The crowd stood shoulder to shoulder on a wide, dusty plain. Fishermen and farmers, widows and beggars, zealots and tax collectors—each craning their necks to see the man whose words had unsettled the synagogues and soothed the suffering. The sun of Galilee shimmered on the horizon, and Jesus, recently descended from a night of prayer, stood not above them but among them. Luke says He spoke “on a level place.”
That detail matters.
It is not a mountain of revelation, as in Matthew’s version, but a plain of encounter. The level place is where God’s voice sounds not from the clouds but from beside you. It’s the geography of grace—the equal ground where the divine meets the human, where the first will not tower over the last.
When Jesus begins to speak, He looks into eyes weary with work and worry and says the most implausible thing anyone has ever heard:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the Kingdom of God.” (Luke 6:20 NLT)
No one had ever been called blessed for lacking everything. But the Kingdom has come, and its grammar is upside down. On the level place, meaning itself begins to change.
Seeing the World Reversed
The scene is not abstract theology; it’s social revolution wrapped in tenderness. In the Roman Empire, blessing belonged to the few—those with patrons, property, or power. To the rest came survival, not honor. Yet Jesus turns the old signs of success inside out.
“Blessed are you who hunger now… you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep… you will laugh.” (Luke 6:21)
Each statement hums with reversal. The rich have received their comfort; the full will one day hunger; the laughing will one day mourn. This is not vindictive reversal but moral realignment—God setting the world’s compass right-side up.
The poor are not romanticized; they are recognized. They are the ones still open to receiving, still aware that the world does not belong to them. Their need has left them receptive, and receptivity is the door through which the Kingdom enters.
The level ground becomes sacred space because Jesus names reality as it truly is:
Blessing is not possession; blessing is participation.
Not having, but belonging.
A Modern Mirror
We live in a culture allergic to lack. Our devices fill every quiet moment, our refrigerators and calendars overflow, yet we ache. We’re surrounded by fullness that leaves us empty. The Gospel pierces that ache with a strange promise: Blessed are you when you hunger now.
That promise does not glorify pain. It dignifies dependence. It says that when you run out of self-sufficiency, you’ve stepped onto holy ground.
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, once said, “The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” 1 Her table was always crowded—with strangers, the unwashed, the ungrateful—and yet she said she met Christ in their faces. In her simplicity, the Beatitudes put on flesh again.
The Grammar of Grace
Every blessing and woe carries symbolic weight—a language of signs rewriting how we see power, time, and love.
1. The Level Place — The Sign of Equality
The “level place” announces incarnation. The Word made flesh does not preach from the clouds but from our dust. Jesus doesn’t stand on higher ground because the Kingdom itself is level ground—no privileged slope, no velvet rope of righteousness. It is an equal field of mercy. 2
2. Blessing and Woe — The Sign of Reversal
Where the world sees failure, God sees readiness. The blessings and woes are mirrors held up to the human heart, showing us who depends on whom. The poor have room for God; the rich are already full. It’s not that God despises wealth but that wealth so easily builds walls too high for grace to climb. 3
3. Enemy-Love — The Sign of Divine Imitation
“Love your enemies,” Jesus says, and suddenly the sermon turns from comfort to confrontation. It’s easy to nod at Beatitudes; harder to bless those who curse you. Yet the logic of grace cannot stop halfway. Love that stops at friends is still self-interest; love that flows toward enemies is divine. 4
A Living Sign: The Christmas Truce
In December 1914, amid the mud and blood of World War I, soldiers in the trenches of France did something astonishing. On Christmas Eve, German and British troops sang carols across no man’s land. By morning, they climbed from their trenches, met between the lines, exchanged food, shook hands, even played soccer.
For one holy day, hatred paused. The “level place” reappeared in the wasteland of war. No one issued orders; no treaties were signed. The world’s logic simply yielded to a better one—the Kingdom’s logic.
Love had crossed enemy lines. 5
Living on the Level Place
Jesus ends this section with what we call the Golden Rule:
“Do to others as you would like them to do to you.” (Luke 6:31)
It’s deceptively simple but ethically seismic. The rule demands initiative. Don’t wait to be treated well; begin the kindness. Don’t mirror hostility; invent grace.
When we practice this, we become living parables of the Kingdom. We embody the God who gives rain to the righteous and the unrighteous, who feeds the grateful and the ungrateful alike.
1. The Level Place at Home
Where are the uneven places in your life—the conversations where you stand over another, or under? The level place begins when we lay down superiority, when we choose empathy over control. Parents, pastors, leaders—all authority in the Kingdom is stewardship, not entitlement. Every “high place” is an invitation to kneel.
2. The Level Place in Society
In a polarized culture, enemy-love is revolutionary. It disarms outrage. Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “Forgiveness is nothing less than the way we heal the world.” 6 He watched enemies sit face to face in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Tears, not vengeance, rebuilt a nation.
To love an enemy is to refuse to let the story end in hatred. It is to write a new chapter where mercy has the final word.
3. The Level Place in Faith
Spiritually, the Beatitudes ask us to trade performance for presence. Many Christians measure faith by achievement—the number of verses memorized, services attended, ministries led. But Jesus measures faith by hunger—by longing for the Kingdom more than comfort.
“Blessed are you who hunger now.” Hunger is the heart’s prayer before words form. Stay hungry for righteousness, for reconciliation, for the laughter still to come.
A Modern Parable: The Amish of Nickel Mines
In 2006, a gunman entered an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and killed five young girls before taking his own life. The community’s response stunned the world. Within hours, they visited the killer’s family, offering forgiveness and comfort. They even attended his funeral.
Reporters asked how they could forgive so quickly. One elder said, “Forgiveness is a journey; we’re taking the first step.” 7
In that moment, the plain of Galilee stretched into Pennsylvania. Love crossed another boundary. The Kingdom touched down again—level ground, mercy made visible.
BENEDICTION — Laughing on the Level Place
The sermon on the plain is not a lecture on morality; it’s an invitation to transformation. It tells us that the Kingdom of God isn’t somewhere we escape to—it’s something that arrives wherever mercy stands up.
When you bless those who curse you, you make the plain holy.
When you give without expecting return, you flatten the hills of pride.
When you forgive what the world says is unforgivable, you carve a plain where heaven can rest.
One day, the laughter Jesus promised will echo through every valley of loss. Until then, we live between hunger and hope, weeping and laughter, persecution and joy—yet always on the level place where Christ stands beside us.
The world chases higher ground; the Kingdom starts where the ground is even.
That’s where grace begins.
That’s where love rewrites the rules of power.
That’s where we meet Jesus.
References
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
NT Wright, Luke for Everyone (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001).
John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006).
Leonard Sweet, Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who’s Already There (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2010).
Stanley Weintraub, Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (New York: Plume, 2001).
Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Image Books, 1999).
Associated Press / NPR coverage, “Amish Community Offers Forgiveness,” Oct 2006.