Defense Against Miracle

Posted on 31 March 201323 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

You have to feel a little sorry for Pontius Pilate. He’s trying to work his way up the career ladder, and he’s been handed the most fractious, intractable province in the entire Empire to try to govern. He’s on notice, because he’s already mishandled one incident and provoked an official complaint from the local leaders—which means he’s under their thumb to some degree, because they could easily wreck his career. He brought it on himself (I only said a little sorry), but still—here he’s trying to do his job, and all of a sudden those local leaders come to him and demand he put some poor schmuck on trial because they don’t like his theology. Rome didn’t give a hang about Jewish religious disputes, and neither did Pilate, but here these infuriating old men were insisting that if he didn’t do what they wanted, they were going to get him fired.

And was that the end of it? No! He’s washed his hands of the matter—literally (Mt. 27:24)—but no sooner does he think he’s done with it then they’re back in his office. They got the execution, but that’s not enough for them—now they want him to guard the tomb! Guard the tomb! You might as well guard a manhole cover. But he has to deal with them somehow, and he has to keep them happy. A lot of our English translations have Pilate saying, “You have a guard,” but I think the NIV has the right of it here: from the context, I think it’s pretty clear he gives them what they want, a squad of Roman soldiers to seal and guard the tomb.

He gave them sixteen members of the greatest fighting force on the planet—four watches of four men each to secure the area through the night. A Roman squad was supposed to be able to form a square, if cut off, and hold their ground against any opposing force indefinitely; they were well-trained, well-equipped, well-disciplined, and ruthless, far more than necessary to deal with anything Jesus’ disciples might try. It was overkill.

And why? What are the Jewish leaders afraid of? They claim they want to prevent a hoax, but really? To quote the Presbyterian pastor and author Frederick Buechner,

in the not so long run religious hoaxes always tend to burn themselves out—as the chief priests and Pharisees had good reason to know, living as they did in an age when would-be Messiahs were a dime a dozen. . . . Even if the disciples were successful in their theft of the body, and even if for a time their claim of resurrection flourished, it could not really flourish long without something more substantial than merely rumor to feed upon.

The threat of a hoax wouldn’t have been worth their time.

No, there has to be something more here. Their real fear has to be something else—something they aren’t telling Pilate, and probably aren’t really admitting even to themselves. It’s ridiculous, but—Jesus had worked some powerful miracles; what if, somehow, he actually did come back to life? What if even killing him wasn’t enough to stop him? I doubt any of them had the courage to face that fear even for a moment, and I’m sure they would have laughed in the face of anyone who dared suggest it, but that had to be haunting the backs of their minds for them to go to such absurd lengths as this. If you’re afraid of a miracle—how are you going to stop it?

The thing is, they were going about it all wrong. As Buechner puts it in his sermon “The End Is Life,”

maybe it is not as hard as they feared. . . . I suspect that many of us could tell them that all in all there is a lot one can do in defense against miracle, and, unless I badly miss my guess, there are thousands upon thousands of ministers doing precisely that at any given instant—making it as secure as they can, that is, which is really quite secure indeed. . . . The point is not to try to prevent the thing from happening—like trying to stop the wind with a machine gun—but, every time it happens, somehow to explain it away, to deflect it, defuse it, in one way or another to dispose of it. And there are at least as many ways of doing this as there are sermons preached on Easter Sunday.

He’s right. As he goes on to say, you can spiritualize the Resurrection away without much effort at all. It’s a metaphor, it’s poetry—it’s a way of saying that the wisdom of Jesus is immortal like the works of Shakespeare, or that his example lives on in our hearts, or it symbolizes the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul—all of which miss the brute fact that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, there’s no foundation for any of that stuff. If he’s just one more great leader killed off by the establishment, then his story is just one more telling us that really, the sword is mightier than the pen after all.

All too often, we hear people reduce the Resurrection to a “miracle” of symbol and metaphor that leaves the substantial reality of our world untouched; and I’m with Buechner on this one.

If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. . . . If I thought that when you strip it right down to the bone, this whole religion business is really just an affirmation of the human spirit, an affirmation of moral values, an affirmation of Jesus of Nazareth as the Great Exemplar of all time and no more, then like Pilate I would wash my hands of it. The human spirit just does not impress me that much, I am afraid. And I have never been able to get very excited one way or the other about moral values. And when I have the feeling that someone is trying to set me a good example, I start edging toward the door.

