Turning the Tables: The Blessed are Cursed So All Will Be Blessed and You Won’t Hear Jesus Apologize for It.
Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian
June 25, 2023
Turning the Tables: The Blessed are Cursed So All Will Be Blessed and You Won’t Hear Jesus Apologize for It.
Jesus said himself that his job was to deal with sinners, not the righteous. He said the sick are in need of a physician, not the well (Luke 5). But whom did he consider sick and sinner?
It was not the poor, the demon-possessed, the ill-clad, the homeless, the uneducated, the ill, the destitute of money and position and power. It was not the Last, the Lost, the Least, the Little and the Dead.
We get an idea of whom Jesus saw as sick and sinner when he spoke and taught on who was blessed: the poor, the mournful, the meek, justice seekers, mercy givers, goodhearted, peacemakers, persecuted, reviled (Matthew 5:1-12). Jesus is not saying here that in a perfect world the cursed will be transformed to the blessed. He is not saying in a future world the cursed will be blessed. He is saying they are blessed now, right there in their deprivation.
What kind of nonsense is that? People who are cursed are not blessed. Maybe in some mumbo-jumbo spiritual-thinking world, but not in the real world. So, if in Jesus’ world, a world he says is indeed the real world, the cursed are blessed, then who, pray tell, in Jesus’ world are the cursed?
Precisely those who claim to be blessed and find power and position and status in their own self-judgment. I’m thinking of the Elder Son in the story Jesus tells (Luke 15). I’m thinking of Jesus’ indictment of the Scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23). Who, in other words, were the sick and the sinner that needed a reckoning and a savior? It was those who were blessed, not cursed. It was the First, the Found, the Full, the Fabulous and the Alive who were and are the target of Jesus unconditional love attack. They are the ones to be loved into destruction and oblivion. Not only destroyed for their sake, that they might know the liberty of seeing life as a gift and not as self-deserved or self-possessed, but also for the sake of the economically, politically and socially poor and oppressed who could benefit from some sharing with those who have so much.
But notice, please, how the cursed are to be taken out. This is where it gets hard. It’s the reason Jesus sweat blood before he was executed (Luke 22). The cursed are to be loved to death (I called it, a moment ago, the “unconditional love attack”). I know this flies in the face of, say, Deuteronomy 13, where the faithful are not simply encouraged to avoid the unfaithful, but to, well, kill them. But Jesus lives in the wild world of being killed instead of killing others rather than the domesticated world of killing others before they can get to you.
This is the power of the cross and what is confirmed and sealed as the real deal in the resurrection.
The power is love that is unrelenting and never ending (I Corinthians 13).
So, those people you hate….love them. I really have a hard time with this. But Jesus doesn’t apologize to me or you. He just keeps on relentlessly and never-endingly loving. And the world is transformed.
