Lectionary Commentaries for February 16, 2025
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

The Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:20–49 closes the section of this gospel that began with Jesus’ sermon in his hometown synagogue. The two speeches form an inclusio around the opening scenes of Jesus’ ministry, scenes that feature wondrous healing, intense conflict, and the gathering around Jesus of both a chosen few disciples and crowds. Here, Jesus is available to the crowds, literally on their level, and many of them who have come for healing are cured. The itinerant preacher embodies the power of healing and shares it freely.

In this context, Jesus speaks blessing. To the poor belongs God’s own realm. The hungry will not be hungry for long. Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning (see also Psalm 30:5), and that joy extends to embrace those who are excluded, reviled, or defamed by virtue of their connection to Jesus. These rejected ones, whom others have tried to cut off, have a belonging that is deeper than anything that the people around them could withhold. They are in the company of the prophets who, throughout Israel’s history, have spoken for God. 

Notice the hope offered by the blessings Jesus offers. 

1. They are bound up with real life. Politicians sometimes speak of kitchen table issues, by which they mean the sorts of things family members talk about at the table, maybe after the kids are asleep. “Which bills do we have to pay now? What can wait? How do we get to the next paycheck?” Jesus speaks to the poor and the hungry, with the news that their material needs will be supplied.
2. The promises make a theological claim that Jesus’ audience would know from the Psalms: “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1, King James Version). Rich, poor, in between: the earth and its inhabitants belong to God. Other would-be owners, extractors, lords, and kings need not apply.
3. The promise of laughter rather than weeping is a time-honored way to announce God’s coming action to change how the reality of death shapes our experience of life. Here is a vision of the future breaking into the present. “And the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces,” Isaiah declares (25:8; see also Revelation 7:17; 21:4). 
4. The good name and position in community of those bearing witness to Jesus’ connection to God are sound, even elevated, precisely when the worst exclusion and defamation are undertaken by others, because of their bond with Jesus. How? The true source of respect, like all other necessities of life, is the God who provides the healing and other blessings Jesus offers.

In short, when the evidence suggests that you have been forgotten or forsaken, you are not. The God whose power the crowds witness coming forth from Jesus will continue as God cares for God’s own. 

The difficulty in preaching this text in a 21st-century American, mainline Christian context is that most of us who will hear this word are not inclined to trust it. When are the poor and hungry anything but a cause for sadness (except when they inspire an odd sort of gratitude, as in, “There but for the grace of God go I”)? And who can endure character assassination, which we know as canceling or bullying, even for the sake of our faith? We aim to be rich, full, laughing, and respected. Hearing the beatitudes from Jesus, we may be tempted to think, “I’ll take my chances with the status quo.”

This reaction may be why Jesus adds woes here after his blessings. No matter how hopeful his words are, some in the crowd have placed their trust elsewhere, and the choices they have made are working for them. For these, the woes are not curses, but warnings. It is as if Jesus said, “Certain things are worthy of your trust, and other things are sure to betray it.” When those objects of misplaced loyalty do betray your trust—Lord, have mercy.

Later in Luke, Jesus will say much the same thing just before he tells the parable of the barns. When a man comes to Jesus asking for help receiving what he considers to be his share of an inheritance, Jesus replies to everyone within earshot, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15). 

Life consists in the provision of God, a provision evident in Jesus’ presence, healing, and teaching among the people. With the beatitudes, Jesus announces that the provision of God is trustworthy when the world is offering poverty, hunger, grief, and rejection. With the woes, Jesus announces that the provision of God is even more trustworthy than acting in what we imagine is self-interest. The Messiah embodies a whole way of being in the world that is better and more basic to life than either eking out an existence or building barns and filling them. To be on the Way with this One is to know the character and extent of God’s realm and God’s mercy. 

Jeremiah 17:5–10 is strongly reminiscent of Hebrew wisdom literature, written in poetry and utilizing comparisons to express general truths. As in Psalms and Proverbs, poetic phrases are written in parallel lines, expressing a given point in multiple ways. Those who “trust in mortals” are also characterized as those who “make mere flesh their strength” and those whose “hearts turn away from the LORD” (17:5). People’s “ways” are “the fruit of their doings” (17:10). This synonymous parallelism imparts to the poem a rhythm and beauty.

