Scripture: Jeremiah 17:5-10;  Luke 6:17-26

“The heart is more devious than any other thing, perverse too: who can pierce its secrets?”

-- Jeremiah 17:9

I suppose it is appropriate on this day after Valentine’s Day to begin with the human heart in its metaphorical sense, as a sign for what we usually call romantic love. The literary tradition of romantic love, which has a specific history in the West going back to the French troubadours of the Middle Ages, and a specific complement of literary clichés, emphasizes the mysterious movements of erotic love. It is worth noting that in the Bible there is no concept of romantic love, and that the heart is a metaphor for what we call the will, the governing capacity in the human being. Emotion in the Bible is located in the belly or “bowels” as the King James Version says, as in the phrase “bowels of mercy,” governance is located in the heart. The Bible is perhaps more realistic in this symbolism than the romantic tradition, because strong emotion registers most vividly in the digestive tract, although it also does make the heart beat faster. Let’s not quibble about metaphors, however, but rather ask what precisely our texts are saying to us.

I begin by comparing our two passages as I did last week. Both have the form of blessings and curses. Jeremiah says, “A curse on the man who puts is trust in man (vs. 5),” and “A blessing on the man who puts his trust in the Lord (vs. 7). Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor: yours is the kingdom of God (6:20), and “Alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now (6:24).” In the prophet the twinned blessing and curse is followed by a straightforward statement about the devious human heart and the warning that God knows that devious heart and will judge it, that we cannot hide our deep wills from our creator. In the Gospel blessings and curses are also twinned and in the same structural place as the straightforward statement in the prophet, the Gospel has the statement, albeit in the form of another blessing and cursing dyad, to the effect that one is blessed when people hate and abuse and drive you out because they have always done that to the those who speak truth, and that one is cursed when all speak well of one. Abuse and expulsion is a sign that one is speaking the word of Christ truly.

I read these “straightforward” passages in parallel first because I think that they illuminate one another. The deviousness and perversity of our hearts (read: wills) is most evident in the way we resist the truth. One would assume that of all things we would want to know, the will and purpose of God our creator is at the top of the list, but alas, Jeremiah and Jesus know that this is not the case. In the life of the spirit we are like we sometimes are in matters of sickness and health, we simply do not want to know. Often one hears of people who stay away from the doctor with their symptoms because they do not want to know that they are afflicted. This is also the case in other areas of life; we would rather not know if the news is likely to be bad. So Jeremiah warns us that our wills are devious and perverse, and Jesus cites the prime instance of this deviousness, namely, our unwillingness to hear the will and word of God as it comes through the true prophets. We would rather hear from false prophets, hear what we want to hear, namely that God is pleased with us, on our side, ready to prosper our schemes and endorse our ambitions, like a discipline and conflict averse parent.

So the first thing to learn today is that we must pay attention to God no matter how unwelcome and uncomfortable the message. We must listen and take to heart the message as it comes to us in the preaching and in our prayers, and in our life together as Christians. Listening in this way is, however, not the primary activity in view here. If we look again at our text we see that it concerns not listening to the truth but rather speaking it, being true prophets. Deviousness and perversity come to power mostly through what we say. Those who speak the truth are hated, driven out, abused, and denounced by name as criminal (Luke 6:22). In that situation they are to be happy because such abuse is the sign that they are speaking the truth. But when everyone praises them they are to beware, “Alas for you when the world speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets (6:26).”  Behind this lies the experience of the earliest Christians as they first proclaimed Jesus, but I think it is an ongoing experience of all of us when we dare to speak the truth without political guile, when we eschew flattery and fawning and simply say what the Spirit lays on our hearts to hear from the text.

Let us now turn to the most uncomfortable message of all for us who are relatively so rich. “Blessed are the poor, and woe to the rich!” I hope we can hear that without immediately trying to interpret it deviously. It has a parallel in Matthew’s Gospel, “Blessed are the poor in spirit (Matt. 5:3)” and there is no paired curse on the rich in spirit there. Poor in spirit is a fair translation of title of a religious group in the Judaism of that time, the “poor” whose hope was placed in God alone and not in anything in this world. The ascetics who gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, referred to themselves as “God’s poor,” not because they were impoverished beggars but because they had, while living in this world, already transferred the center of their confidence and concern to the other world, the world of God.

In both Jeremiah and Luke we have this same theme. Jeremiah says that the one who puts his trust in man is cursed, and the one who puts his trust in God is blessed. Luke says that the rich are cursed because they put their confidence in their riches and take their identity and satisfaction from their status in this world, while the poor are blessed because their kingdom is the kingdom of God, the spiritual substance of the eternal world. All of the ways of speaking in the prophet and in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, say the same thing. We can hear what they are saying and I hope we shall take it to heart without deviousness and perversity.

They all say that our real life is with God, and that good fortune in this world might be a great temptation to forget that fact and piddle our lives away on the trivia money makes possible. That is the sense of the saying of Jesus that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle (Mark 10:25). For that reason the poor are especially blessed; they have that much less incentive to glory in the wrong things. This is what Jeremiah means when he says, “A curse on the man who puts his trust in man (17:5)” and “A blessing on the man who puts his trust in the Lord (17:7).”

Nevertheless, it is also possible that riches in this world need not lead one astray but can be a way to the really real, the Kingdom of God. I do not think that the beatitude on the poor and the curse on the rich are simply declarations of final judgment. They are rather warnings and exhortations – they are what the grammarians call the hortatory indicative – setting forth two outcomes in order to warn us and encourage us to behave differently. It stands to reason that wealth is an opportunity to serve the really real in this world, that severe though its temptation to triviality might be, it is, in the hands of the poor in spirit who live in the ambience of the divine love and eternal life, an immense opportunity to cooperate with God in the work of redemption in this world. Wealth is a trust from God, a responsibility and an opportunity, a call to be stewards of the power that it brings.

Amen.