If the Resurrection is just a story, then it’s just what someone wants us to believe; it has no power to change the way things actually are. That’s the tragedy of modern versions of Christianity: but understand this, it’s also the reason for them. The reason we seek in so many ways to defend ourselves against miracle, against the reality of the Resurrection, is that just like the Jewish leaders, we’re afraid of what it might mean. If we can reduce it to an affirmation of the human spirit, or moral values, or the importance of hope, or the wisdom of Jesus, then we get to define what that means; it might not be able to do much for us, but it can’t do anything to us, either. We’ve made it something we can control—we’ve made it safe, tame, the seed of a nice, domesticated religion. Miracle pitches us right out of that; even uncontrollable joy is still out of our control.

That can be frightening enough; but if Jesus died and came back to life—not even was raised from the dead by another human being, amazing as that would be, but simply got up, by the direct power of God—then what is there that he can’t do? And if he really did that for us, with all the horror of the cross, then what might he ask of us? What he said about “anyone who would follow me must deny himself and take up his cross”—he might have meant that. When he said, “Love your enemies and bless those who hurt you,” he might actually expect us to do that. Jesus laid everything down for us, he turned everything inside out for us—how can we possibly accept that and take it seriously without our own lives being turned inside out and upside down?

Even if life is miserable, change is still frightening to most people; we know in our bones that however bad things might be, they could still get worse. “Better the devil you know,” and all that. Even when we know we don’t have much control over our lives, our egos tell us we need more control to make things better—not to give up what little we have. If the problem with our faith is that our God is too small, as I and others have said often enough, it’s only fair to say that we shrink him out of self-protection; Easter shows us a God untamed and untameable—we can’t possibly know what he might do.

The thing is, the desire for control of our lives is just another version of the primal temptation: to be our own gods. There’s no life in it; it is the road to death. The gospel doesn’t offer us a tame, reasonable faith that lets us feel like we’re in control and we understand what’s going on; Jesus doesn’t promise us a safe religion with a god who makes perfect sense to us. The gospel proclaims, and Jesus gives, life—life that has overcome death, and will overcome it. Life that takes the thousand and one little deaths that we suffer in this world and transmutes them into seeds of growth. Life that raises dead hopes, dead relationships, dead souls, not as they were before, but better—not merely earthly and human, but eternal and divine. “Safe” and “reasonable” are limited to our imagination; Jesus is good beyond our ability to imagine, and alive beyond our experience of life. Let go your grip on control, drop your defenses, and let the miracle of the Resurrection overwhelm you. Let go, and live.

The Vulnerable God

Posted on 29 March 201318 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 5:1-6; Luke 20:9-19)

It was the Passover, the greatest and most important feast of the Jewish year. Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a donkey to the praise of the crowds, who laid cloaks and palm branches before him on the road. Before him stood the Temple—a magnificent structure of beautifully-carved cream-colored stone. The gates in its outer walls opened into the the Court of the Gentiles; a low wall separated that from the Court of the Women. Past that wall no Gentile could pass who had not been circumcised, on pain of death. Within that was the Court of Israel, from which women were barred, and then the Court of the Priests, forbidden most of the year to all but priests and Levites. Inside the Priests’ Court stood the great altar, and the Holy of Holies.

When Jesus entered the temple, he found that—as had happened before—the high priest, Caiaphas, had set up a market in the outer court, turning it from a place for Gentiles to worship God into an opportunity to make money off all the Jews coming to pay the tithe and offer their sacrifices. Once again, Jesus drove them out; more, he refused to let anyone carry anything through the temple. Apparently, given the disrespect the high priest had shown the temple, the people of Jerusalem had started using its outer court as a public street. Jesus put a stop to that—which must have meant taking control of the entire 35-acre complex, for at least a few hours.

Needless to say, the authorities were infuriated, and demanded to know by what authority he presumed to do such a thing. Instead of an answer, they got a parable about a man who planted a vineyard, then rented it out while he went off to a far country. The harvest came, and he sent a servant to collect the rent—a share of the crop—but instead of paying, the renters beat the servant and told him to go away. This was a grave insult to the owner, but he sent another servant; this time, they not only beat the servant, they publicly humiliated him. Yet a third servant was sent, whom they hurt even worse and then physically threw out of the vineyard.

