The Hard Saying: Luke 6:24
But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.
This article is part of a series explaining the sayings of Jesus that are hard to understand. This list was put together by the Lord's Library. To see the list an access earlier articles, go to this page.
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Jesus spoke this verse after a short series of three Beatitudes in Luke about being poor, hungry, and hated. At the time, Jesus was teaching on a plain surrounded by a grow from the entire region, many of whom were healed by touching him. The the Gospel says that he spoke these Beatitudes while looking at his “disciples.” This makes it sound like he was addressing the twelve who he had just named as “apostles,” (“the ones sent”) but the word “disciples” is more general, meaning “students.” Luke may have applied this term to all those coming to hear Jesus’s teaching.
This verse came after Jesus said that those who are hated for the sake of the Son of the Man are fortunate. He said that they should rejoice and leap for joy because of their great reward, that is, their compensation, in the sky. This verse, Luke 6:24, is a transition point to a change in topic.
NIV: But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.
This is the first in a series of three “woe to you” lines about being successful in some way. None of these lines are exactly as they appear in the Bible. They have a less critical and more light-hearted tone because the Greek word translated as “woe” is a bit funny.
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Woe to You
This “woe” word signals this verse’s tone as somewhat satirical. "Woe" is an wry exclamation of grief, meaning "woe" or "alas." The word is not a verb or a noun, but a particle, a word that serves many small purposes. Jesus uses it sympathetically. The Greek word is very like the Yiddish, "oy vey" which can be used to express sorrow but can also be used in a more light-hearted way. “Oy vey” looks like a union of the Hebrew, oi vavoy, expressing sorrow, and the Greek ouai (οὐαὶ), which is the word here. Today, in English, we might say "too sad for you" or "boo-hoo for you."
This word provides a droll contrast to the “fortunate” that begins the verses before this one. This Greek word “fortunate” is translated in the Bible as “blessed,” but that is just adding a religious gloss to a word that isn’t religious at all. The word means being lucky, especially in the sense of having good fortune, which can also refer to money. The word “woe” here is in many ways its opposite, having the sense of bad luck or losing money. Jesus used fortunate in contrast with those who are beggars. See this earlier article. Here, Jesus reverses that formula of contradiction, expressing how sad it is for the wealthy. This further exaggerates this series of humorous paradoxes.
The Rich
Because this verse is preceded by one extoling the compensation we get in the sky, this word may have caused a bit of confusion for those listening at the time. This confusion existed because there is no verb here to clarify the time frame. Jesus didn’t say, “who are already rich” but simply “Boo-hoo to you, the rich.” Jesus forced his listeners to think about his words instead of making his ideas simple by explaining them.
The Greek word for “rich” is interesting. "Rich" is a Greek adjective that means "rich," and "opulent." It very much has the sense of ostentatiously rich, but like our English word, it doesn’t only mean wealthy in money. A person can be rich in wisdom, friends, and virtue depending on the context. In some verses, such as Mark 10:25, our previous “hard” verse, (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God”), Jesus uses this word to mean “comfortable in several senses. We may think that Jesus highlights that sense of “comfort” here because of the way this verse ends with the word “comfort,” but that is not the case. The “comfort” here is an illusion created by poor translation.
Received
The word translated as “received” is not the common Greek word that Jesus uses to say “received.” It is a less common word that has a fun double meaning. It is also not in the form of an action completed in the past, “have received,” but it is an action started in the past that continues to the present.
The word combines the Greek word that means “have,” “hold,” or “possess” with a prefix that means “out of” or “from.” While, in English, “to have from” sounds like it could mean “to receive,” that is not how this word works. In Greek, “have” is more static, more focused on possession or holding a thing, not the action of getting it, which is a different word.
This more complicated Greek word translated as “received” is most often translated as “to keep away from” or “to hold off from.” It means to “receive” only in the sense of “to have received a payment in full” because that phrase describes the end state, having been paid in full. Can you see the double meaning here? The riches could mean earthly riches which “are paid in full,” already but they could also be the heavenly riches, which we “hold off from.”
This brings us to the final play on words, the Greek word mistranslated as “comfort.” It doesn’t relate in anyway to our idea of “comfort,” and in some ways is its opposite. The noun means "calling to one's aid", "summon", "demand," “request," "imploring", "appealing", "invocation of gods", "exhortation", and "address". All these shade of meaning give it different possible dimensions. Jesus only uses this word here so we cannot know how he typically used it. The general idea is not only something desired, but what is asked for or even demanded. It is something that someone prays for. Like so many of Jesus’s punchlines, the word offers multiple possible meanings.
The sense of the punchline could be, “you have what you begged for.” This phrase sounds very much like our English idiom, “you got what you asked for.” This has both a positive sense of having one’s wishes come true and the caustic sense of getting “just deserts. “ Those translating Jesus’s words may have thought of this as comfort, but Jesus saw more sides to the idea. The “boo-hoo” at the beginning of this verse tilts its meaning to the negative.
Jesus listeners would have heard this line as:
Except, too bad for you, the rich, because you hold off from that imploring of yours.
There are a lot of different words we could replace that “imploring ” with, but you can try different ones yourself. It could be a “demand of yours” or a “pleading of your.”