Like other Hebrew poetry, this passage also communicates by employing metaphor. Here, those who trust in God are compared to a well-watered and deeply rooted tree, while those who depend upon human powers are like a shrub languishing in a dry desert. A similar comparison is made in Psalm 1, in which those who choose the path of life are “trees planted by streams of water” (verse 3) and the wicked are “chaff that the wind blows away” (verse 4). 

Despite the similarities between the two poems, however, Jeremiah packs a much harder punch than Psalm 1’s general wisdom for living. When read in the context of the chapter and the book as a whole, Jeremiah 17:5–10 undergirds the book’s repeated insistence that Judah and Jerusalem must submit to the invading Babylonian armies and abandon any claims to national sovereignty. The Babylonian military incursion of the sixth century BCE is God’s doing, it claims, the justified punishment for the nation’s failures. 

In Jeremiah 17:4, God declares, “by your own act you shall lose the heritage that I gave you.” This claim is amplified later in the book: “I myself will fight against you with outstretched hand and mighty arm, in anger, in fury, and in great wrath. And I will strike down the inhabitants of this city, both human beings and animals; they shall die of a great pestilence” (23:5-6).

The opening verses of Jeremiah 17 echo the book’s frequent explanation of why this punishment has been decreed. In scandalous, often even misogynistic language, the prophet accuses Judah and Jerusalem of unfaithfulness (verses 2–3; also see 2:20–25; 7:30–34; 8:4–12). The verses that follow the lectionary selection underscore the book’s criticism of those who rely on their wealth and religious heritage while failing to honor God (17:11, 19–27; see also Jeremiah 7; 9:23). 

Anchoring this message, the wisdom poem of Jeremiah 17:5–10 paradoxically declares that letting go of traditional understandings of security and safety is the only ground in which God’s people can flourish. This message is reiterated powerfully in Jeremiah 29, when the prophet insists that those who were captured during the first Babylonian invasion of the city should not fight to return but rather settle down, have children, marry those children to others, and pave the way for grandchildren to be born outside of Jerusalem. They should make a life where they are and pray for the land on which they are now settled, the place forced upon them against their will. Their welfare would rely on Babylon’s welfare, not the welfare of the place they once called home.

The plant metaphors used in this poem clearly convey the book’s bold (even scandalous) claim about the relative non-importance of human institutions. Strong armies, secure borders, national independence, sustainable religious bodies—Jeremiah challenges them all as ultimate goals. Such standards by which humans judge success are as shallow as the roots of a shrub. Like the other frequent natural imagery in the Prophets (people as grass and sheep; God as rock and lion), these images are a powerful vehicle for communicating a larger message. 

In our current ecological context, however, perhaps the tree and the shrub themselves deserve our attention. Rather than treating nonhuman life as existing solely for our benefit (a supreme act of anthropocentrism and exploitation), what happens when we read with—and for—the plants in this passage?

As rampant deforestation turns more spaces into desert and water sources diminish on an increasingly hot and dry planet, Jeremiah’s description of parched, salty land will become an increasingly common reality. The plants struggling in these environments will be visual reminders of the greed that has treated Earth simply as a repository of resources to be exploited; they will testify to human failure. 

If in the coming decades we are fortunate enough to behold well-watered and sturdy trees, they will testify to our repentance, moving beyond the simple models of “creation care” and “environmental stewardship” to face squarely the extent of Earth’s crisis and the human dynamics that fuel it. Just as Jeremiah once asked of his audience, we will have chosen to honor Earth and its Creator rather than our own interests. 

The Prophets used such literary metaphors to help their audiences “see” the realities before them. To help modern audiences grasp the extent of Earth’s crisis, preachers have at their disposal not only words but also a powerful visual resource: photographic images of contemporary environmental devastation. Photography documents reality in ways that paintings and graphic images cannot, taking less than 13 milliseconds for the eye to process—faster than a blink. Displaying high-quality photos of contemporary drought, deforestation, and wildfire (with proper copyright permissions, of course) as Jeremiah 33 is read and interpreted can viscerally remind us of just how deeply the fate of nonhuman life is intertwined with our own. 

For Further Reading

Beal, Timothy K. 2022. When Time is Short: Finding our Way in the Anthropocene. Boston: Beacon.

Marlow, Hilary. 2009. Biblical Prophets and Contemporary Enviornmental Ethics: Re-reading Amos, Hosea, and First Isaiah. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sharp, Carolyn J. 2021. Jeremiah 26-52.  International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.