This is all a huge public insult to the vineyard owner, who is no doubt rightly furious—less for the financial loss than for the dishonor done to him. Honor demands that he avenge the injustice to his servants and the insult to his name. He has every right to ask the authorities to send the army to retake the vineyard and punish the tenants for their wickedness; no one would expect anything else. But he doesn’t do that.

One night in the early 1980s, King Hussein of Jordan discovered that a group of army officers were meeting nearby to plot a military coup. His chief of security requested permission to seize the barracks and arrest the plotters, but the king refused; instead, he flew by helicopter to the roof of the barracks. He told the pilot, “If you hear gunshots, fly away without me,” then walked down two flights of stairs, unarmed.

He appeared without warning in the room where the officers were meeting and said, “Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that you are meeting here tonight to finalize your plans to overthrow the government, take over the country and install a military dictator. If you do this, the army will break apart and the country will be plunged into civil war. There is no need for this. Here I am! Kill me and proceed. That way, only one man will die.”

Kenneth Bailey tells this story, having confirmed it from an American intelligence officer; he reports that “after a moment of stunned silence, the rebels as one rushed forward to kiss the king’s hand and feet and pledge loyalty to him for life.” They had been planning to kill him, but the nobility of King Hussein’s act in making himself totally vulnerable, putting his life in their hands for the sake of their country, changed their hearts.

This is the approach the vineyard owner chooses. He sets his anger aside; rather than retaliate, he humbles himself and risks far greater loss at the hands of his tenants for the sake of one last attempt at reconciliation. He sends his beloved son to the vineyard in the hope that when they see him, their hearts will be moved to shame at their behavior, and they will regain their honor. Of course, it doesn’t happen, and judgment comes.

This is what God does. Jesus tells this parable against the chief priests and the Pharisees—Israel is the vineyard; they are the tenants who think they own the place—but we could just as well apply it to all of us. God created a beautiful world and gave it to us to care for, and what’s the first thing we did? We decided being tenants wasn’t good enough, we wanted to own the place. And really, we’ve been on about that ever since. God raised up Israel, and he sent the prophets, and there were some who listened, but most didn’t—even within Israel itself, there were often few who feared the Lord. God could have done as he said he would do in the parable in Isaiah—he could have loosed his wrath and wiped us out. Instead, he set his anger aside, and he set his glory aside, and he made himself vulnerable to our hatred. He sent his son down among us, unarmed.

That’s what God does. And we killed him, because that’s what we do. And his enemies on Earth celebrated, and maybe the Devil celebrated . . . but it only happened because God chose it.

This Is the Lord’s Doing

Posted on 24 March 201323 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Psalm 118:15-24, Zechariah 9:9-17; Matthew 21:1-13)

Psalm 118 is a psalm of triumph—we see the king and people of Israel praising God for victory in battle, a victory in defiance of all human expectation. The army of Israel was badly outnumbered, their king was hard pressed on every side, but the Lord heard the prayer of his servant and delivered him from death; by his power, the Lord gave the king victory against overwhelming odds. In thanksgiving and joy, the king is now leading a procession through the streets to the temple to offer his sacrifice to God.

Which king? What battle? We don’t know. We do see the psalmist reaching back to the first great victory God won for his people, their deliverance from Egypt; verse 14, which we used as part of the call to worship, is quoted from Moses’ song of praise in Exodus 15, after the Lord drowned the army of Egypt in the Red Sea. Whatever event occasioned this text, the writer is deliberately setting it in the context of God’s mighty acts of deliverance in the past—his righteousness to his people—in order to show this victory as one more step in God’s ongoing work of salvation. That’s what’s important.

Irony, the reversal of expectations, is potent in this psalm. It comes to a point in verse 22, in the context of the temple of God. In verses 19-20 we have a challenge and response: the king arrives at the great doors of the sanctuary and calls, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter and give thanks to the Lord”; the countersign comes, “This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous may enter through it.” The king passes through to worship the Lord; in verse 14, borrowing from Moses, he has declared, “The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation,” and now he gives thanks to God for so answering his prayers.

And then in verse 22, we get this: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the keystone.” NIV has “capstone” there, which is fine too; you’re likely more familiar with the translation “cornerstone,” but that points us in the wrong direction. The keystone holds the integrity of the arch and makes it work, serving to transfer the weight of the wall outward and down the arch to its vertical supports. In a stone arch, you’ll often see the keystone emphasized because of this—it may be larger, or a different color, or perhaps engraved or embossed. It would be the prize stone in that section of the wall.

