The Reverend Canon Dr John Holdsworth writes: Both Matthew and Luke contain versions of the Lord’s Prayer. They are different. The Church uses Matthew’s version. Both Matthew and Luke have an account of what Jesus said as he presided at the Last Supper. They are different. We use Matthew’s version. Both Matthew and Luke have a section early in their Gospels that contains a condensed version of Jesus’s teaching, a ‘sermon’, which begins with beatitudes—declarations of who is blessed. They are different but the likelihood is that if we are familiar with them at all, we are familiar with Matthew’s version.
Our Gospel for this year is Luke, offering an opportunity to note some of those differences and to consider whether we so gain a new take on familiar passages. The beatitudes is a good place to start.
Matthew’s version of the beatitudes is part of the so-called Sermon on the Mount. The sermon as a whole is largely concerned with a new understanding of the law, the Torah of Judaism, and the mountain is a powerful symbol calling to mind Moses and his initial reception of the law on Mt Sinai. In effect, Jesus is a new Moses. Luke’s sermon is much shorter and strips away all discussion of law: he is largely writing for people for whom it would make no sense; people who were not brought up in, and were not very much at one with, Jewish culture—in fact, people like us.
Matthew’s Gospel, up to this point (chapter 5), has contained little in the way of teaching content. Jesus has been described as healing and teaching, and we have seen him involved in individual healing accounts. Immediately before the sermon, he called the disciples from the seashore in a familiar account.
In Luke’s Gospel, we know by this point a lot more about the content of Jesus’s message. We know from Mary’s song, the Magnificat, that he will put down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the humble and meek. We know from Jesus’s first sermon in the Synagogue at Nazareth that he identifies as the one mentioned in Isaiah who has been anointed to bring good news to the poor. And, having called disciples from the seashore (and also Levi from the tax office) Jesus in Luke has gone up a hill/mountain and called twelve from among the disciples and rebranded them as apostles.
Pointedly Luke says that Jesus came down from the mountain with these apostles and delivered his sermon, his first charge to them, on level ground, on the plain, down to earth. That might suggest a reference to the next stage in the Moses story in Exodus, where Moses comes down from the mountain, from his heady conversation with God, and is literally brought down to earth as he has to address an unruly crowd of people who have abandoned God and begun to worship a golden calf.
Then we see the most striking difference. Luke has just four beatitudes and they are counterbalanced with four woes. The message is direct and unavoidable. Whereas Matthew speaks in an objective, almost academic way about the poor in spirit, Luke is speaking about people who are actually poor. Whereas Matthew speaks about those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, Luke speaks about those who are actually hungry and thirsty. He also addresses those who are disregarded and dismissed. In each case there is a reversal. The effect of the woes is to give the beatitudes what we might almost call a political edge.
That potential is used by the playwright Christopher Hampson in his play Savages, which mourns the extinction/genocide of the Indigenous people of Brazil in the 1960s and 70s. In one scene, the revolutionary defender of the Indigenous people shares with a diplomatic hostage what he calls the new beatitudes, which begin ‘Blessed are the Corporations’ and includes lines like “Blessed are they who only hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be easily satisfied.”
In the world as we see it, and mourn over it, we can sympathise with those who believe that the ones who appear blessed are the tech billionaires; those who see Indigenous peoples and their cultures simply as barriers to real estate development; and those in power who mis-use religion, thereby dishonouring it, to reassure themselves that God is on their side, rather than, as Luke tells us, on the side of the powerless.
The reversal is accentuated by the woes. The rich, the well-fed, those who laugh now and those whom society places on a pedestal, will all experience what it is like to be poor, to mourn and to be disrespected. A gentler reading of the text might say, O that they could walk in other men’s shoes. O that they could know what it is like to really be poor, to really be hungry.
This was brought home to me recently when I was in Alexandria in Egypt. Alexandria is a delightful, beautiful and hugely historic city. But one of its suburbs is a district called Ras el Soda.
Ras el Soda is one of the poorest districts in Alexandria. It is the sort of place where the dogs compete with the goats and the humans to re-use what can be retrieved from the ubiquitous piles of other people’s rubbish. Its narrow, unmade streets are dark with foreboding. Its multi-occupancy tenements seem unwelcoming and there is a general air of menace. The people who live here are poor Egyptians who have migrated north from Upper Egypt in search of work. Many of the men find work on construction sites. Divorce is common. The culture of Upper Egypt means there are often four or five children in the family group. With large numbers of people often together, perhaps in a single room in which all the living has to be done, aspiration means having a screen for your toilet.
In this unlikely setting, The Anglican Church in Egypt has managed a family and community development centre for over twenty years, one of six in the country. It is a beacon of life, safety and hope in a dark place full of seemingly hopeless lives.
In its rooms you can see the bright children’s pre-school, the play area, the women’s literary group, the children learning English by singing ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’; see lives being restored and, especially, hear laughter. It would be good to be there with those who sing of asylum-seekers and refugees the ever-clamorous chorus, “They should go back where they came from”—to see exactly where they did come from, and to ask those members of the chorus, “What would you do? What are you doing for them?”
That centre, the others like it, and countless other projects run by churches across the world seek to give substance to Luke’s version of the beatitudes. To bring laughter to those who mourn their lives; to bring self-respect to those dismissed by society; to bring practical help to the hungry.
Actually it’s little wonder that we prefer Matthew’s philosophical and objective presentation to Luke’s revolutionary challenge that gives the poor hope and the rich nightmares. The world still has its golden calves. Disciples, apostles cannot simply live on the mountain.
Image credit: James Tissot, The Beatitudes Sermon, c. 1890, Brooklyn Museum (Wikipedia)
