(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.