And yet here, the king and the psalmist declare, the keystone is not a stone the builders prized, but one they rejected. How? Remember what we were saying about the divine passive a couple weeks ago—to say this stone “has become the keystone,” without any other explanation, means that God did it. God has trumped the builders. Which is particularly interesting because, remember, this is the temple. It’s God’s building, but who built it? The leaders of Israel. The keystone of God’s work here, the person through whom he has won this victory, wasn’t just facing enemies among the other nations—he had been rejected by the leaders of his own people. He could truly say his enemies surrounded him on every side, because even his own side was against him. Even so, he overcame them all by the power and faithfulness of God.

Thus we have verse 23: “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” There is no one else to credit, and no one else to blame; there is no other explanation. Human power and human brilliance cannot encompass it, much less create it, for it’s a victory in defiance of all prediction. This isn’t even a mere upset; we’re not just talking Florida Gulf Coast over Georgetown, or Valpo over Ole Miss, or Butler making the championship game two years running. Those get called March miracles, but they’re entirely human affairs when all’s said. The psalmist is celebrating a victory more on the order of Grace College beating IU to win the NCAA tournament. Only God can do that.

Now, I mentioned earlier that this psalm draws on Moses’ song of praise after the Lord drowned the Egyptian army. That was one of the great events of the Exodus, when God delivered Israel from Egypt; over the centuries, as Israel celebrated the Exodus in the Passover feast, this psalm came to be a part of that celebration. As the Passover began, Jesus had just raised Lazarus from the dead; popular interest in him and his ministry was likely at its peak, and the city was full of pilgrims, many of them from Galilee where he had done most of his work. Given that Psalm 118 was already in the hearts and on the lips of the people of Jerusalem as he approached the city, it’s no wonder that they took up its words to acclaim him: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

The thing is, they’d had centuries to wear the edges off this psalm; the crowds hailed Jesus in the words of verses 25-26, but they didn’t really understand the significance of verses 22-23. Over the generations, repetition had ground away the shock value of those verses and their message, leaving them safe and familiar; what was once unpredictable had become completely predictable. The crowds knew they needed a deliverer, but only in the conventional way—someone who would kick out the Romans and give them political independence. They wanted God to do something that made sense to them. They missed the lesson of the psalm that God can and does deliver us in ways that defy common sense and human expectation, “to showthat the all-surpassing power belongs to God and not to us”; he doesn’t limit his victories to the horizon of our imagination.

The crowds were excited by Jesus because they thought he might give them the worldly success they wanted; because they failed to understand what he was really on about, it would be just a few short days before the Jewish leaders would be able to fire them up to demand his crucifixion. They missed the Messiah for thinking too small.

Getting into Trouble

Posted on 17 March 201323 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 5:11-16, 1 Peter 4:12-19)

Blessed are you if you’re slandered and persecuted and abused because you’re trying to follow Jesus. The church keeps telling people, “Come to Jesus and all your problems will be solved”—but if being a Christian has bought you a whole pile of trouble instead, count yourself blessed.

This is essentially an expansion of the previous verse, the eighth beatitude, with one significant shift: no longer does Jesus say, “Blessed are those,” he says, “Blessed are you.” He moves from describing a group of people—much as I might describe, let’s say, the kind of people who live in small mountain resort towns—to personal address; and in so doing, he abruptly connects the Beatitudes to the lives of the people before him. He has presented the vision, he has given them the goal: now he begins the challenge.

You see, in the Beatitudes, Jesus has laid out the qualities which characterize someone who is truly his faithful disciple, who is being filled with the life of the kingdom of God—but with the last one, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” there’s a shift. It still tells us what the life of the kingdom of heaven looks like in this world, but the angle is different; it’s not describing what a faithful disciple of Jesus looks like, but rather what their life will look like. It belongs among the Beatitudes, because it’s another contradiction to this world’s ideas of what it means to have a blessed life, but at the same time, it doesn’t exactly fit with the rest of them. It shifts from a description of character to a description of action.

Thus we have the challenge. It would be possible to be the kind of person described in the first seven beatitudes and have almost no one know it—to stay within a very small circle of friends and family and have very little effect on the world outside. The eighth beatitude removes that possibility: those who belong to the kingdom of heaven won’t live that way. They won’t keep themselves safe from the world—they’ll be out where the world has the opportunity to go after them. No gated communities allowed.

