A Sermon from a Level Place (February 16, 2025)
Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:12-26
Jesus went to the mountain to pray, and spent the night in prayer to God. When day came, he called the twelve apostles, and then … he came down with them and stood on a level place with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all over. Then he looked up at his disciples and began to teach them.
Early in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, we find a report of a sermon by Jesus that includes a summary of his main teachings. The content of these two sermons is similar, but the settings are very different. Matthew, writing for a Jewish audience, tells us of a Sermon on the Mount – just as Moses went up Mount Sinai to give the Jewish Law to the people, Jesus also gives the New Law from a mountain.
But our gospel passage today comes from Luke, who is writing for a non-Jewish audience, and Luke gives us what we might call the Sermon Off the Mount. The sermon given from a level place. In Luke’s story, Jesus goes up the mountain to spend the night in prayer. In the morning, still on the mountaintop, he chooses and calls the twelve apostles, which sounds like a real top-down, hierarchical move … but then Jesus and the Twelve go down the mountain to a level plain. Where they meet not only many other followers of Jesus, but a vast crowd of people who were sick and troubled in spirit, looking for deliverance and healing as well as teaching.
Not only does Jesus come down to the level plain, to be on the same level as his disciples and the crowds, but when Jesus begins to speak, Luke tells us that Jesus “looked up” at his disciples to teach them. The teachings of Jesus, Luke wants us to see, are not pronouncements from on high, but are offered to us from below, to all of us – disciples of Jesus and just regular people, all of us gathered together on the same level, where Jesus has come down to meet us and talk up to us, not down to us.
And the message that Jesus delivers to his disciples likewise reverses the standard definitions of who is higher and therefore closer to God and who is lowest and farthest from God. It was commonly assumed in those days, and in our own day, that the wealthy and successful are the fortunate ones, the blessed ones, the ones we should look up to and seek to benefit from. The common wisdom is, people don’t become billionaires unless they’re smart and gifted and lucky, so we should probably put them in charge of everything, right?
And to be fair, that is one way that many people have conceived of God and religious practice. That there is a hierarchy of superior and lesser people, and God sits at the highest point of that hierarchy as the most superior being of all. So if you want to be right with God, know your place in the hierarchy of dominance and submission, pay proper respect to God and everyone above you, and you’ll be rewarded both in this life and in the next. Step out of line, and we can’t be responsible for what might happen. This is the religion that says: blessed are the rich, blessed are the successful, blessed are those who have what they want, woe to the poor, woe to those who depend on the charity of others, woe to those who are hated and despised and looked down upon.
Jesus, needless to say, has a different perspective. Jesus who comes down the mountain with his chosen apostles and meets the crowd on a level plain, who looks up to his disciples and tells them that he sees that there is more to them than their place in the social hierarchy. That they are of infinite dignity and worth, made in the image and likeness of God who is infinitely greater than the one at the top of this world’s order of domination and hierarchy. And so the poor are the ones who are really blessed, because in God’s kingdom they are already on a level plain with the rich. In God’s kingdom the hungry and the mourners are the ones who are like God because their infinite dignity and worth are hidden, just like God’s. The despised and hated are the ones who know God best of all, and like Jesus they can teach us from below what God’s kingdom is all about.
And if someone thinks their dignity and worth come from their place in the hierarchy, in their wealth and their success and their good name – well, Jesus has bad news for you, because if that’s what you want that’s all you’re going to get, and none of those things last forever. You can’t take any of them with you. And then where will you be?
The teaching of Jesus is that God comes to us from below, and therefore it is those who have the least status in this world who have the most to teach us about God. Which is why Luke tells us that Jesus gives this teaching by coming down the mountain to join the crowds on the level plain, to be with those who were in need of healing and deliverance, to teach his disciples from beneath them. Jesus takes the place of the poor, of the lowly one, of the poor and needy one standing on a level plain as the equal of everyone else in the crowd, and it is from this place that he speaks to his disciples about who God is and shows them, as well as tells them, what God’s reign is all about.
According to Luke, Jesus stands on a level plain with his disciples and with the crowds of poor and sick people gathered to ask healing from Jesus. But the teaching of Jesus is something he addresses only to the disciples to whom he looks up. How are the disciples then related to the crowd? I have never heard a better answer to this question than one given by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a poem he wrote from his prison cell in Nazi Germany in the last year of his life. The title of the poem, in German, is Christen und Heiden, literally Christians and Heathens, but really Christians and others, the disciples and the crowd.
It’s a short poem, three stanzas, and it goes like this:
All go to God in their distress,
Seek help and pray for bread and happiness,
Deliverance from pain, guilt, and death.
All do, Christians and others.
All go to God in God’s distress,
Find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread,
Watch God tortured by sin, weakness, and death.
Christians stand by God in his agony.
God goes to all in their distress,
Satisfies body and soul with God’s bread,
Dies, crucified for all, Christians and others,
And both alike forgiving.
The first stanza of the poem reminds us that all people turn to God in times of need – to seek healing and peace, to seek deliverance from sickness and death. Everybody needs these things – the poor and the mourners and the outcast are maybe more aware of their need, but everyone turns to God for help in times of need, whether they are believers or not.
And in the third stanza Bonhoeffer affirms that God goes to all people in their need – believers and unbelievers, Christians and others, disciples and the crowd. God goes to all people in their need and fulfills those needs, body and soul, feeds them with their daily bread, dies for them, forgiving everybody – all people, rich and poor, Christians and non-Christians alike.
What makes Christians unique is expressed only in the second stanza – that God comes to bring us healing and bread and forgiveness by sharing in our suffering, Christians recognize where God is suffering and stand with God in that suffering. In a letter Bonhoeffer wrote just after his poem, he explains the point further. He wrote: “God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and this is exactly the way, the only way in which he can be with us and help. … We are summoned to participate in God’s suffering at the hands of a godless world. This is what makes Christians what they are.”
If you were hoping to hear this morning that God’s blessing consists in being wealthy and successful and popular and living your best life, that those who have it good in this world are closest to God, I’m sorry, but that’s not what Jesus says or does in today’s gospel passage, or any other passage for that matter. That is not the good news Jesus came to announce.
But Jesus does give us good news today, and it is this: The one who can heal us and raise us to life has come among us, the one who has what we all need and want has come down the mountain to stand with us face-to-face on a level plain, to join us in our weakness and our need, and to teach those who wish to follow him how God comes to us and where we can find God: from below.
The rich and powerful will probably miss the point as long as they remain rich and powerful, but that won’t be forever. But if you know your need, your illness, your weakness, your hunger, your humility, you will know where to find God, where to find the source of the bread and shelter and forgiveness you seek. Rejoice, and be glad, for the kingdom of God is yours.