Take yourself back in time, if you would, back to the first
century. You are a Jew living in Palestine. Life has not been
all that terrible for you. There are certain inconveniences
associated with the fact that your country is under the rule of
the Roman empire, but then most of the world is under the rule of
the Roman empire, so that is not such a big deal.
Or is it? There might not be any concern about how much
Rome controls, but there is about it's control of this one little
spot of land called the nation of Israel. A good Jew knows that
there can be no real ruler in Israel except Yahweh, so this
upstart Roman emperor is an affront to the Almighty. There will
come a day, a day when the hand of that upstart will be cut off,
and God's people will be truly GOD'S people once again, in name
as well as in fact.
Word has been circulating around your village that a very
special man is nearby, special because of the wonderful works he
has been doing - healing the sick, making the lame to walk,
giving sight to the blind, even raising the dead, so they say.
Powers like that could only come from Yahweh, so obviously, this
one is very special. The neighborhood gossip would have you
believe that this man might be the one who will be Israel's
deliverer, the Messiah, the one who will lead the armies of the
Hebrew people (such as they are) in the final battle to throw off
foreign domination.
Now, the news is that this special man, this one called
Jesus of Nazareth, is right nearby. He is just outside your town
teaching some friends on a quiet hillside. Your neighbors have
heard about it and decide they would like to get a glimpse of
him, perhaps to hear a little of what he has to say. You decide
to go along.
Sure enough, there he is. Quite a crowd has gathered. They
are hearing some strange things, things like "to be happy, you
have to be humble before God - poor in spirit." That doesn't
make sense; everybody knows that you have to let God know how
good you are so your little sins will be ignored. Or things like
"it is possible to have true happiness as you mourn!" Anybody
with any sense realizes the difficulties with that one. The
stranger goes through a whole list of these things, each one a
little tougher to understand than the previous.
Now he says, "Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be
called sons of God." Now wait a minute! That really does not
make sense. If we are all to be peacemakers, how will we ever
get rid of the Roman legions? We might not be big enough or
powerful enough right now to make a frontal assault on them, but
at least we can harass them a bit: steal supplies, ambush
patrols, things like that. We cannot be peacemakers if we would
be true to our national heritage as God's chosen people. We
cannot be peacemakers on any level unless we are willing to just
roll over and let anyone who will take advantage of us. This
Jesus is talking through his holy hat, if he has a hat.
Peace. It is a word with which you are very familiar. You
greet your neighbors with it everyday. Shalom! Peace! It is
one of the most sought-after of all human conditions, supposedly.
The last words of the priestly benediction say, "The Lord lift up
his countenance upon you and give you peace!" (1) The Psalmist
says, "I will lay me down in peace...for you, Lord, only make me
dwell in safety." (2) The prophet Isaiah talked about the day when
swords would be beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning
hooks. (3) But peace is an elusive commodity. Jeremiah complained
about those who proclaimed, "Peace, peace, when there is no
peace." (4) What would Jeremiah say about "Blessed are the
peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Ah well,
perhaps this Nazarene is not the one you had been looking for
after all.
Centuries pass now, and you are back in 21st century
America. No longer is your nation under foreign domination. No
longer is there an oppressor who must be overthrown. No longer
are we looking for someone to lead us in battle. Things are
totally different, but yet, the peacemakers are still looked upon
as pie-in-the-sky crackpots, especially in our post-9/11 world.
Sadly, our leaders responded to that monstrous crime by declaring
a "War on Terror," a metaphor that has been used in other
contexts when we have faced difficult scenarios - the War on
Drugs, the War on Poverty, come to mind. It might be good to
notice, though, that every time we declare war on a noun, we
lose. We could choose our terms with better hope for success.
There are a number of ways to approach these words of Jesus
about peacemaking. We are made to be at peace with God because
our eternal destiny demands it. We need to have peace within
ourselves if we are to deal with "the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune." We need to have peace within our families
if we are to live lives that are truly fulfilled. We need to
make peace with neighbors and co-workers because our society
demands it. All of those should be dealt with in depth if we are
to get a true picture of this concept we call peacemaking, but
time would fail us in the process, so we must limit our
investigation to one that is of continuing concern in our nation
as our young men and women are in Iraq and Afghanistan with no
end in sight to those conflicts, plus the continuing issue of the
proliferation of nuclear weapons and the real concern that they
could fall into the hands of terrorists. How do we approach such
things as Christians?
Perhaps we might listen to some of our military leaders.
Here is the late Gen. Omar Bradley, in an Armistice Day speech in
1948: "We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the
Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without
wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear
giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know
about peace, more about killing than we know about living." (5) An
unusual statement, perhaps, from one who made a very successful
career in the military. But then, perhaps too, only one who has
seen things through military eyes could legitimately say
something like that without the pie-in-the-sky label being
attached to him.
Listen to the words of President Eisenhower, another
brilliant military mind before going into politics. "Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and
are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed...This is not a
way of life in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening
war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." (6) President
Eisenhower.
That brings us to a further word, this one from another
military man, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He said, "The great
question is whether global war can be outlawed from the world.
