LET’S START with a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that you have a real, honest-to-goodness fairy godmother who is willing to grant you one wish. She puts two pieces of paper in front of you, with four words written on each. One paper has the words poor, hungry, weeping, and hated printed on it in large, bold letters. The other one reads rich, well-fed, laughing, and respected. “Which of these lists do you like better, my dear?” she asks, with a gleam in her eye. “Choose one. I’ll wave my magic wand, and for the rest of your life, those words will be true of you.”

Which list would you choose? Be honest.

Or consider version 2 of the same thought experiment. Think of the times you may have described someone as “blessed.” Was their life more like list 1 or list 2? Or think of how people in your church might describe a life that’s been blessed by God. Again, which list is closer to that description? Wouldn’t we normally say that good health, a stable job, a secure home, and a loving family are signs of blessing?

When Jesus told the crowds that the poor, hungry, weeping, and hated among them were blessed, he wasn’t saying that it was intrinsically pleasant or morally good to have no money or an empty stomach, to weep or to be shunned and reviled. In essence, he was trying to change the fundamental values of those who would be his true disciples. They needed to think differently about what it meant to live a “good” life, to think in less worldly terms. To Jesus, a good life meant a life under the care and favor of God, not a life of material and social goods. And the odder and more counterintuitive his words seem, the more we ourselves may have already internalized the world’s way of thinking.

He reinforced the point by speaking to the other side of the coin. For every blessing, he pronounced a precisely corresponding woe:

But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
    for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
    for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
    for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets. (Luke 6:24-26, NIV)

Jesus wasn’t saying that it’s intrinsically wrong to have money or plenty to eat; didn’t he himself feed the hungry? Nor is it evil to laugh or have others treat you with respect. But just as he did with his teaching about blessing, he was giving his hearers the big picture, the eternal perspective that anyone pursuing the kingdom of God should have.

Think, for example, about the first woe. “But woe to you who are rich,” Jesus says. Why? It’s not because they’ll necessarily suffer some calamity or be struck by divine lightning in the present. Rather, it’s because “[they] have already received [their] comfort.” This is the flip side of what Jesus said about the poor earlier in verse 20: theirs is the kingdom of God. The implication here is that the rich do not have the kingdom of God; they have their earthly riches, and that’s all they have. In the language of the Sermon of the Mount, their hearts have been captured by earthly treasures, and they’ve spent their lives storing them up, instead of storing up “treasures in heaven” (Matt 6:19-21).

Or consider what Jesus says just before that passage in the Sermon on the Mount. He criticizes the kind of hypocritical religion in which people do pious things like charitable giving, prayer, and fasting to be noticed and admired by others, instead of to be rewarded by God. Jesus warns three times, “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full” (Matt 6:2, 5, 16). It’s as if to say, They got what they were after, and they’ll get nothing else.

Similarly, when Jesus says, “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,” those words need to be understood against the big-picture background of what he says next: “for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.” This is the flip side of reminding his followers that when they are persecuted or kicked out of the synagogue for their allegiance to him, they’re in the illustrious company of the prophets of old. Conversely, people spoke with approval of the false prophets because they only said what the people wanted to hear (e.g., Mic 2:6-11; 3:5-11). Such prophets are like the pious hypocrites of Matthew 6. They may have the people’s admiration today, but as Micah and Jeremiah insist, they’ll have to face the judgment of God tomorrow.

. . .

WE CAN’T TAKE Jesus’ words of blessing and woe and turn them into prescriptive to-do lists that will help us achieve the life we want. Emptying our bank accounts or going without food won’t make us blessed. We’re not cursed when we enjoy a good meal or a good joke. And people can be hated and reviled for reasons that have nothing to do with God’s kingdom or his righteousness. We can’t be jerks for Jesus and expect a thumbs-up from God.

Rather, Jesus is trying to transform how his followers think. Life isn’t just about what happens to you between the day of your birth and the day of your death, he seems to say. You may be hungry or well-fed now; you may weep or laugh now. But what about in the future? What about for eternity? If you’re going to follow me, if you really want to be my disciple, then you can’t just live for the goods you can gain in this life. So, what’s it going to be? Do you want to chase the things that the world considers as blessings in this life, or the blessing you will inherit in the next?

Which would you choose?