Beatitudes: Like God are the pure in heart...
Like God are the peacemakers... Like God are those who are persecuted...
The next three Beatitudes are nicely dealt with as a package deal.
#6: Like God are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Something has happened to me as I ascended the previous five rungs of the Beatitude - my agendas have left me. First, my agenda for myself has disappeared. Next, my agendas about others have faded. Are the victims of the world taking the things I want? Are the victimizers of the world getting what they deserve? The agendas can go on that cloud our hearts.
With agendas removed, I begin to experience a pure heart like God’s own heart. His is a heart of agape. Agape is a heart of love that loves free of agendas.
Jesus, Emmanuel (God with us), was not recognized by the Pharisees and others because their agendas blocked their sight. They had agendas of power, wealth, and retribution that prevented the pure heart we come to through the Beatitudes.
When my heart is pure (agenda-less), I will see God where I would have otherwise missed him.
With a pure heart, we will discover God all through this world and imaged within: Every. Single. Person.
#7: Like God are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.
To reach this point, we have touched on the rungs of setting ourselves aside, mourned with the pain in the world, tamed our power, released charity to those in need, given mercy to the undeserving, and come to a pure, agenda-less heart that has revealed God through everything in our world.
It is now that we are ready to begin the work of peacemaking, rebuilding broken bridges and breaking down divisions in the work Paul calls the “ministry of reconciliation.”
If we do not work through the previous Beatitudes, we come to peacemaking prematurely and we may damage rather than fix. To make peace, we will press people into submission to the agendas we still carry. And ultimately, peacemaking, without the other rungs, ends up not really being peace at all.
Peacemaking without the other rungs becomes simply the use of oppression and violence to coerce the absence of open hostilities.
When we have moved through the other rungs, we equip ourselves to work as true healers, like Jesus, to be real reconcilers and peacemakers. And as we genuinely come to act like Jesus, the Prince of Peace, we too will be identified as sons and daughters of God.
#8: Like God are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.
We have come to the top of the ladder. In reality, we work up and down this ladder throughout our lives. When I come to realize that I am struggling with a Beatitude, it is only truly addressed by covering against all the steps before it, beginning back at reconsidering my poverty of spirit.
As we weigh the steps before this one, the concern is significant that if we actually live these out (1-7), we will be ridiculed as foolish, stomped upon, and could even be killed. After all, if the Beatitudes encapsulate what God is like, look at what happened to him when he came to live as God on earth.
If we become like God, and the world treated God like that, what will they do to us?
The final Beatitude is fulfilled as we live out the cost of the others. As I climb this ladder out of a dark world under the shadow of death, I will be misunderstood, disliked, and treated poorly. Through my endurance of mild to harsh persecutions, I am like God, who endured the same for all of humanity.
The key here is what we are persecuted for. Very often we can find Christians acting very unChristlike. They would be hard-pressed to prove their actions align with the rungs of the Beatitudes we have been looking at. Yet, they cry, “Persecution!”
And they even attempt to use their persecution as proof that they are part of the Kingdom. Yet, the claim only holds true if you joined the Kingdom all the way back at the beginning, with a poverty of spirit.
In reality, the crier of persecution may simply be experiencing the cost of acting like a jerk.
As we read through the Beatitudes and get to the final rung of persecution, it can only be called real persecution if it is a cost that comes from a lifestyle connected to the rest of the rungs up to this point.
In other words, before we claim persecution, we might consider this test from the Beatitudes:
Is this suffering the result of my failing to be poor in spirit?
Is it due to my failure to identify and mourn with some kind of pain?
Is the adverse reaction I am receiving born from abusing my power?
Is my claim of persecution due to my failure to associate with charity to victims and those in need?
Is what I am receiving a response to a lack of mercy on my part as I demand someone needs to get what is coming to them?
Is my oppression a result of an impure heart so I am treating others with my own agendas?
Is the abuse or violence I am experiencing from others due to my attempt to suppress hostilities rather than reconcile divisions?
If I am experiencing hostilities, but I answer yes to any of these questions, then I may not be able to say that I am being like God and am persecuted for it.
However, if hostilities are born toward us because we are living as Jesus did, exuding the Beatitudes in our lives, then we have found ourselves at the last rung of the ladder.
So counter is the ladder of Godlikeness to the world’s way of life that the world will not understand it. Very often, the human response is to suppress or even eradicate what we misunderstand and, therefore, what we cannot contain and control.
Jesus took the brunt of this human response through his life and death - establishing the final step of being like God to endure persecution.
As Jesus goes to the cross, he withholds retaliation, bears the sins of evil people, and forgives them! He then tells us, “Don’t just look at what I did and applaud me. Now you pick up your cross and do like I just did.”
The final rung of being like God is to hold fast to being like God, even when it is hard and painful.
In the first step to being like God, we find ourselves across the threshold of the Kingdom. And in this final step of staying committed to being like God even when it costs us, we are reassured that we still have the Kingdom that we stepped into at the beginning.
So ends the Beatitudes. Christianity 101.
Most excellent!!