The doctor calls and says, “I have good news and bad news.” “What’s the good news?” you ask. “Your tests showed you have 24 hours to live” she replies. That’s terrible good news!” you say, “What’s the bad news?” She says, “I didn’t have time to call you about it yesterday.”
Good news, bad news jokes are a staple of our humor, but maybe they are a pretty ancient form of wit. In our Gospel text for this coming Sunday, Luke 6:17-26, Jesus offers a slightly different form of four of the Beatitudes, blessings, we typically recall from Matthew 5, and pairs them with four woes. There is good news for some and bad news for others, with the blessings and woes being distributed in the opposite directions we might expect.
So the poor are blessed, but the rich warned. The hungry and promised food, but the well-fed told to expect hunger. Those who are sad are to be given laughter, while those laughing now will be crying someday. Finally, those who are despised and hated for Jesus’ sake are offered great reward in heaven, while the popular and respected are lumped together with the false prophets, implying they will receive a divine judgment like those liars.
The beatitudes and woes Jesus speaks in Luke, during the so-called “Sermon on the Plain” (which I think is the same event as the Sermon on the Mount, but could have been simply a similar speech by Jesus), are harder to “spiritualize” than those in Matthew. Being “poor in spirit” or “hungry and thirsty for righteousness” sound like something we might ascribe to ourselves while still being materially fairly comfortable in the world. But plain poverty and hunger are pretty clearly the attributes of those at the margins of society, which is not where I or most of you reading this probably find ourselves.
So the question for us might be whether Jesus’ good news, bad news joke is actually on us. Is there any good news in this text for middle-class Americans who’ve seldom, if ever, suffered for our commitment to Christ? Let’s think about that together this week.