When Jesus stood up to read from the Scriptures in the synagogue at Nazareth, he read the passage which begins: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18; Isaiah 61:1). This was the opening statement, the manifesto, of his mission.

But where does this “good news” leave those of us who are not poor? Most church-going Christians in the developed countries today are middle-class people with a comfortable home and a steady income. What is the gospel, the “good news” for people like us?

There is a story in three of the Gospels about a man who asked Jesus what he should do to have eternal life. He looks rather like many idealistic young people today. He had grown up taking for granted the comforts of what we would call a middle-class life. He was honest, law-abiding, and faithful to his religion. But he felt something was missing. Perhaps he thought Jesus might show him the way to a deeper spirituality. The answer Jesus gave him was an invitation to sell all his possessions, give the money to the poor, and then, “come, follow me” (Mark’s version adds the touching little detail that “Jesus, looking at him, loved him”). The answer was not the one he wanted to hear, and he walked away disappointed.

Much Christian preaching today presents the gospel as an extra dimension to life. Life, it says, can be more than just a comfortable home, a happy family, and a steady nine-to-five job with a good pension at the end of it. Christian faith offers a richer experience: a personal relationship with God, and the prospect of going to heaven when we die. But this is a pale and cheap version of what Jesus said to that young man. The “personal relationship with God” offered to him was not a richer prayer life: it was a practical life-changing experience, leaving all his wealth and security behind and joining Jesus on the road. Jesus seems to be saying that eternal life, a deeper spirituality, blessedness, or whatever you want to call it, is not “the icing on the cake”, something we can just add on to what we already have: it comes at a price.

In the teaching of Jesus, “good news for the poor” seems to go together with bad news for the rich: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. … But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” (Luke 6:20-26)

In Luke’s Gospel (16:19-31) we find the misnamed story of “Dives and Lazarus” – misnamed, because the rich man doesn’t have a name. “Dives” is simply the word for “rich” in Latin, the language of the Catholic Bible. Of all the stories Jesus told, this is the only one in which one of the characters has a name. Because of this, preachers came to think the other character should have a name too. This is not only an unnecessary addition to the story: it is a misunderstanding of its whole point. In real life the rich man would have a well-known, respected name, a name that could get a lot of things done if mentioned in the right places or signed on the right documents. The poor man sitting outside his door would just be known as “that beggar”. By giving a name to the poor man and not to the rich man, Jesus was turning the values of “normal” society upside down.

When the rich man dies, he is buried, and presumably given a dignified funeral procession and a fine tomb. The beggar’s body would probably just be tossed into a common grave or rubbish dump. But beyond death their status is reversed. The poor man is taken up by the angels to sit with Abraham in heaven, but the rich man is suffering in the underworld. Why is he being punished? Nothing is said about any sin he has committed. He is apparently being punished just for being rich while the man sitting at his gate was destitute. The story seems to be saying that sin is not just in what we do but in what we tolerate without doing anything about it.

In today’s world the richer nations happen to be mostly those of a Christian tradition, those who sent missionaries to preach the good news to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, in those “mission fields”, millions of people are living every day with grinding poverty, undernourished, exploited, sick with no access to medicine, held back by lack of education, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions to provide luxury goods for the rich. Those of us who are comfortable and well fed need to hear both sides of Christianity, the good news and the bad news, the promise and the warning.