Luke 6:17-26: in context

Jesus, on a level place amid a great crowd, teaches his disciples with a series of blessings and woes that overturn the world's values. Blessed are you who are poor, who hunger now, who weep now, who are hated and excluded for the Son of Man's sake; yours is the kingdom, you will be filled, you will laugh, your reward is great in heaven. But woe to you who are rich, who are full now, who laugh now, of whom all speak well; you have received your consolation, you will be hungry, you will mourn.

Jesus turns the world's assumptions upside down. The world counts the rich, the full, the comfortable, the well-liked as blessed, and pities the poor, the hungry, the grieving, the rejected. Jesus reverses it: blessing on the poor and hungry and weeping and hated, and woe on the rich and full and laughing and popular. This is not because poverty and hunger are good in themselves, but because they can turn us toward God, keep us dependent, and open us to the kingdom; while wealth, fullness, comfort, and universal approval can lull us into a false security, giving us our consolation now and leaving us with nothing for eternity. The reversal is meant to jolt us out of the world's way of measuring blessing and danger. And the last woe presses with particular force: woe to you when all speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. We instinctively want everyone to think well of us; universal approval feels like blessing. Jesus calls it a warning sign. The prophets were hated; the false prophets were popular; and if the whole world speaks well of us, it may mean we have made peace with the world rather than stood for God's truth. This searches our sense of where blessing and danger lie. We seek the very things Jesus warns against, wealth, comfort, the good opinion of all, and fear the things he calls blessed, hardship, loss, rejection for his sake. The reversal calls us to see rightly: that comfort and approval can be spiritual dangers, lulling us and giving us our reward now, while poverty, hunger, grief, and rejection for Christ's sake, hard as they are, can be the soil of a deeper blessedness, drawing us to God and storing up reward in heaven. This does not mean we should seek suffering, but it means we should not measure our lives by the world's scale, envying the comfortable and pitying the afflicted, but should hold both blessing and woe as Jesus named them, remembering that where the world sees blessing there may be danger, and where it sees misfortune there may be the kingdom.

Do I measure blessing and danger by the world's scale, seeking wealth, comfort, and the good opinion of all while fearing hardship, loss, and rejection, or can I let Jesus' reversal reorder my sense of things, seeing that comfort and universal approval can be spiritual dangers, and that poverty, grief, and rejection for his sake can be the soil of a deeper blessedness?