The Throwaway Line that Changed the World

In last week’s gospel text, Jesus proclaims blessing on the poor, hungry, reviled, and excluded as one who experienced all of those states of being. Jesus’ entrance into these experiences transforms them for our good.

Jesus was poor, yet he lavishes the riches of his grace on us (Ephesians 1:7-8).
Jesus was hungry, yet from his fullness we receive (John 1:16).
Jesus was reviled, yet his rejection makes us acceptable (Romans 5:1).
Jesus was excluded, yet his isolation roots us in love (Ephesians 3:17).
Jesus suffered, yet his body hosts the broken (Luke 4:18).
Jesus died, yet his tomb nourishes a seed (John 12:24).
Jesus was resurrected. He offers us His life (Ephesians 2:5-6).

Each of the above statements provides a way of meditating upon the good news. However stirring or helpful they might be, what’s missing from them is a truth that the gospel text for the seventh Sunday of Epiphany highlights: we who would follow Jesus must also be prepared to endure poverty, hunger, revilement, and exclusion.

Yes, Jesus experienced each of these states, but he did not enter into them so that his followers don’t have to, as if he makes possible a life free from suffering.

Jesus’ proclamation of blessings and woes in Luke 6 harkens back to the same pattern at work in Jeremiah 17, which compares the blessed to a tree planted by a stream. Just as the tree’s favorable geography does not preclude the possibility of drought, Jesus repeatedly tells his followers that their proximity to him will not spare them from their own experiences of suffering and lack.

Although Jesus isn’t saving his followers from these experiences, he is making a way for his followers to live creatively and transformatively in the midst of suffering—both their own and that of others.

To extend the metaphors of geography and planting, that which Jesus sows in his life, suffering, and death germinates and brings forth fruit not only for his disciples, but also through their own encounters with suffering.

Throughout Luke-Acts, Luke alerts his audience to this reality, demonstrating the ways that the early believers experience the same opposition Jesus undergoes. Once we as readers become alerted to this developing pattern in the two-volume work, it becomes hard to miss.

Before Jesus utters a word of blessing upon the reviled in the sermon on the plain in Luke 6, he experiences revilement himself. In response to his healing the man with a withered hand (Luke 6:6-10), the scribes and Pharisees who witness the miracle “were filled with fury and discussed what they might do to Jesus” (v. 11). 

Likewise, Peter and John’s healing of the lame man at the gate (Acts 3:1-7) opens them up to opposition from authorities and eventual imprisonment (Acts 4:1-3).

While easily overlooked, what comes next in Luke 6:12 constitutes the creative, transformative response to suffering that Jesus models for his followers and that, in turn, catalyzes them into world-altering community: he goes out to the mountain to spend the night in prayer.

Luke 6:12, divided from verse 11 in many Bibles by what seems an unfortunately placed heading, contains what Episcopal priest Stephen Blackmer refers to as a “throwaway line,” or one of the many seemingly inconsequential expository asides in the gospels in which Jesus is said to withdraw to an isolated place to pray.

The content of the prayer Jesus prays is conspicuously absent, but the context is clear. Jesus’ prayer spans the pivotal time between his conflict with religious authorities and his choosing of the twelve.

Given that Jesus responds to opposition with prayer, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find his early followers in prayer after the authorities imprison Peter and John (Acts 4:23-30).

While Luke withholds the details of Jesus’ prayer in Luke 6, he provides what amounts to a full transcript of the believers’ prayer for Peter and John in Acts 4. “Sovereign Lord,” their prayer begins, “who made the heaven and the earth, the sea, and everything in them.” This line echoes Psalm 146, which, fittingly, praises the God “who executes justice for the oppressed” and “sets the prisoners free” (v. 7).

The believers’ prayer goes on to lift up Jesus’ example of having faced opposition (Acts 4:27-28) and ends with a request to God not to deliver them from opposition and suffering, but to enable them to endure it boldly (vv. 29-30, which is a request the early believers seem to develop a habit of making).

While we don’t know what Jesus prays in Luke 6, it’s not difficult to imagine his prayer sounding a lot like the one his followers would later pray for their endangered friends in Acts 4:29-30: “And now, Lord, look at their threats, and grant to your servants to speak your word with all boldness.”

Thankfully, though, we aren’t left simply to imagine Jesus praying this way for his disciples—we’re told exactly how Jesus prays in Luke’s account of Jesus’ words to Peter at the Last Supper:

“Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31-32).

Like the believers in Acts 4, Jesus prays not that Peter would avoid the sifting, but that his faith would remain.

Whatever it is that Jesus prays during the night in Luke 6:12, by the time he chooses the twelve the next day, he’s clearly not calling them to a life of safety or security. After all, not much time had passed since an angry mob drove Jesus out of the town and tried to throw him off a cliff (Luke 4:28-29. Imagine being called and chosen to follow that teacher!)

Yet it’s from that place of revilement and opposition that Jesus chooses the twelve and shakes up their lives. As long as we’re drawing parallels between Luke 6 and Acts 4, it’s worth noting that the believers experience a literal shaking up when the Spirit comes as evidence of their being called and chosen (Acts 4:31).

Luke goes on to show how the seed Jesus plants through his prayerful hosting of the twelve blossoms and bears fruit in his description of the early believers’ life together (Acts 4:32-35).

If we’re tempted to romanticize this picture of shared life and generous abundance, we would do well to remember the ways that throughout Luke-Acts, Luke seems intent on disabusing his audience of the notion that following Jesus means a life free of suffering.

According to Luke 6:27-31, part of the appointed gospel text for the seventh Sunday of Epiphany, not even the community that Jesus envisions for the early believers is safe:

 “But I say to you that listen, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you”

At the risk of stating the obvious, Jesus’ vision of community assumes a lot of time spent around people who aren’t particularly nice. They don’t have our best at heart, to put it mildly. These are violent, dishonest people.

As the intended audience for these words, we must reckon with the far-reaching implications of the sermon on the plain, namely, that Jesus sends us into the company not only of the poor and the hungry, but also of those who, by violent and dishonest means, might leave us poor and hungry. We are sent not only into the company of the reviled and defamed, but also those who would revile and defame us.

These harsh realities sound a discordant note against the harmonious community life shared among the early church, which makes the presence and promise of such a community all the more audacious.

Christians could spend the rest of time exploring the kind of reality Jesus describes in Luke 6:27-31 and that the early church lives out in Acts 4:32-35. Note the utter lack of bookkeeping, for example. Or the unapologetic focus on generosity with money and possessions in both passages.

But for starters, one possible connection between Jesus’ vision for community and the early believers’ life together is that if there’s ever hope for loving our enemies in the way Jesus instructs us, we would do well to begin developing those muscles and habits of heart among friends—those with whom we are “of one heart and soul.”

With this vision of community in focus, and in light of Jesus’ example of and response to suffering, what might his desire be for us? What would we hear him pray if, refusing to gloss over Luke’s “throwaway line,” we accompanied him out to the mountain to pray?

If Jesus intercedes for us as he did for his disciples, do we have an easier time hearing him pray for our protection, or our boldness? Our financial abundance, or our radical generosity?

If we are to pray for one another following his pattern of entering into suffering to creatively transform it, how might his prayers reshape our intercession?