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Matthew 5: 1-12
Over the front entrance of Westminster Abbey, across the street from the Parliament building in downtown London, are statues of ten 20th Century martyrs, installed in 1987. Some you may have heard of, some not: “Maximillian Kolbe from Poland, Manche Masemola from South Africa, Janani Luwum from Uganda, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Martin Luther King, Jr. from the USA, Oscar Romero from El Salvador, Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Germany, Esther John from Pakistan, Lucian Tapiedi from Papua New Guinea and Wang Zhiming from China.” (http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/maximilian-kolbe)
All of them are extraordinary Christians, who felt called in extraordinary times to do extraordinary things; and it got them killed. It’s easy to praise them, and certainly they should be examples for us: but the truth is, we can just as easily dismiss them, saying they were extraordinary people who in extraordinary times were called to do extraordinary things—they aren’t like us—we’re ordinary.
Over the years, though, I’ve gathered my own little list of saints. There’s Ruth, a Roman Catholic lay person I know, who is a retired grandmother and active community organizer, unafraid to confront some of the most powerful people in our community, if it is for the good of others and to the glory of God; Shirley, who stayed in a terrible, abusive marriage for decades because she thought, for good reason, that divorce would only worsen things, and trusted that God would take care of her and her children; Billy, who ran to help his worst enemy when he found him horribly injured by the side of the road from a car accident, and held the man’s hand until he died; Carolyn, whose mother-in-law always hated her because Carolyn was a divorced woman who dared to marry her favorite son; but nonetheless when her mother in law was dying, Carolyn took it upon herself to be her caregiver; our own Kit Carson, retired bomber pilot and one of the most faithful Christians I’ve ever known, open-minded and open-hearted. All these folks are ordinary people, but they did extraordinary things—they did things that exemplified the courage, justice, mercy, forgiveness, and humility that Christians are called to—and they did it because they were Christians, because they knew God expects better of them than we often expect of ourselves. These are people whose actions, in some way, make the world more the Kingdom of God.
In our scripture today, Jesus is calling ordinary people to extraordinary virtue. He is preaching to both his disciples and to gathered crowds of farmers, fishermen, parents—and yes, also teachers and religious leaders. But Jesus is calling them all to be better than being merely a good person requires. Where grace under pressure might be enough, Jesus requires something further: humility. Where justice might fairly require a redress of grievances, an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth, Jesus requires more: mercy and forgiveness. Where two people in a disagreement might grudgingly decide just to avoid one another, to live in détente, Jesus requires more: He requires reconciliation and peace between the two parties. And if two people are out-and-out enemies, he’ll require much more than they’d ever imagine: that they love one another.
A little further on in Matthew Jesus will say, “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5: 20). Your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees—another way to translate that is, “Your righteousness should be more extraordinary than the Pharisees.” It’s an exceptional, demanding way to live, made all the more demanding because, Jesus teaches, the world isn’t ready for it. “That is why the disciples are rejected as strangers in the world, bothersome guests, disturbers of the peace,” writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer [1](Discipleship, DBW 4, p. 104). The world isn’t ready for this message, and so the messengers get treated as outcasts and pariahs.
That’s why Jesus absolutely predicts that suffering will come if you live by these principles. It’s inevitable. Others will look at us seeking to build peace with enemies, or showing mercy to the merciless, or sacrificing our own good for the good of others, or challenging the system for the sake of justice and fairness and equity, and they’ll say, “You’re upsetting the apple cart! What you’re doing is upsetting the status quo! Besides, all those values you hold to aren’t practical—they just don’t work in the real world.”
One reason it’s hard to live into the values of the Kingdom of God is quite simply that the world isn’t ready for them. It’s not just Jesus who tells us that. That’s what the world itself claims. When Dr. King wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” it was addressed to a group of well-meaning pastors who’d publicly asked him and other activists to ease up on the pressure they were putting on society with their non-violent protests. Just wait a while, they advised; we’re not quite ready yet. King’s response was simple: “For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” King’s point is true of any attempt to make the world better than it is: the world’s response will always be, “We aren’t ready!” –because it isn’t. What Dr. King realized is that it might never be ready—unless we live into the values of the Kingdom no matter how much others resist it, no matter how much of an uphill climb it appears to be.
The other temptation is, quite frankly, it’s discouraging. We can try to be reconciled with our brother or sister, but if our brother or sister doesn’t want to be reconciled, there’s not much to be done. We forgive people, and they do it again. We love our enemy, but our enemy doesn’t love us back. If we’re humble and meek, we get walked all over. It doesn’t always seem very effective.
We shouldn’t be surprised at that. Since the world isn’t ready for the message, it always wants to pull us back to the way it’s used to doing things, and it’s always sabotaging our attempts to make the world a better place. The struggle is always uphill—even inside ourselves, because often to live by these values goes against our own nature. But we don’t do this because it will always work. We do it because it’s what God expects of us, and Jesus commanded it of us. We do it because we believe we’re living into the real meaning and purpose of the world. We’re living the way that God has shaped history, nature, the universe itself. As John Howard Yoder writes, “…The cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power, determine the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness, but their patience.”[2] Part of our challenge as Christians is simply to keep living by those ethics, to keep improving at them, and never to give up, no matter how difficult it is, even if it doesn’t seem to work.
But that doesn’t mean these values don’t work. That’s certainly one argument against them. “These values would be fine in an ideal world, but we live in the real world.” Be honest—we even say that to ourselves sometimes. But it’s not true. These values are tailor-made for the real world. After all, in an ideal world, there’d be no need to pursue righteousness, because it would already be established; no need for mercy because no one would have wronged us; no need for peacemakers, because there wouldn’t be any war. No, these values are precisely what the world needs to heal what ails it.
And furthermore, they have worked! Peacemaking has ended wars, or sidestepped them altogether; the pursuit of righteousness has really led to fairness and equity. Not always, but often. There is a powerful message implied by those ten 20th century martyrs gracing Westminster Abbey: those who have the humility and sense of purpose to die for the sake of others and for the Gospel live on beyond the grave, and continue to make a difference in the world. Their enemies thought their deaths would make them ineffective, that their message would die with them, but that’s not the case. Often their very deaths forced the changes that they’d found so difficult to make in life. They didn’t end all war, or all discrimination, or all injustice, or all poverty—but they ended some of it, and the world is better for it. And now we hold them up as examples, so that ongoing generations can see that there’s a better way to live and a better world that could lie ahead—if we live into the extraordinary values of Jesus Christ.