Restoration is Possible
Luke's beatitudes and the hope of shared abundance | Epiphany 6, Year C
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God…
But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.”
When John Liu first came to the Loess Plateau in the north of China he witnessed a traumatized landscape. It was bare of vegetation, eroded by wind and rain, the nearby desert was encroaching, turning the fertile soil into dry dust. Poverty was rampant and the people living there, eking out what they could from farming, were plagued by dust storms in the dry season and mudslides in the wet.
It had not always been this way. The Loess Plateau had been the birthplace of Chinese civilization and though arid, it had once been lush with green, forests covering the hillsides. But nearly four thousand years of settled agriculture had taken its toll. Liu was there to document a bold plan to reverse the devastation and restore the landscape. What happened would change John Liu’s life and career forever.
Restoring landscapes decimated by millennia of abuse takes bold measures. The tools vary according to the geography: controlled fires are used to clear undergrowth or restore prairies, invasive plants are uprooted, rivers silted by erosion are dredged, and gullied hillsides are terraced. Before healing can come to the landscape, the old patterns of destruction have to be unsettled and shifted. And sometimes this unsettling creates conflicts. Coastal restoration projects are often up against beach front property owners; removing levees or damns to restore natural river patterns can disrupt water supplies for cities and farms. Though all are better off with the healing of the whole, that reality is sometimes hard to live with in the face of the losses that such healing requires. And it is no different with the reign of God that is breaking into the world.
Our Gospel reading for this Sunday is a piece of God’s map of restoration. Instead of addressing a traumatized landscape, Jesus is speaking to a traumatized people. The peasants gathered around him were share croppers, living under the burden of heavy taxes, both to the elite of Israel who lived in the cities and to the Romans who marched along their roads. Many had been required to give up their children to slavery in order to pay debts, and more than a few young girls had been employed in prostitution as their only means of survival. They were poor, and hungry, and mourning—and Jesus was here to tell them that with the arrival of God’s reign the situation had turned. They are blessed because God has come to heal their lives. It is good news to all who are willing to live into the reality of its coming, but that coming was no reform with small measures. Jesus knew that those who were not poor, and hungry, and mourning might not be ready to give up their power or turn over their land for this project of restoration. So it is that Jesus joins in the prophetic tradition of Israel, offering woes along with blessings.
The prophets of Israel had been speaking the message of God’s restoration for a long while. They would arise whenever the work of healing was diverted and God’s economy of manna was thwarted. Manna had been the gift of God to the hungry of Israel as they wandered through the Sinai wilderness. It was food that was plenty and yet could never be stored. It was enough with no surplus. No one could be rich with manna, it was a gift from the abundance of God. And it was in manna’s pattern that Israel’s economy was to be formed. All too often, though, Israel found ways around this shared abundance and it was then that God would send prophets. Archeologists have dug through the layers of Israel’s ancient cities and found that the times when the prophets were active were those when a few people lived in huge houses while most lived in slums. That was the situation in which Jesus found himself as he preached to a group of peasants on the plane of Galilee.
That’s the background of the Gospel and it is clearly good news for the poor, but what hope is there for the rich? I’m personally invested in the answer to this question because I, along with most of us here, am wealthy. Many of us are well off by American standards and all of us are well off according to the standards of global poverty. We may not have all we want, but few of us are likely go hungry, and though we may struggle (and I don’t want to diminish the anxiety of that), we do not generally have to worry about supplying our most basic needs. So what are we to make of the woe here? Are we among the rich, full, and happy people Jesus is warning? And if so, what can we do to be among the blessed?
The word for rich used in Luke is plousios and it is found 28 times in the New Testament. Every instance is negative except for two. And those exceptions are where I think we can find the Gospel today. To be plousios is to be “one who has plenty.” And that’s where we get our first clue to the problem here. Abundance in the economy of God’s creation, the economy of manna, isn’t any one person’s to possess, but rather a reality of God’s gift to all in common. Abundance is something we gain not as a personal possession but as a participation in God’s life of generosity. That’s why the positive references to wealth refer to the riches of God and Christ. God is rich, but God’s wealth isn’t a richness in possessions. Instead, as Paul puts it in Ephesians, God is rich in mercy. And Christ, though plousios became poor, so that we might become rich.
God has made a world of abundance, fueling it with the flourishing energy of God’s life. God is rich and the creation made from God’s love is abundant with the wealth of God’s mercy. All of us get to participate in that wealth. The problem comes when we try to hold on to it ourselves, when we have more than enough and yet are not generous with those who have less than enough. Gandhi had the Gospel message right: there is enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed. What Jesus is inviting us into through God’s reign is not a woeful reality of deprivation. Jesus is the man who fed over five thousand people until there were leftovers, and helped a crew of poor fishermen haul in the catch of their lives. That’s the reality of creation’s abundance and he wants to extend that reality with our help. Next week we’ll hear Jesus giving some clear instructions on how this works with his call for those who have two coats to give to the one with none, and those with resources to spare to give to those who ask. God is the one who is rich and we get to participate in that abundance and the joy of sharing within it.
It would be sad if in the face of that invitation we chose instead to hold onto our own stuff, pretending it was abundance and fullness all our own. It would be woeful if we were happy because of our success and sense of security rather than letting go so that we could join joyful dance of creation, the celebration of God’s gathered people. The woes here are not a warning of condemnation, but a loving call to distracted hearts toward the real abundance of the world. If woe is to be had, it is the choice of those who embrace their own possessions over God’s generous gifts, like a property owner who holds on to a dam that has cut off the life from the valley below. God is inviting us to join in restoring the world, but it will take our willingness to engage bold measures to do so. Yet if we let go of our power and possessions, offering them back to God, the results will be full of blessings and beauty. Restoration is possible.
The Loess Valley of China is no longer a place of bare hillsides and dust storms. The images John Liu captured of its transformation are stunning and I recommend you look them up. In his documentary, Hope for a Changing Climate, he shows that when people come together and are willing to unsettle the way things are, great healing can happen. And though John still picks up his camera and documents the work, he has also begun to organize other large scale projects of restoration. Among them is an ambitious plan to re-green the Sinai wilderness, the very place where God gave the gift of manna to teach Israel the lessons of abundance. It’s a project that is good news to the poor who live there and the creatures who once thrived in the landscape, but it is only possible if the wealthy give up their power and resources to help it happen. It’s not unlike the coming of God’s kingdom, a restoration project so large the whole of creation is included. God, who is rich, is beginning the work. Our call is to give up our small claims of possession and join in the abundance of God’s love so that it can flow, watering the deserts of our world and hearts and make them green with life.
You words are the result of rightheartedness, study, humility - among other things - and COURAGE 🙏👍.
Wonderful article. So relevant to today. I was blessed to read it.