Here’s to the crazy ones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjgtLSHhTPg 

Apple’s “Think Different” advert in the 1990’s launched its brand into success. It showed rule breakers such as Albert Einstein, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Pablo Picasso, and others. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” voiced by actor Richard Dreyfus, resonated with many: Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

In a world that still seems to reward success, wealth and popularity and power,  “Here’s to the crazy ones” promotes an unusual logic of success.  The unexpected qualities of not fitting in, of being an outsider, of being a little weird or downright strange are highlighted as world changing characteristics. Jesus’ sermon, often called the beatitudes, seems similar to the counterculture logic of “here’s to the crazy ones." We agree it’s true. Crazy changes the world. Who are our outlandish today? Where are the crazy ones hiding? One of the wild ones was Jesus. Today’s Gospel is pure craziness:  Blessed are the poor, the starving, the depressed, and the disposable. You who are rich, full, happy, and well-liked – you’re in big trouble. Here’s to the crazy ones, an upside-down world, a system of blessing that has no respect for the status quo and that middle-class Christianity will find rude. The upside-down view of the world Jesus offers is not new in the beatitudes, it has been developing in Luke from the very beginning:

a)   In Luke 1.56, Mary sings the Magnificat which celebrates what God is doing in the world: looking with favour on the lowly (the poor), sending the rich away empty, filling the hungry with good things (the starving), casting down the might from their thrones and lifting up the lowly (the sad or depressed) and has come to the help of society’s disposable ones. To remind you, Mary sings: “ My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour; for he has looked with favour on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is God’s name.  God has mercy on those who fear God in every generation. God has shown the strength of God’s arm, God has scattered the proud in their conceit. God has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.  God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich God has sent away empty.  God has come to the help of Israel.” Notice that Mary is so confident of God’s promised future that she sings of it in the past tense.

b) John the Baptist continues where Mary leaves off:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
    make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
    and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
    and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

The levelling of hills and the straightening of paths John sings about is the flattening of society brought about through jubilee politics, when debt is cancelled, and economic sharing takes place such that the lowly are raised up and the mighty are cast down.

c) It’s like a Bollywood musical really, Luke’s Gospel. The salvation promised by Mary and John the Baptist comes true in Jesus first sermon (Lk 4), hear it as a song: 

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed, go free, 

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

The work of Jesus, the vision statement of his work, is a variation of Isaiah. Jesus’ purpose is to be good news to the poor, relief for those imprisoned by utter sadness and freedom from the oppression of being disposable.

d) Jesus’ song comes true in another sermon, the beatitudes (Lk 6): “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God…” New Testament scholars explain that there are several words to describe the poor, the usual word being tapeinoi, which describes the peasant classes (Richard Rohr and John Feister 1996:130). The word used by both Matthew and Luke in the beatitudes, is ptochoi, which means the empty ones, describing those who are unclean and expendable (Richard Rohr and John Feister 1996:130). In Jesus’ time the poor were those who lived as outcasts: beggars, widows, orphans, the sick, the disabled, the blind and the dumb. Those referred to by the Pharisees as sinners, were the poor that Jesus came to reach (Albert Nolan 2001:27,28). Sinners were the am–ha arez who were peasants unfamiliar with the law and included prostitutes, shepherds, tax collectors and social outcasts (Albert Nolan 2001:29)

In Luke 6.17 Jesus speaks (“sings”) to the crowd he is on a level place: “Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.”  Why a “level place”? Because John the Baptist’s understanding of salvation is taking shape in the work of Jesus. The place is levelled because the valleys are filled, and the mountains made low, the lowly are lifted and blessed, the mighty are brought low, the hungry are filled and blessed and the rich are empty.  

Luke 6.17-26 is a freedom song understood best in the light of other songs: Mary’s song “My soul magnifies the Lord”, John’s song “make straight in the desert a highway” and Jesus opening song “The spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news.” These are all songs of nonviolent resistance.  John Dear in Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of Peace, describes Mary’s song as a “manifesto of revolutionary nonviolence and a call, not to arms, but to disarmament and justice….Mary's Magnificat was banned in Argentina in the mid-1970’s, because the Mothers of the Disappeared published it as a call for nonviolent resistance to the military junta. The words are so powerful, they are considered by some to be dangerous.” The same is true for the other songs described above that build into the climax of the beatitudes. The beatitudes are thus not meant to be understood as a new list of Ten Commandments, nor as helpful advice or as a new list of requirements to get into heaven. No. These beatitudes require no work, no achievement, no striving. There is no creed to sign up to, there is no moral code to be judged by. No. We are given a blessing of what heaven on earth looks like when Jesus is central to our reality. Whole groups of people, simply by being who they are, are blessed.

“Blessed be” or “Woe to you”

Before we breathe a sigh of relief, we ask ourselves where we are in the text. There are two sides of the same coin; are we on the side of “woe” or the “blessed” ? As one of the wealthiest nations in the world obviously we are in the second half of the text.

 How then are we crazy ones when we squirm as the woes are handed out? We are rich, mostly happy or drugged to be happy, well-liked, and necessary to our economy. Do we give all this away to “inherit” the blessing Jesus offers? I suggest not. Poverty, illness, and pain are not holy, helpful, nor redemptive in themselves. In fact, Jesus’ healing and love is about Good News, joy, and freedom from suffering. Instead of defaulting into doing, we can sit – sit either with poverty, sadness and emptiness or sit with the woes. We sit in solidarity with God, in solidarity with poverty or woe and we learn the meaning of blessing.    

In response to the beatitudes and in learning the meaning of blessing,  wealthy Christians have stepped out into solidarity with the poor, not to help the poor but so that the poor can help them. It is us the rich that need the help, not the poor who are already blessed by God. Authentic friendship with the poor that offers twice as much listening and humble learning rather than speaking or helping is solidarity with the poor. It comes from the knowledge that at some point, all experience poverty. It is also a recognition that the poor are poor because of how society is structured. Theodore Jennings (1990:183) laments: “Each year there is a new holocaust, a new sacrifice to the Moloch of greed and indifference … The slaughter of the innocents is no fortuitous calamity, but the direct result of economic arrangements that blind us to reality by making us complicitous in calamity. Mortal poverty is not due, as some blasphemously maintain, to an act of God. It is the work of economic idolatry”.

One of the values we celebrate as Alstonville Anglicans is “Blessing.” We believe that we burst into the world as original blessings, that blessing lies at the very heart of our identity. When we insist that we are blessed to be a blessing to others, who we are creates the conditions for others to flourish, so that God is not a noun but a verb, an energy of love moving in us and though us and with us until all woes are healed and all come home to their true identity – blessing.

Books:

1.    Richard Rohr and John Feister 1996. Jesus' Plan For A New World. Cincinnati, OH : St. Anthony Messenger Press.

2.    John Dear. 2003. Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of Peace. Ave Maria Press. Michigan

3.    Theodore Jennings. 1990.  Good News To The Poor: John Wesley's Evangelical Economics.  Abingdon Press, Nashville