The blessings and woes in today’s gospel passage are counterintuitive and contradictory to the common Jewish understanding of the time, or even of our own times. The common understanding is cursed are the poor. Cursed are those who suffer and weep; cursed are those who are hungry. Jesus pronounces them blessed! The woe statements are also counterintuitive in the same way. The common understanding is blessed are the rich, the satisfied, the laughing and appreciated ones. Jesus pronounces them cursed.
Who is the assumed subject of these blessings and curses expressed in the passive voice? That subject is God. It is unspoken! Some people put the agency of cursing the poor to God. Jesus challenges it radically. Blessed are you, poor! The subject of this unspoken blessing is also God. Jesus – God – pronounces in first person, I have blessed the poor. By reversing this common understanding, Jesus establishes that God is not the originator of inequalities. Who has been teaching on behalf of God? Who taught the poor that they were cursed? Both the lessons and the teachers should be out of the syllabus, out of the school!
It takes a lot of trust to believe in what Jesus proposes—to believe that the poor are blessed. Reading this text together with the announcement of the Jubilee Year at Nazareth, we get a taste of what Jesus actually intends. He is proclaiming liberation and giving the poor property rights in the Kingdom of God. The proclamation of the Jubilee year imposes upon the rich to give all the accumulated landed property back to the original owners. It was meant to bring back equality among the children of Israel. Jesus now pronounces not only real estate equality but emotional equalities as well! The joyful will cry, and those who weep will be consoled! The Kingdom of God with Divine Equality!
To understand reestablishing of equality by Jesus, we need to reconstruct the scenario in which Jesus is preaching. Israel as a Kingdom is precarious with the Roman governor on one side and the half-blood Jew Herod as the puppet king on the other. People are feeling displaced in their land. When Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God, where the poor would have property rights (“The Kingdom of God is yours”), the people understood it not as a kingdom in heaven after death. Israel expected the Messianic King on earth, and the people who listened to the promise of the Kingdom of God believed in a physical reality. Imagine what hopes he was able to fill in the people who were dispossessed and cornered! The neglected, the guilt-ridden, the cursed are given hope of self-respect and dignity.
Luke’s understanding of divine justice is sprinkled all over his gospel. We can hear the reversal of roles in the Magnificat of Mary, in the synagogue at Nazareth, or in the parables of the rich and poor.
Insensitivity among the community is at the root of all disparities. We get used to and we consider it normal to have people who are hungry, poor and embarrassed. Sometimes, the curse of God is the name we give to the justification we make for our insensitivity. The ways we exonerate ourselves!
Sometimes, the poor are not considered cursed, but they are a curse themselves. They are considered liabilities or instruments of cheap labour! Getting rid of the poor rather than of poverty is the central focus of some governments. The sinful apathy to the poverty, injustice and oppression of the other are structural sins we live with. We are grossly responsible for them.
We also find the Church and many people now working for the disadvantaged, people after the heart of God, who finds it uncomfortable to go on living without engaging with those who suffer and alleviate their pains. But those who do not care for the poor? When will Jesus be able to call them blessed are you too?