If so it would mark the greatest advance in civilization since
the Sermon on the Mount. It would not only remove fear and bring
security. It would not only create new moral and spiritual
values. But it would also produce an economic wave of prosperity
that would raise the world's standard of living beyond anything
any of us ever dreamed of." General MacArthur.
"Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called sons of
God." A fascinating book has been on the best-seller lists in
recent months: Three cups of tea: one man's mission to fight
terrorism and build nations--one school at a time. (7) Perhaps you
have read it.
Greg Mortenson grew up in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, the son
of Lutheran missionaries. When Greg was just 11, he and his
father hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest
mountain, and though he battled altitude sickness on his way to
the top, that first expedition gave him a hankering for more
mountain climbing. As an adult living back in the United States,
in 1993 he joined an expedition to a Himalayan mountain known as
K2. It is the second-highest mountain in the world after Mt.
Everest and has a reputation for being even more difficult and
dangerous to climb. Greg never made it to the top. In fact,
coming back down, he got separated from his porter, became lost
and ended up in a small, isolated mountain village in northern
Pakistan called Korphe. The people there took him in and showed
him typical central Asian hospitality, part of which involves
drinking tea together. As the village chief explained to him,
"Here, we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you
are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third,
you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do
anything - even die."
As he spent time in Korphe, Mortenson discovered that the
children there had only a part-time teacher whom they had to
share with a neighboring village. For that matter, they had no
school building either, so the 84 youngsters met out in the open
for classes and scratched out their lessons with sticks, writing
in the dirt. He promised to come back again and build them a
school. And he kept his promise.
Once the school in Korphe was built, word spread to other
villages whose people asked Greg if he would do the same thing
for them. How could he say no? Eventually he formed a not-for-profit organization, the Central Asia Institute, to oversee the
work. Word continued to spread, and villages in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan implored him to do the same for
them. At significant risk to his own safety, he took on that
challenge as well. His big breakthrough came in April 2003, at
the outset of the Iraq war, when a cover story about his work
appeared in Parade magazine. After this national exposure,
money, which had always been in short supply, started pouring in.
Of course, underlying this remarkable story is the question
of how best to deal with the challenge of Islamic-inspired
terrorism. Mortenson does not have his head in the sand. All
around where he is building his own schools, madrassas (schools
that teach a militant form of Islam) are being built with Saudi
Arabian money.
Speaking to members of Congress, Mortenson said that he is
building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan not in order to
fight terrorism but because he cares about kids. "But working
over there, I've learned a few things," he said. "I've learned
that terror doesn't happen because some group of people somewhere
like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It
happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough
future that they have a reason to choose life over death." And
when he had a chance to speak to military planners at the
Pentagon, he pointed out that the cost of one missile being used
in Afghanistan could build dozens of schools that would provide a
non-extremist education to tens of thousands of students over a
generation. Which do you suppose is making us more secure, he
asked, the missiles or the schools?
Mortenson's web site (8) reports that Central Asia Institute
has successfully established over 60 schools in Pakistan and
Afghanistan so far, which will provide an education to over
24,000 students this year. Good job, Greg.
"Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called sons of
God." Just like all the rest of the Beatitudes, these WILL-BE-
attitudes for God's people, it is an upside-down, inside-out,
counter-intuitive state of mind. We are generally much less
comfortable in spoiling a fight than in spoiling FOR a fight.
But that is what Jesus says living in the Kingdom of God is all
about.
Jump back through history to the first century again. You
are on that hillside, listening to this traveling preacher. You
have no idea that years down the road your descendants would have
developed the capacity to destroy all life on earth with the push
of a few buttons. You think that this idea of being a peacemaker
leaves a lot to be desired, but then you hear that peacemakers
will be called "sons of God." That phrase means something
special. It has nothing to do with family relationships, nothing
to do with any advanced state of spirituality; it simply means
that you are doing "God-like" work. Since Aramaic, the language
in which Jesus is speaking, does not have many adjectives, he is
using the accepted means of descriptive expression. Had he
wanted to call someone a "peaceful man," he would have called him
a "son of peace." You understand that. But what a pity that
your children who stand over the nuclear buttons seem to miss it
entirely. For them, God-like work seems to stop at the nation's
border. What a shame.
Perhaps, if you could, you who live in the 1st century might
pray for your children who are to come along in 2000 years, that
they might have the wisdom necessary to avoid global disaster.
But then, we are just pretending anyway, aren't we? The prayer
should really be for ourselves and the children who have already
come, a prayer that we who have had our lives changed by the
cross of the 1st century might have the strength and
determination to do the God-like work so utterly crucial in this
button-dominated 21st century.
The prayer of St. Francis comes to mind:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not seek so much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons
of God."
Amen!
1. Numbers 6:26
2. Psalm 4:8
3. Isaiah 2:4
4. Jeremiah 6:14
5. The collected writings of General Omar N. Bradley, (Washington, 1967)
6. Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before
the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, DC, April 16,1953
7. Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, (New York : Viking, 2006)
8. www.ikat.org
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