ultimate blessing

Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, introduces that famous speech with a series of blessings we know as The Beatitudes. And he winds up those blessings with something that I think really gets at the nub of why it’s hard to be a Christian. Here’s what he said, from Matthew 5:11-12: 

“‘Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’”

That doesn’t sound like a blessing, does it? Who wants insults, persecution and slander? In what way will that make my day better? This is the kind of thing that’s hard for Christians to understand, and certainly hard to explain to people curious about our faith. Why follow a God who wants to drag you through this?

Well, first of all, because he’s the only God and putting faith in anything else is literally suicidal. Beyond that, though, this is a fascinating case study in how Jesus taught and what it really means to follow him. 

As always, when I’m trying to understand something hard in scripture I go back to the basic purpose of the Bible, which is to reveal God to us. Scripture is how God tells us about himself, and how we learn what he expects from us. So I ask myself what Jesus reveals about himself by saying we should see insults as a blessing.

Here’s what I think: there is huge blessing, perhaps the basis of all blessing, in conforming ourselves as closely as possible to Jesus. But Jesus knew, and we’ve always struggled to accept, that the more we look like Jesus, the less we’ll look like most of our fellow citizens. Mostly, we just want to fit in rather than stand out. We tend to go along to get along.

True Jesus-followers can no longer demonize the other side. True Jesus-followers acknowledge people of every race, gender, political persuasion, or nationality as people created in God’s image. Once you spend time with Jesus, you realize that there are only two categories of people: the ones who know Jesus and the ones who are still buying Satan’s lies. In other words, the ones like us, and the ones like we used to be and still are some days. Or, as I like to say, the healed and the wounded. It’s not our job to shoot the wounded; we’re supposed to find them and bring them to an aid station.

What happens when we think like that? Everyone else sees us as other, as “not-my-tribe.” We might vote Republican, but when we speak sympathetically of Democrats we become RINOs to other Republicans. We might honor and respect women, and uphold them in every way we can, but if we won’t call masculinity toxic we become part of the patriarchy to most feminists. On the other hand, if we at the same time think the new Gillette ad raises an important topic, many men will call us betas and suggest we buy a pink purse to go with our Gillette blades. These are a couple of examples of how no one will accept us if what we want is to love everyone.

I think it’s likely that Jesus isn’t saying here that we should try to get people to insult and persecute us. He’s not calling us to pick unnecessary fights or put ourselves intentionally in confrontational positions. What he seems to be saying is the simple actions and basic opinions that are part of faithful living will inevitably attract some venom.

When that happens to you, be glad. It’s proof that you have the ultimate blessing: you’re starting to look more like Jesus than like the world.