There Are Three Kinds of People in the World

Text: Luke 6:17-27
February 11, 2007

There are two kinds of people in the world.

There are those who are poor, and those who are rich. There are those who are hungry, and those who are full. There are those who weep, and those who laugh. Is that right? Is that what Jesus is saying here? Are there poor hungry weepers and rich stuffed laughers?

In the time when Jesus was healing and preaching, there were many, many people who were poor, hungry, and powerless. If you drew one of those demographic charts that look like pyramids, with big bases of poorer people at the bottom and gradually smaller layers of gradually richer people, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet at the very top—if you drew one of those for Palestine 2000 years ago, it would look more like a thumbtack than a pyramid. With a wide horizontal base and a vertical spike. Almost everybody was poor. A very few were very rich. And a tiny bunch, way at the top, at the point, had almost all the power and most of the goods.

It is different today, but not a lot different. In the U.S. now, the richest person has about 350,000 times more stuff than the average person. (That means that for every dollar normal people have, the richest person has 350,000 dollars. For every cup of coffee you and I buy, the richest person can buy a pretty good house in Cambridge; for every latte, he can buy a house on Brattle Street.) In this country, the top 1% of the people own about a quarter of all the stuff that can be owned. In the world, the top 1% owns 40% of the stuff. The poorest 50% of the people, that’s three billion people, own only 1% of the stuff.

So it is not much of a shock to hear Jesus talk about poor people and rich people. What is—and was—a shock was to hear him say that the poor, hungry, and sorrowful people are blessed and that the rich, stuffed, and happy are to be pitied. How you define rich and poor depends on where you stand—and about where your friends and neighbors stand in relation to you. But I’m sure that you could classify people by their reaction to Jesus’ words. I suspect that the people in the first group that Jesus talks about, the poor hungry ones, thought, “hooray, finally!” And that the people in the second group, the rich full ones, thought things like, “the guy is delusional; let’s be realistic; what’s wrong with money?” They knew who they were.

Both those who celebrate and those who protest cannot claim that Jesus is speaking about some other world. In Luke’s gospel, when Jesus talks about wealth and power, he means wealth and power in a physical, earthly way.

The word “blessed” here pretty much means filled with abundance. It has to do not with things of the spirit. It has to do with power and riches and privilege.

By the same token, the word “poor” means destitute, without anything. It means not those who don’t have enough money, but those who have no money. If you know someone who has less than you have, then you are not poor according to the meaning of this word. There is a paradox in Jesus’ proclamation. Blessed are the poor is an oxymoron. Rich are you who are poor, Jesus seems to say.

And the word “woe” means “alas!” or “too bad.” It is not a word of condemnation. It is a word of grief. A word of sympathy. If anything, Jesus’ proclamation about the rich is one of pity and compassion. I’m sorry; too bad for you who are rich.

The same extremes are found in the other blessings and woes that Luke lists. To weep means to wail in intense sorrow. To laugh means to be full of joy. To hunger is to look on a table piled high with food and know that none is for you. To be filled is to be free to take your pick of that feast.

Jesus speaks to a crowd that knows that the Bible tells them—as it tells us—to care for the poor and hungry. The mandate of this care comes from our common humanity as identically children of God. The stories of the Bible emphasize that we are created beings, and also that we are freed beings. All the Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt, not just the leaders and those with connections in high places.

But that common bond erodes pretty quickly. Jesus speaks to the crowd—who are mostly poor people. They hear him say what is way too obvious to them. The poor see the rich, because they had better see them: the rich have power over the lives of the poor. But the rich do not see the poor. The poor are by and large invisible, hidden by the wish of the rich not to see them. Which is what Jesus means when he says “they exclude you.”

If there are two kinds of people in the world, they are not granted equal weight in the world’s balance. When this happens, it is an injustice. That’s what the word “injustice” means in the Bible. A glitch in the plan, a distortion in God’s hopes and intent for the world, caused by the sin of people in their greed and fear. Injustice in the world is a sign that the idols are prevailing over God.

It certainly is true that there are rich and poor, hungry and well-fed. That may be the way it is. There may even be reasonable-sounding explanations for it. But both those who are poor and those who are rich know one thing: it is not just. It is not right. It is not just for some to sit by the side starving while other are more than satisfied. That may be the way it is, but Jesus reminds the crowd—and us—that it is not God’s way.

The prophets remind us that the community of God is a just community. Not a world in which the satisfied take a little better care of the hungry. Not a world in which the privileged give a little bit more to the needy. But a world that works in a different way, works in such a way that there is no poverty, no hunger, no oppression, no violence.

Jesus’ teaching here to the crowd is both a vision and an announcement that that’s how it is in God’s world. This is not a passage to elevate the ambitions of some and castigate others, though it does serve notice that in Jesus things will change. He is not saying there are two kinds of people in this world. This is not a call for the rich to be nicer and for the poor to hold on a little tighter to hope. It is a call for all people to welcome God’s kingdom. In the world of sin, only the rich and powerful get abundance. In the God’s kingdom, all do.

The beatitudes, as this list of blessings is called, comes in Luke right after a scene of healing. Jesus, it says, healed those who were troubled with unclean demons. We are all of us, poor and rich, hungry and full, sorrowful and jubilant, troubled by unclean spirits. The injustice of the world wears us away, makes us tired and crazy. We follow Jesus in the expectation that he will cure the world of the unclean demons of injustice.

The joke goes that there are three kinds of people. Those who are good at math and those who are not. I wonder about that virtual third person. A being who is like a spirit. This imaginary prophet who is unable to see the world divided into two halves. But who sees that in the eyes of God, in the just world, there is only one kind of people.