This is critical, and so Jesus underscores it and aims it directly at the people before him: “If you follow me, you’ll be slandered and persecuted and abused—and when that happens, rejoice and recognize that you’re blessed. You’re standing right there with the prophets, and God will reward you for it.” We often think of good Christians as people who stay out of trouble, but Jesus’ statement is emphatic: my disciples get into trouble. Not for doing wrong, sure, but we all know trouble often comes for doing what’s right; that’s why they say, “No good deed goes unpunished.” If we follow Jesus, we won’t avoid those opportunities—he leads us right into them. Indeed, he leads us to seek them out. There are a terrible lot of trouble spots in this world; that’s where the good news of Jesus Christ most needs to be heard, and so that’s where we need to be.

He communicates this by telling us we are salt and light. These images show us three key things about what we’re supposed to do as his disciples. First, we are to move into the world. Salt only does anything when you pour it out of the saltshaker, and light only benefits anyone when you uncover the lamp. Turn on the light and put a bucket over it, the room is still dark; and while salt is the first great preservative the world ever discovered, it can’t preserve the meat if you leave it on the shelf. In the same way, we do very little good if we just hang out here in our saltshaker, and our light never gets beyond the front door. We need to be where the need is.

Partly, that’s a matter of place: where might we find people who need to be introduced to Jesus Christ, and how might we find a way to speak with them? There’s also the matter of culture. Let’s say some of us decided we were called to go preach the gospel in Rex’s Rendezvous, or in Zimmer’s corporate headquarters; in either case, we would find ourselves not just in a different building but in a different cultural environment, full of people who aren’t just like us. They have different values, goals, assumptions, plans, desires; they might be smarter than us, better educated and more knowledgeable, or they might be rather less so. How would we earn the right to be heard, and what would we do to be sure we were clearly understood? We can’t say, “Well, they need to become like us, and then they’ll understand”; but sadly, many churches do.

That sort of attitude develops when we think outreach is primarily about us and our own growth. In truth, Jesus calls us into the world not to strengthen ourselves but to give of ourselves. Salt and light work by expending themselves. Light pours out to be absorbed here and reflected there; salt dissolves in liquids and works its way into the meat; that’s how they fulfill their purpose.

It’s also how God works. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in eternal, self-giving love for one another; he created us to share their love with us, to extend the circle of love. When we rebelled against him, they raised up Abraham, and through him the people of Israel, to extend his love into the world; then Jesus came to live for us, and die for us—and to make us his people, his body on earth, that we might continue his work, to go out and do the same. He’s creating us as a community of the self-giving love of God, a people of the cross, who understand that our mission is to give ourselves to others, for others, just as he did. This is profoundly countercultural; our consumerist society is all about taking, not giving. If the world doesn’t see it in us, they won’t get there on their own.

Our part is to show the world the love of God, so that when they look at us they don’t just hear us talking about Jesus giving his life for us—they see his sacrifice reflected in the way we live our own lives. We’re called to go into the world, not for our own benefit, but for the flourishing of our neighbors. Salt is used, not for the sake of the salt, but for the sake of the food and those who eat it. Light shines, not so we ooh and aah over the light, but so that we can see where we’re going. And our work is not for the purpose of our own “success” as an organization, however we might define that, but to resist the decay of the world and to light up its darkness.

Jesus calls us to move into the world to give of ourselves for the sake of our neighbors. He has given us a mission not to avoid the troubles of this world, but to put ourselves right in the middle of them, to get into trouble for his sake and the sake of the gospel. He calls us to be salt—to be a spiritual preservative, to fight the sin that corrupts our lives and the lives of our neighbors. We must do so with care and grace, seeking to draw people away from their sin rather than condemn them for their sin,understanding that we need to earn the right to speak by showing them we love them and that we can be trusted, both in one-on-one relationships and through ministries like the Beaman Home.

That said, we can’t shy away from speaking, even though it’s difficult, because Jesus has made us to be light—to let love and truth shine from him through us into the lives of our neighbors, so that the darkness in their hearts and their actions will be revealed for what it is. Some will thank us for that, responding with humble repentance, and then with the joy of the forgiven, and they’ll come along and follow Jesus with us. Others will resent us, preferring the darkness, and they’ll fight back, seeking to turn out the light. But blessed are you when that happens, says Jesus, because that’s how they treated the prophets—and that’s how they treated me. Blessed are you, says the Lord, because that means you are where I am.