For photographic resources, consider search sites such as Shutterstock, Pixabay, or simply adding a filter such as “Creative Commons licenses” to an internet search. 

“Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law they meditate day and night” (Psalm 1:1–2, New Revised Standard Version).¹

Standing at the beginning of the Psalter, Psalm 1 functions as both an introduction and an invitation (along with Psalm 2) into the book that follows. The opening psalm begins with a promise of happiness (or “blessedness”) to the one (literally ha?îš, “the man”) whose “delight is in the law of the LORD (tôrat yhwh).”

Yet this common translation “law of the LORD” obscures the invitation into the textual world of the Psalter that the opening psalm provides. Rather, the Hebrew tôrat yhwh is better translated as “Teaching of Yahweh” or “Torah of Yahweh.”

Much like the Torah, the ensuing book of Psalms came to be divided into five “books” (Psalms 1–41; Psalms 42–72; Psalms 73–89; Psalms 90–106; Psalms 107–150). Psalm 1 thus opens by encouraging readers to see the books that make up the Psalter as “Torah,” worthy of “meditation day and night” (Psalm 1:2; see Joshua 1:8).

The image of a tree stands at the heart of the first psalm. Those who recite the Torah “are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither,” while “in all that they do, they prosper” (1:3). The language echoes Jeremiah 17:8, where the man who trusts in Yahweh “shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”

Psalm 1 clearly instructs its listener in how the right relationship with the Torah of Yahweh separates an individual from the “wicked,” the “sinners,” and the “scoffers” (1:1). These people stand in the way of the individual who spends their time reciting the Torah.

Psalm 1 paints a neat and orderly world: good comes to those who follow the Torah, evil to those who do not. So, unlike the prosperous tree, the wicked “are like chaff that the wind drives away” (1:4). The juxtaposition is clear: the good person is a prosperous, rooted, watered tree, while the wicked men are only chaff, easily driven away by the wind.

As is often noted, the Hebrew underscores how lonely and difficult it might feel to choose the good path: up until verse 5, which invokes the plural “righteous (?addîqîm),” the one faithfully meditating on the Torah is in the singular. Against this person stand the wicked, always in the plural.

Often classified as an instructional psalm or a wisdom psalm, the first psalm lacks a superscript and bears no Davidic attribution. For this reason, many scholars suggest that Psalm 1 is a relatively late addition to the Psalter, perhaps an editorial addition that now provides an introduction to what follows. Yet though it stands at the beginning of the book of Psalms, this psalm does not feel particularly psalm-like.

After all, while Psalm 1 describes a world easily divided into the righteous and the wicked, the psalm lacks any praise, thanksgiving, or lament. There is no “I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever” (Psalm 145:1), no “I thank you, Yahweh, with all my heart” (Psalm 138:1), no “My god, my god, why have you abandoned me?” (Psalm 22:1). In fact, there is no speaking to God at all in this psalm. Rather, there is only a description of God, who “watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish” (Psalm 1:6).

Thus, as beautiful and inspiring as the image of the prosperous tree is, readers might find themselves unsatisfied. After all, it is rarely the case that things are as neatly ordered as this psalm promises: at least not here, not now, not in our day-to-day lives in this world we live in. Psalm 1 does not grapple with the many realities of what it means to be human.

Yet the psalms that follow do, wrestling with all the facets of human emotion: anger, grief, and mourning, but also love, admiration, and joy. This is why the invitation that Psalm 1 provides is so important. Psalm 1 asks readers to meditate on the entire Torah of Yahweh, to delve into the whole of the Psalter that follows.

While Psalm 1 is painstakingly clear on which path is the correct way—and it’s not the path of the wicked—it also urges its readers to continue into the world of the psalms that follow. And the world of the psalms that readers will encounter as they recite them day and night is far more complex, diverse, and representative of human existence than the simple contrast between wickedness and righteousness that Psalm 1 presents.

Psalm 1 might leave readers wanting, but happy are those who enter into the polyvocal, emotion-filled world of the book of Psalms, with all of its thanksgiving, praise, and lament.

Notes

1. This commentary was previously published on this website for October 29, 2017.

Christ’s bodily resurrection is not a stand-alone miracle. Rather, it has concrete implications for Christians and the world. Christ’s resurrection as the first fruits exemplifies God’s transformative work that will culminate in believers’ resurrection, the defeat of death, and the redemption of the cosmos.

