The Sermon on the Plain

How many people know that there was another sermon preached by Jesus on a level plain and that he also preached a set of Beatitudes? Until today I did not know this. I have been preaching for almost 46 years and this bit of scripture missed me. In Luke's gospel , chapter 6 we read similar words to those we expect to find in the Sermon on the mount. Here too, Jesus speaks about reversed values. He says the rich are to be pitied but the poor will be blessed, the well fed will go hungry whilst the hungry ones will be fed, those who now laugh will mourn and weep and those who weep will laugh.

When you look at the coming of Jesus you read in the Magnificat how the commonly held values will be reversed. Jesus preaches on the mountain and confirms that these values will be reversed. The rich man comes to Jesus and learns that he must sell everything before he can follow Jesus and inherit eternal life. Even the disciples are surprised at all this because they held to the convention that a rich man is rich as a blessing from God. Look back in the Old Testament and you see how Job is a man considered to be a model of faithfulness because of the numbers of camels, sheep etc he possesses. The whole story of Job is to test him to see how his faith stands up to the removal of everything he owns and the infliction of a skin disease and halitosis.

Jesus must have shocked his listeners when he told them they had to rid themselves of riches which got in the way of spiritual progress. The crowds came to hear him because he had become famous throughout the land. But what they heard on this occasion must have left them scratching their heads. He shook them to their toes with his words. In other words, if his listeners had any preconceived ideas about how good they were, they soon learned that what they thought of themselves was based on the wrong priorities.

These words have just as powerful a meaning today as they did then. We live in an acquisitive society, a consumer society which rates itself on possessions. The message of Jesus is that all this accumulation of wealth and possessions ultimately has no value at all. Now that makes it a difficult message to preach and certainly one which does not attract many listeners. We now, once more pose the question, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?"

God calls us to follow Jesus but he does not make the task easy. It is rather like the people who heard "I have nothing to offer you except blood, sweat and tears." It was a harsh statement but it spelled out the way forward. It is often the case that we are exhorted to take the hardest way as being the best option when we would prefer to take the short cut or the smoother route. When a pilot is faced with a difficult storm ahead he has to decide how to deal with it. He can fly right through it or he can choose to fly round or over it. The choices are those which involve more flying time and fuel expenditure but he faces up to the fact that he will arrive safely at his destination this way. In the same way we are exhorted by Jesus to face up to harder and longer ways to get to a destination.

The beatitude asks us a straight question. Will you take the way of the world or will you trust God's way? To take God's way is our challenge. But it carries no promise of easy times or direct paths. There may come times when you think you cannot possibly be going in the right direction. The Israelites wandered round the Sinai Desert for years until they reached the promised land. But they learned to trust God and he delivered them in the end.

In life there are many pitfalls and many diversions and we have to learn to navigate around them. Some years ago we were travelling from France through Belgium and Holland into Germany. Ii was following the map carefully and suddenly found a sign before me that Ii did not understand. "What does that say?" i said to mu wife. She had been reading the "book" before we set off and was able to says, "It says Diversion." We took the diversion direction and all was well. In fact this was the most difficult journey we have ever made because it was at night and there was no one about to ask our way. A journey that should have taken about 3 hours took over 5 hours because I had great difficulty following the road atlas. We were in and out of Germany like a fiddler's elbow until we took the certain way which involved following 3 sides of a square!

The way forward is quite simple. It is the way God leads us. It is we who make it difficult by questioning better judgement all the way. We keep on learning that the only way is to trust God.