For the Right Reason

Posted on 10 March 201323 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Jeremiah 11:18-20; Matthew 5:10, 1 Peter 3:13-17)

Back in January, I argued that this first section of the Sermon on the Mount is composed of eight beatitudes, rather than nine, and ends here in verse 10. For one thing, while verses 11-12 are certainly a pronouncement of blessing, they are a very different one, moving in a different direction for a different purpose. We’ll get into that next week. My other main reason for this conclusion is that this beatitude and the first share the same promise statement: “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” As I noted then, this is a simple form of parallelism called an inclusio, which is designed to frame a passage, to put it into a particular context. These references to the kingdom of heaven—Matthew’s language for the kingdom of God—frame the Beatitudes, and we need to understand them in that context: these are statements about the life of the kingdom of heaven. As God transforms us with his life, this is how we come to live.

As I said when we looked at the first beatitude, this promise goes with “Blessed are the poor in spirit” because being poor in spirit is the essential characteristic of the citizens of the kingdom of God: if it comes down to a choice between God on the one hand, and on the other, your earthly riches, ambitions, desires, and accomplishments, which are you going to choose? This is the dividing line between those who bow before Christ in love as Lord, and those who will bow in the end, but only because they must. Here, we have the other end of the process, as you might say: if yours is the kingdom of heaven, this is how the kingdoms of earth are probably going to treat you. As Curtis Mayfield would say, “people get ready.”

Why do I say that? Well, remember the context. Those who are persecuted for the sake of God’s righteousness are those who hunger and thirst for his righteousness; and if you hunger and thirst for his righteousness, if you live for his righteousness, if you pursue his righteousness above all other things, what are you not doing? You are not hungering and thirsting for the products this world wants to sell you; you are not living for its applause and its approval; you are not pursuing its agenda or its approved goals. This means you are not under its thumb, you are not under its influence, it has no lever on you—and that makes you a threat to be neutralized or eliminated. If you are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, sooner or later, the world is going to rise up and try to change that fact, by any means necessary.

Now, at this point, we must be clear about two things. First, this verse doesn’t just apply to people who get their heads chopped off by Muslims in Iran or Hindus in India or Communists in North Korea. Obviously, if you stand up to preach the gospel in someplace as hostile as Iran or North Korea, you can expect obvious, direct and severe persecution; but that’s not the only kind the world has to offer. Those who pursue the righteousness of God will find that persecution may come anywhere—it’s just more subtle in some places than others.

And I do mean anywhere; as the Holy Spirit reminded me while I was praying about this text, we can’t assume that the church is not the world. We ought to be able to, but we can’t; there are plenty of people building earthly kingdoms in the church, running the church by worldly methods, for worldly reasons. Persecution for righteousness’ sake happens surprisingly often within the church—though it shouldn’t really be surprising if we think about Jesus. He was certainly killed for righteousness’ sake, after all, and it was the religious folk who killed him.

Second, this verse does not in any way imply that persecution is evidence of righteousness. Jesus does not say, “Blessed are those who are persecuted and claim to be righteous.” I expect we’ve all known people who claimed they were being persecuted for righteousness’ sake, when actually they were being persecuted because they were jerks. If you’re an insensitive lout, the fact that you’re quoting Bible verses rather than Howard Stern or Bill Maher doesn’t change the fact that you’re being persecuted for being an insensitive lout, not for being righteous. Being a victim is not proof of moral superiority, however much our world might think otherwise.

That said, if we are seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness with any sort of seriousness, we will be offensive to many people, and we will be perceived as a threat by some. By our very way of life, by the goals we set, by the things we say and don’t say, by the things we don’t laugh at and the joy in our laugh when we do, in the pleasures we pursue and those from which we turn aside, we will challenge people around us and call their lives into question, without ever trying to. We will make some of them uncomfortable enough that they’ll lash out against us in an effort to break us down or expose us as frauds.

When that happens, our instinct is to react—we’ve been talking about this lately, it’s fight or flight: we run, we back down, we compromise ourselves, or else we counterattack. Why? Because our gut-level assumptions go back to early childhood, where the practical definition of right and wrong is what makes our parents happy vs. what makes them mad, and the expectation is that if we behave, nobody will be mad at us. Obviously, some people grow up in badly fouled-up homes that don’t work that way at all—but that doesn’t change those subconscious presuppositions. When someone gets mad at us, our first flash is, “Oh, no, I did something wrong”; that may be followed immediately by, “No, I didn’t—how dare you!” Either way, it’s rooted in the assumption that if we’re doing what’s right, people will be happy with us.

