Luke 6.20-26
When we went to my daughter's first sports day we got a surprise. We were expecting Jennifer to do her best and perhaps even win a race. What we didn't know was that she and her best friend had agreed that, in every race, they would both cross the finish line at exactly the same time.
And they were as good as their word. In some races they even crossed the line holding hands, and whatever they were doing, the egg and spoon race, the bean bag race, the sprint, they kept looking at each other to make sure they were running side by side. Of course, they came last equal in everything, which made Sports Day extremely tedious.
Many years later I went to another athletics contest that Jennifer was taking part in. Her school was competing against a boarding school from Harrogate. The boarders included several tall, slender long-legged girls from Africa. They were built like gazelles and they could run every bit as fast.
The event was just as predictable as Jennifer's first sports day. In every running event the girls from Jennifer's school were only halfway round the track when the African girls crossed the finishing line. They needn't have got off the bus. Jennifer's team could just have conceded and saved everyone the trouble of getting changed into their running kit.
What sort of sports day would Jesus prefer to watch? The very unequal one or the one with no winners and losers? I rather think he might prefer the sort where everyone crosses the finishing line together.
Luke's Gospel says that Jesus came down to a level place and imagined a world where everyone is on the same level, where no one is super rich and no one has nothing to eat or nowhere to sleep, a world where things have been evened out, where everything is fairer.
That ought to be a better world, but on the other hand it could also be more uncomfortable for you and I. When everyone is together on the same level it's easier to be jostled and pushed around, and it's harder to see what's going on.
Someone has pointed out that being in a level place with a great crowd of other people is a bit like sitting behind a woman with big frizzy hair, or an annoyingly tall man, at a concert. We would be able to see a lot better if our seats were just raised up a little bit higher. It would even be worth paying extra to sit there.
If everyone was on a level playing field, if everyone had the same amount to live on, clever or hard working people couldn't get higher rewards than everyone else or pass on their wealth to their children. Faster people couldn't win races. On the other hand no one would lose or be left behind.
Perhaps the ideal level place would be one that was not completely flat but a place where the nastier humps and bumps, the ones that can trip us up and do the most harm, have been evened out; a sort of Snakes and Ladders game where the ladders aren't too long but the snakes are always short and sweet.
That's why Jesus promises good times for those who are struggling, but warns of trouble ahead for those who are doing well. He wants us to work with him for a more level, fairer world.
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