Saint Margaret’s
Anglican Church
Budapest
The Third Sunday Before Lent
16 February 2025
Jeremiah 17:5-10;
Psalm 1;
1 Corinthians 15:12-20;
Luke 6:17-26
The Gospel of Luke is, almost uniquely among the four Gospels, one of radical reversals of
fortune. It is a Gospel, in other words, in which we frequently find things turned on their head.
Think for instance of the beautiful Magnificat, the prayer in verse which Luke puts into the
mouth of Mary, the mother-to-be of our Lord. She marvels that the Lord “has brought down the
powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.” And keep in mind that this is already in Chapter One.
What is down one day is up the next in the topsy-turvy Gospel of Luke. The old and barren, such
as Elizabeth, conceive and bear a child. The almighty Son of God is born essentially in a lowly
garden shed. The poor become rich; and the rich end up poor. The hungry eat; and the satiated
starve. Nothing is as we might expect, and alas little is as we think it to be. The world is full of
surprises, full of miracles. Anything and everything is possible, it seems. And in Luke’s telling,
that in itself is the Good News. Expect the unexpected, Luke might well tell us. Wait and see.
And we see this played out in our Gospel account this morning, again from Luke. Jesus, having
just spent the night in prayer on a mountain and chosen his Apostles by the mrning light, now
descends the mountain with them in tow. And it is presumably at the foot of this unnamed
mountain and “on a level place,
” as the text tells us, that he and they are confronted, one might
almost say overwhelmed, by “a great crowd” from near and far, all of whom have come out to
hear and to be healed. Night turns to day. Disciple becomes Apostle. The few become the
many. Illness turns to wholeness. And mountain becomes flatland.
And it is there on what might today be referred to as a level playing field that Jesus in response
looks up toward his disciples and teaches them. This must surely be one of very few times
when our Lord looks up to anyone. But no Sermon on the Mount for Luke’s Jesus. There he is,
as so beautifully depicted in Jan Brueghel’s painting, almost lost among the throngs. You can
spot him, if you look closely, in the circle of light and people just off center left on what looks
like a meadow. And while his message, as delivered in the Gospel of Luke, is deceptively
similar to that found in the Gospel of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and Beatitudes, there are
differences.
Luke’s Beatitudes, or Blessings, are fewer in number, shorter, and more direct and practical
than Matthew’s version. Matthew’s “poor in spirit,” for instance, are now in Luke’s telling,
“poor,” plain and simple. And while Matthew’s Jesus speaks in the third person of those “whohunger and thirst for righteousness,” our Lord in Luke’s account speaks simply of “you who are
hungry,” you in other words sitting in front of me who do not have enough to eat right now. The
abstract becomes the all too real. Luke depicts Jesus addressing the real-life issues of
ordinary people in the here-and-now, people concerned with the practical matters of everyday
life and, well, everyday beatitude. Luke’s Jesus by the way does not say as he does in
Matthew’s telling, “Blessed are those…” Luke rather has Jesus proclaim, “Blessed are you…”
But if there is blessing and beatitude in the world around us, you can be sure there is also woe
and worry. In Luke’s telling, the Beatitudes or blessings are balanced with woes and polar
reversals not found elsewhere in the Scriptures. “Woe to you…” cautions Jesus in the Gospel
of Luke and nowhere else. Woe to you, the rich and otherwise fortunate. Be on guard. Things
are not as they appear. Things will not always remain as they are. In a world in which too often
oligarchs and despots seem to prevail, the powerful become the autocratic, and, the poor
become alas ever more destitute, help and change, our Lord assures us in Luke’s Gospel, is on
the way.
Good fortune and riches are not necessarily a sign of God’s favour and blessing, no matter what
wealthy televangelists may tell you. In fact, in God’s grand scheme of things, in God’s upside-
down economy, wealth and good fortune count for little or nothing. Jesus, in Luke’s version of
our Lord’s sermon, proclaims that God’s favour is not just with the “poor in spirit,” as Matthew
would have it, but with the poor, period. A revolutionary thought, if ever there was one. Luke’s
Gospel was, and remains, one of the most challenging and dangerous books of the entire New
Testament canon.
For Luke, Jesus’ coming has changed all that is wrong with the world. In our Lord, the end-time
of peace and justice, the Kingdom of God, has already come near, already touched this
impoverished world of ours and given us a glimpse of a world of justice and divine grace.
Present and future meld into one, as do the physical and the spiritual. And this inner or deeper
reality becomes in turn the foundation or cornerstone of our Lord’s message for those who
accept his words.
We well shake our heads in disbelief to learn of the evil around us: the threat of war and the
destruction it brings; the abuse and neglect of children, the aged, and the sick; endemic
poverty and civil strife in so many corners of the globe. It would be all too easy to lose all hope;
to lose all patience; to give up on our world. But if Luke’s world-vision is filled with reversals
and about-turns, it yet offers hope for our world today, a world as filled with woe and
misfortune as was the time when our Lord lived among us, as has been any age or time before
or since.
But in Luke’s telling of the Gospel of Jesus, the bad news is sometimes the good news. The Lord
“has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the
hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Woes have become blessings. And
ultimate evil points us to ultimate Good; to salvation; to God. Every Gospel story there is, be it
found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, every word our Lord speaks, every gesture he makes,
every healing he works, leads us to this conclusion; leads us finally to the woe and beatitude of
the Cross and Resurrection; or as Luke might tell us, to the greatest reversal of all time and
eternity.
Amen.
The Revd Dr Frank Hegedűs
Comments