The Eleven Woes of Luke

In The Message translation, Eugene Peterson often translates "woe" as "doom".  I get the impression that the fuller meaning is you are doomed to hell unless you repent.  In other words, God is seriously mad at some issues, and this is a severe warning that you better repent and change your ways quickly.

Most of these woes were issued to religious people such as Pharisees.  For example, in Chapter 11 in Luke, one of these woes was issued to the Pharisees because, though highly religious, they were accused of neglecting justice and the love of God.  I get the impression that when you neglect justice, you are neglecting love.  Or that love and justice must go together.  You cannot claim to love God unless you are a doer of justice.  So Jesus warns the Pharisees that the law that they so reverently and meticulously try to obey, that law was built on the twin pillars of love and justice.

After living 92 years in America, I think that, by in large, the American church is guilty of neglecting to do justice and thereby neglects the love of God.  So we should take this woe with extreme seriousness.  Instead, I see a past and present in America riddled with things such as Indian genocide and land theft;  African enslavement, followed by a white segregation, sharecropping, prison gangs, and lynching. Also, the theft at the point of a gun of nearly half of Mexico's territory.  And the killing of a million Filipinos when we conquered their islands.

Our past is dripping with ethnocentrism and oppression.  We have neglected justice and the love of God.  The other woe I would like to highlight is found in chapter 6:24, "Woe to the rich!"  This also comes from lips of Jesus.  Apparently he is very angry with the rich of his day, many of whom were religious.  Why?  Because, in most cases, the rich were oppressing the poor.  Also falling from the lips of Jesus was the phrase, "den of robbers."  He called the sacred Temple which was intended to be the house of prayer and worship, "a den of robbers."  So apparently, the religious rich had moved in and taken over.

But with Jesus, woes are never the last word.  In chapter 6, there are four "blesseds" and four "woe"s.
One of the "blesseds" is, "Blessed are the poor."  This might be only a pious platitude, if the church sits on its hands.  If the church does nothing to release the oppressed.  If the church becomes active in releasing the oppressed poor by doing Jubilee justice then it is incarnating the kingdom of God.  If the church is doing that, the poor will call the church blessed.  But if the church is neglecting justice and the love of God, if the church is honoring the rich and discriminating against the poor, then the poor will have every right to curse the church.  The Spirit-filled church will be the key to the poor being blessed.

In James 2, it says, "God has chosen the poor to be the first citizens of the kingdom of God, with full rights and privileges."  But the rest of the chapter says this will only happen if the church is activating  its faith with works of love and justice.