We should understand that when Jesus said, “the poor have good news preached to them,” he was expressing his deep sorrow over the disbelief of John the Baptist and the Jewish leadership.
The prepared Jews, and John the Baptist in particular, were the rich people who had been blessed with an abundant wealth of God’s love. Yet because they all rejected Jesus, he had to roam the seacoast of Galilee and the region of Samaria to search among the “poor” for those who would listen to the Gospel. These poor ones were uneducated fishermen, tax collectors and prostitutes. The disciples whom Jesus would have preferred to find were not such as these. Since Jesus came to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, he was more in need of one leader who could guide a thousand than a thousand who would follow a leader. Did he not first preach the Gospel to the priests and scribes in the Temple? He went there in search of prepared and capable people. Nonetheless, as Jesus indicated in a parable, because the guests who were invited to the banquet did not come, he had to roam the streets and byways to gather the poor and maimed, the blind and lame (Luke 14:16-24).
Faced with the miserable situation of having to offer the riches of his banquet to the uninvited outcasts of society, Jesus expressed his sorrow in these words of judgment: “Blessed is he who takes no offense at me” (Matt. 11:6). Though John was greatly admired in his day, Jesus judged John’s life by saying obliquely that one who took offense at him would not be blessed, no matter how great he might be. |