In the previous passage (1 Corinthians 15:1–11), Paul laid the groundwork for his complicated argument in 15:12–20 by showing that Christ’s resurrection is a core part of the gospel proclaimed by all apostles and that it was already received by the Corinthians. This is the basis for Paul’s question: “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you [in Corinth] say there is no resurrection of the dead?” (verse 12).

Why did some Corinthians deny the resurrection of the dead? Several answers have been proposed. Some interpreters assume that the Corinthians were preoccupied by over-realized eschatology. This means the Corinthians believed they already lived in resurrection mode, which would make future resurrection unnecessary. Other scholars theorize that due to the influence of gnosticism, the Corinthians devalued bodily resurrection. Yet others propose that the Corinthians completely denied any afterlife whatsoever. None of these views are strongly supported by the ancient evidence or 1 Corinthians itself.¹

A close reading of 1 Corinthians 15:12–20 (and 15:1–11) reveals that the problem probably lies elsewhere. In other words, some Corinthians did not see clear correlations between Christ’s resurrection and the resurrection of the dead. Corinthian believers were mainly gentiles (12:2). In their pagan environment, Christ’s resurrection may have been easier to accept since it sounds comparable to the deification and ascension of famous heroes (and emperors). Yet, this deification did not mean the promise of resurrection (or ascension) for those who follow them.

Paul Brown notes, “It was only the heroes, the ones who were worshiped and sometimes immortalized bodily, who attained a special destiny and thus, the Corinthians could deny their own future resurrection while still embracing the resurrection and worship of Jesus, the Messiah, as one with hero status.”²

Paul is convinced that Christ’s resurrection is significant insofar as it relates to Christ-believers and the world. In today’s passage, Paul highlights what implications Christ’s resurrection has for them all. To address the problem posed in verse 12 (some people saying there is no resurrection of the dead), Paul presents a hypothetical scenario by employing a rhetoric of ad absurdum.

If there is no resurrection of the dead, an immediate consequence is that Christ’s resurrection is also impossible (verse 13). If so, the apostles’ proclamation and the Corinthians’ faith would be futile (verses 14–15). Paul restates this chain of negative consequences in verses 16–19. Resurrection of the dead is the foundation on which their current existence and their future hope stand.

After this theoretical demonstration that leads to the most unwanted consequence (“we are of all people most to be pitied,” verse 19), Paul suddenly reverses everything with a short phrase nyni de (“but now,” verse 20) that attracts the audience’s attention. The same Greek phrase is found in Romans 3:21 when Paul transitions from condemnations of humanity (“no human being will be justified in his sight,” 3:20) to the revelation of God’s righteousness through faith in Christ.

Similarly, with nyni de (1 Corinthians 15:20), Paul starts to expound the meaning of Christ’s resurrection. It is not an event exclusively related to Christ, but rather, Christ has become the first fruits of all who have died in him. In verses 21–29, at a breathtaking pace, Paul describes the eschatological scenario from Christ’s resurrection to believers’ future resurrection to the destruction of death, finally to God being all in all.

First Corinthians 15:12–20 is not trying to persuade the Corinthians to believe Christ was raised. Christ’s resurrection is something that Paul, the other apostles, and the Corinthians all agree on (see 15:1–11). Here Paul takes that belief to its theological and practical implications. If Christ was raised, what would this mean for believers? Paul explains what transformation Christ’s resurrection has initiated for all bodies.

The same is true for those in today’s churches. This passage addresses those who believe in Christ’s resurrection doctrinally, but not in the life-giving power of this resurrection. In other words, this is for those who do not see clearly how their bodies are connected to Jesus’ body: broken, yet risen.

Borrowing the words of my respected colleague Cindy Rigby, “We want to stay joined to the body of the one who joined himself to us by being born of Mary’s body, and dying as a body broken, and rising—embodied—to break bread with us again.”³ As she further notes, this deep entanglement between believers’ bodies and Christ’s body points to the greater truth about one’s connection to other bodies that are absent and invisible, but present and visible in love. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, Christians confess that they are “connected to the bone.”⁴

Notes

1. Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 105–6. See also Paul J. Brown, Bodily Resurrection and Ethics in 1 Cor 15: Connecting Faith and Morality in the Context of Greco-Roman Mythology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 66–79.
2. Brown, Bodily Resurrection and Ethics in 1 Cor 15, 94.
3. Cynthia L. Rigby, Holding Faith: A Practical Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Abingdon, 2018), 270.
4. Rigby, 271.