meaning to Israel and to the world. This is one of Luke’s.

My recommendation for how to deal with these kinds of texts? Admit the problems and deal with them. Not the problems with the texts. The problems with us. We really want to be the good guys. We want to be the “blessed” - the Greek word translated as blessed, “makarios”, denotes a deep, abiding joy and contentment that comes from a right relationship with God, we want that even when the ways in which Jesus describes the blessed are less than appealing. 

When I was a fifth grader, we had a debate as part of history class about whether Andrew Carnegie was a good or bad man. And it wasn't particularly hard, especially as fifth graders who still saw the world as pretty black and white, to argue either side, because while he was a steel baron who treated his workers poorly he also gave most of his fortune away. Most people are complicated. And those complexities mean that we can’t take the blessings and woes and decide to use a simplistic hermeneutic where there are only rich people and poor people. There are only the hungry and the full. Only the laughing and the mourning. We don’t have to fit into the box where we are one or the other for Jesus to be speaking to us.

Another way we try to weasel out is that we recognize the complexity of life and that Jesus clearly also recognizes those complexities and therefore is speaking hyperbolically and THEREFORE we can dismiss “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation” as hyperbole, conveniently ignoring that hyperbole doesn’t mean there’s no reasonable application to our lives. Jesus isn’t giving us an out so that we don’t have to do anything.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle of each of these two categories. And therefore we all have some level of responsibility to serve one another. To make sure our full bellies and riches are not our comfort, but instead, our right relationship with God through the care of those in any kind of need is our comfort. This teaching from Jesus is also a reminder that when you are poor. When you are hungry. When you are mourning. When you feel hated and reviled. You are seen by God. Your suffering is not forever. And, in a healthy Christian community, there is comfort to be found through relationships with your siblings in Christ. Through the belief that, as we are one body, what happens to one member affects all of us. So that when we are suffering, someone who is in a season of abundance in their life will be there to hold us, comfort us, and raise us up. To return to the blessing of deep, abiding joy and contentment. Amen.