Canter Bridge

One thinks of the crowds thronging to Jesus because of his more dramatic performances, say, the noisy exorcisms and the healing of lingering diseases. Yet when Luke summarizes Jesus’ labors, he begins his abbreviation of the crowds’ vigor by referring to what they heard Jesus say:

He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured.

What words, what voice, what personal mystique must have touched them with such impressive potency?

No doubt a part of the message that brought such numbers to Jesus concerned his intimation that a reversal of the way things are lay just over the horizon. When Luke presents a distillation of Jesus’ famous ‘sermon on the mount’—the discourse itself must have been much longer than the few lines in which it comes to us—he tell us that Jesus juxtaposed now to then. Four times he makes this unspecified contrast:

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.’

Like so many Israelite prophets of whom Jesus might have elicited uncanny recollection, he spoke of a change that would turn the tables on the satisfied rich, inventing a world where the ignored and stomped-upon would be sated, refreshed, and exultant.

It must have sounded to hungry ears like God’s own response to uncountable tears. It must have pounded the ears of others with the most threatening insinuation. Someone would need to deal with this crowd-enthralling dreamweaver.