Jesus here is saying, no—don’t expect the world to applaud you for seeking his righteousness, and don’t take it as a bad thing if you’re attacked for it. Take it as a challenge to examine your heart, first: is this because I’m being faithful to Jesus, is it a reaction to his righteousness in me, or is there sin here in my life that I’m not seeing? If I’m being persecuted, is it for the right reason? And if it is, take it as evidence of his blessing in your life. It is because yours is the kingdom of God that persecution has come; and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.

Lay Your Weapons Down

Posted on 3 March 201323 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Psalm 34:11-14; Matthew 5:9, Colossians 3:12-15)

“Blessed are the peacemakers.” Not “blessed are the peacekeepers,” the appeasers, the people who will sacrifice justice for a little temporary quiet and safety. Not “blessed are the peace-imposers,” the control freaks, those who create “peace” on their own terms by shouting down or crushing anyone who disagrees with them. Not “blessed are the diplomats,” the manipulators who practice “the fine art of letting someone else have your way.” These produce no true peace, just an illusion. And speaking of illusions, if you heard this and your mind immediately went to nations and governments and global politics, bring it back, because that’s not what Jesus means either.

As we’ve been working our way through the Beatitudes, we’ve seen that they build on each other. What kind of people are peacemakers? They are people who are poor in spirit—who recognize their need for Jesus, and find the meaning and value of life in following him. As a consequence, they hunger and thirst for righteousness: more than anything, they want their relationship with God to be right, the way it should be, which also means they want the same for all their other relationships. Thus they are meek, not demanding their own way or what they see as their rights; rather, they are merciful toward those who wrong them, recognizing their own dependence on the mercy of God.

Peacemakers, then, are people who first make peace within themselves, and do nothing to create unnecessary conflict with others, or among others. They control their tongues, keeping back the word that will only cause trouble and division, strife and mistrust. That means no gossip, for one thing; but even more importantly, it means not talking about people instead of to them.

The ministry of peacemaking is the ministry of reconciliation, and it must begin in our own lives. If anyone has a fair complaint or grievance against us, we need to do what we can to make amends; and if we have a complaint or grievance against anyone else, we need to take it to them. Too often, we do everything but; instead of talking to that person, we talk to others about them. In so doing, we create strife, dissension, disunity, and trouble; we are unrighteous, unmerciful, and arrogant rather than meek. If we would make peace, we must begin by silencing our tongues, cutting out those words of complaint, and dealing directly and honestly with the person who we believe has done us wrong.

As I say that, I’m well aware that we often use words like “direct” and “honest” as euphemisms for “rude, demanding, selfish and insulting”; and that’s obviously not in view here. If we would make peace, yes, we must confront people, but we must do it humbly and graciously, and we must do it out of the desire to serve them rather than to get back at them or to extract our pound of flesh. Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful,” and, “Love your enemies and do good to those who hurt you”; Paul tells us, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he’s thirsty, giving him something to drink.” If we understand how great is the grace Jesus has given us, if we understand how blessed we are in him, we can look at our enemies and realize—they’re less blessed than we are, at least at that moment. We can see them as people needing grace, and feel compassion for them.

Now, as I noted a couple weeks ago, the fact that you show someone mercy doesn’t guarantee they’ll accept it; and the fact that you try to make peace with someone doesn’t mean they’ll be willing to make peace with you. That’s why Paul also says in Romans 12, “If possible, as far as it depends on you, be at peace with everyone.” If someone refuses to listen, if they refuse to consider that they might be in the wrong, if they refuse to forgive you when you ask forgiveness—you can’t control that. You’ve done what’s yours to do, and the rest is their problem, not yours.

In closing, let me say one thing about the promise statement for this Beatitude. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” “They will be called” is a divine passive—a standard way for pious Jews to avoid using the name of God; God will be the one who declares that those who make peace are his children. But note that, because the word here isn’t “children,” it’s “sons.” Jesus knew he was speaking to men and women both, the point isn’t about gender; rather, it’s about authority. The children of God are those whom he loves, and those to whom he has given his life, but in that society, sons were something more: they were those who shared in the authority of the father as his representatives. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the ambassadors of God, filled by his Holy Spirit, carrying out his mission in this world in his power.