Jesus said to his disciples and the crowds:
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:7-12)
Sometimes they'll say being merciful makes you look like a "loser." Or that peace is only possible through brute force. Sometimes they'll say "You won't get into trouble if you just do what you are told and comply." And sometimes they cast folks who were doing good as villains in order to take the focus off their own rottenness. Jesus knows not to believe any of it.
And instead, Jesus offers a blessed alternative to all of that misguided thinking and misdirection.
In this second half of the Beatitudes, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, we get further illustrations from Jesus about the upside-down values of God's Reign. And as we saw with the first section, in which Jesus announced blessing on folks likely to be looked down on (the "poor in spirit," the "mourning," the "meek," and the ones who have been denied justice and are therefore hungry to see things put right), once again Jesus reveals a set of priorities at odds with conventional wisdom. In both the first century and the twenty-first, all of those folks are typically viewed as pitiable or pathetic, not blessed with divine favor. Now here, Jesus again uplifts values that the Roman Empire (and all of its copycats ever since) would have dismissed as nonsense.
Being merciful, for one, means refusing to use your power or leverage over somebody else but rather showing compassion to help them--even when they can't pay you back in return. The Big Deals of history would say, "No! When you've got 'em over a barrel, that's the time to squeeze them for all they're worth and press your advantage!" But mercy says, "This is someone loved by God, who has shown mercy to me as well. If I were in their shoes, I would need compassion shown to me." Being merciful means leaving possible "advantage" on the table unclaimed in order to show favor to someone without concern for whether they have earned it or whether you will get anything out of it. Being merciful requires being able to see the world in more than merely transactional terms where everything is a deal.
Similarly, to be "pure in heart" will mean a willingness not to always seek your own advantage or your own self-interest in what you do. As Soren Kierkegaard once put it, "purity of heart is to will one thing." And if we are supposed to be committed to seeking God's will and aligning our hearts with God's, that will mean there is no place for a self-interested side-hustle of grabbing for ourselves in addition to that. And again, that just sounds foolish to the thinking of many. "You've got to look out for Number One!" the thinking goes. "It would be crazy NOT to take advantage of every situation you're in for yourself!" they say. Jesus knows that to many, it seems like common sense to blend our devotion to God with some strategic self-interest. He knows that for a lot of folks, "Me and My Group First" sounds like an article of faith. He just doesn't agree. Instead, he points us to a different set of values--where we seek God's will rather than muddying the waters with our own corrupt impulses on the side.
Peacemaking, too, sounds preposterous to the thinking of the Powerful Empires and the Big Shots. At least, genuine peacemaking does. Rome, of course, was happy to tell its subjects that it was bringing peace--but what the Empire meant by "peace" was really conquest. They meant, "If you give in to our demands, we will stop stomping on your neck." And again, history keeps showing us that every empire and strongman since has tried to use the same playbook. What is really radical is Jesus' call not to use the language of "peace" as a talking point or propaganda, but to actually do the hard work of reconciling with other people, whom we treat as equal dialog partners rather than pawns. To the world's mindset that thinks of peace as something you can only enforce by intimidating your opponents at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun, Jesus' call to peacemaking is outlandish.
And those final two statements of blessing--about those who are persecuted, reviled, and defamed for the sake of doing justice (the same word as "righteousness" in Greek) and for being associated with the name and way of Jesus--those are countercultural, too. You know as well as I do how often conventional wisdom says, "If you just obey what the authorities say and don't make waves, you won't get into trouble." And you know as well how often those who get into such trouble are often blamed as though they brought it on themselves: "They should have complied. They should have kept quiet. They shouldn't have stepped out of line." That was the advice of people in the Roman Empire whose neighbors got crucified or flogged as a public example. It was the same criticism aimed at the ones who worked in the Underground Railroad to help the formerly enslaved get to freedom at great personal risk, just as it was lobbed at the ones who helped Jewish neighbors escape the Reich when they came knocking on doors in the 1930s. And it was the same conventional wisdom used to condemn the Freedom Riders, sit-in participants, and marchers across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, and throughout the Civil Rights movement. Criticism was aimed at those who were arrested, beaten, hit with firehoses, or who lost their lives, as though such punishments were only ever doled out to wrongdoers. Jesus knew better, and he knew full well that sometimes you get vilified for doing the right thing. Sometimes your faith in Jesus leads you to speak up, stand up, or act up--and when the powers of the day do not like it, not only will they try to stop you, they'll try to inflict pain and cast you as a villain in the process. Jesus tells us in advance: don't worry about what they say about you--you just stick to pursuing what you know is right, what is just, and what corresponds to the way of Jesus.
If we dare to actually practice this set of values, we will look strange in a world that keeps telling us to keep our heads down and only to look out for our own interests. We will certainly seem odd and against the grain of what is expected. But of course, that's the whole point. Jesus has called us to be a part of the Reign of God, which is always a blessed alternative to the self-serving bullying and calculated cowardice of The Way Things Are. We are called to be different--to live deliberately out of step--in the ways we practice mercy, the ways we make peace, the ways we keep our integrity, and the ways we risk our reputations for the sake of doing right.
That might just turn some heads if we dared it today. What do you say?
Lord Jesus, enable us to live as your blessed alternative in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment