FACING STONES, CLAWS, AND TEETH

 

Fortunate are they who are persecuted because of righteousness, because theirs is the kingship of the heavens.

Makarioi hoi dediōgmenoi heneken dikaiosunès, hoti autōn estin hè basileia tōn ouranōn.

 

Interestingly, the second part of this sentence is an exact copy of that in the first Beatitude: the kingship of heaven there belonged to the beggars in spirit, here to those who are persecuted for their righteous, or just, behaviour. So either these two share the heavenly reign, or they are the same people; or, conceivably, there is poetry and hyperbole at work here. For later on, in Matthew 14:19, he says of the little children that “the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”.

 

There is no confusion about the words. Basileia means ‘kingdom’ in the sense of the office, not the geography – so ‘kingship, dominion, reign’. The heaven, or heavens, is/are the seat of divinity. So if this basileia is variously attributed to the poor in sprit, the righteous victims of persecution, and ‘such as’ little children, it is the thought, not the words, that needs to be teased out. Let us try to imagine that it might refer to the same people. Who would they be?

 

We have seen that the ptōchoi tōi pneumati are likely to be those who in their love for the Father tend to be simple, uncomplicated; and in fact the expression that instinctively occurred to me was ‘as children’ who trust their parent without complication. So the first and the third indications of who is referred to here agree.

But what about the persecution?

 

Why are they being persecuted? hekenen dikaiosunès: for the sake of – the translations say ‘righteousness’ but the noun can also mean ‘justice’ of ‘(the things of) the law’. They are being persecuted (the verb can also mean ‘prosecuted’) for the sake of, because of, justice – being just, being righteous. They practice that which, in an earlier Beatitude, people hungered and thirsted for. And for doing so, they are persecuted. By whom? The answer is not given, but there are plenty of examples in the New Testament (and in the Old, for that matter). It might be the religious authorities, the Scribes and Pharisees, the High Priests, who after all were on the way to persecuting Him for the very same reason; it might be the Romans, whose persecution of Christians reached a paroxysm under Diocletian and Galerius (303-311 AD), but who persecuted them for nonconformity to new Romanising edicts: among the Christians themselves, such nonconformity may well have been considered ‘righteous’.

 

So what it amounts to is that the simple, the innocent, the poor in spirit are those who know instinctively how to react to the Father’s love, and who therefore are likely to be victims of the kind of authority that demands obedience over any other behaviour, and punishes those who obey a different lordship: ‘my basileia is not of this world’ says Yeshua to Pilatus. 

 

What we see happening at this point in the Sermon on the Mount is the movement away from the declaration of good fortune to those of a certain nature or those in a certain condition, and toward a similar declaration toward those to whom certain grim realities are happening. Yeshua is modulating toward the beginning, and in future overwhelming, pattern of opposition that He will undergo first, and that awaits His followers afterwards. We see here the seeds of the martyrs’ blessedness.

Image: Execution by wild beasts (Ziten mosaic ca. AD 200)

ROYALTY, OR, IS RUNNING THE WORLD BEYOND US?

British Library MS K90049-89 Royal 6 E ix ff. 10v-11

As he was composing the Abun Dbashmayo (“Father in Heaven” in Aramaic), Yeshua began with Ha Shem, the Name. The Name is as close as earthlings can come to the essence of the Deity. What should come next? “Thy Kingdom come” says Yeshua. I have previously written about the curious optatives in the first half of the Lord’s Prayer; now, of course, we have to put right a noun. What is desired here is not the coming of a place or even the transformation of a place: the word malkuth, with the same MLK root as melech, would be much better translated in this context as “kingship” or “reign”. May/let Thy reign come.

Now this is a petition we can understand and wholeheartedly support. A dear friend of mine is always sad, sorry and frustrated that God, in His omnipotence, does not one day simply appear on all TV stations and all social media at once, say “Playtime over, you little horrors!” and close the whole show of our sorry planet down. And I suspect that many people would be in more-or-less agreement with that. Let Him take over. Let Him wipe out poverty and sickness and misery in one mighty stroke, and magically transform our squabbling messy billions into the sweet harmonious societas we think He must have had in mind when He created us. Thy reign come – please!  Ours has made such a spectacular mess of things; do please take over!

God, of course, softly but definitively says “No” to that. That frustrates us, and it makes us try to work out why. Why does God let all the evil in the world happen, why does He not set up his reign once and for all, now? There are two reasons, which I’ve mentioned here before. In the first place, God does not, I think, micromanage our planet. Not a sparrow falls, says Yeshua, but God sees it; but He doesn’t stop it falling. Shit happens. Earthquakes happen. Hurricanes happen. Secondly, God’s omnipotence has only one limit but it is huge: He cannot go against His own nature. Since his nature is love, and since love by its nature implies freedom, He cannot force us to love Him back, or love our neighbour. Auschwitz happens. And God weeps burning cosmic tears as he takes the souls of massacred innocents to Himself.

Having thus understood why he does not impose his reign, we may still ask why, then, we can and should beg for it to come? I imagine, again, Yeshua meditating on this, perhaps at night on a Nazareth rooftop, and coming gradually to the realisation that our prayer for God’s reign to come means that we are asking for, begging for, his institution as our Ruler, the ruler of our land, of our polis, of our oikos, of our collective and individual lives. And this is not something God will do on his own: rather, it is we who will nominate and install Him – evidently through His grace, through His Holy Spirit. If we ask Him – and in so far as we ask Him – He will, as he has promised, come and dwell with us, in us. So the prayer is turned back on us: it is our praying, our asking, our begging, that will make His reign come.

This is true both individually and collectively. If I ask Him with all my heart and soul and mind and strength to rule me, He will, although it may take time; if we, “We the People”, so far get our shit together that we ask him unitedly and insistently and with our whole collective heart and mind and soul and strength to rule us, He will. Of course, as we even begin to think about the possibility we see how staggeringly unlikely is such a unanimity. But maybe it has to start with small collectivities: an oikos, a household or family; a club; a group of friends; a charitable institution; even a political party. The petition “Thy reign come” is a compass that gives direction to out hope, a sense to our work in the world, and a course to our praying.

HATE SPEECH?

Cosimo Rosselli, 'The Sermon on the Mount' 

`If any one doth come unto me, and doth not hate his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, and yet even his own life, he is not able to be my disciple;  and whoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, is not able to be my disciple.’ (Luke 14:26-7; today's Gospel.)

There is no way around it: J.B. Phillips, in his modern New Testament translation, put quotation marks around ‘hate’, but the Greek verb is uncompromising. This is one of Jesus’ more rebarbative sayings, one of those we would rather forget; the more as the current Church insists that every believer should be a mathètès, a disciple. So, we say, what about the man and wife who are to be one flesh? We are to love the little ones, the children – just not our children? We are to honour our parents, yet hate them?

The saying goes, of course, with Jesus’ snarky reaction to his mother and brothers’ coming to visit him: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . These are mother and my brothers’, pointing to the disciples (Mt 12:46-7); and Matthew 19:29, where anyone who leaves everything (home, father, mother, sisters, brothers, wife, and property) to follow him will receive a hundredfold return and eternal life. Extreme, also: still, giving up is less than hating.

How do we deal with such a saying? One way is to say that Jesus, in his humanity, was truly human (in all things, we are told, except sin), and that thus he was capable of impatience and irritation as he was of exhaustion and depression. In that sense, the saying Luke reports comes from a simple, indeed a simplistic, binary ‘love’ and ‘hate’. He does not, in other words, mean the verb literally. (Hence Phillips’ quotation marks.)

Another way of dealing with it is to remember that ‘Matthew’ was part of the early Church, and that his Gospel, like the other Synoptics, doesn’t want only to recount Jesus’s sayings and doings in great accuracy but is engaged, as part of the Church, in building an edifice for those who have not been there, and future generations, to live in. The extreme terms, then, are those of a community that has to deal with members who regularly privilege their private affairs over those of the ecclesia.

Leaving history aside, though, we need to know how we are to deal with these words.  And there, I think, another passage from Matthew comes to our aid. This comes in the discourse on the lilies of the field that toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, says Jesus: but ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’ (Matthew 6:33)

Here, I think, may be the key to our passage of hate. Hyperbole aside, we need to concentrate on the kingdom (basileia, perhaps better translated the ‘kingship’, the reign) of God: both on recognising it in Jesus, who is the Kingdom, and in bringing it about in the world where he is no longer physically present. ‘Seeking first’ is beginning the day with the prayer that we may do His will that day, and that we may not forget that by lunchtime. (The noontime Angelus is a good reminder.) It’s not a matter of hating A, but of going all out to pursue B – in which case, if A gets in the way, you brush A aside impatiently – which, to A, may feel like hate but isn’t. (And in any case, it only happens if A gets in the way.) 

And, he says, if we do so; if all we consciously care about is doing His will, is living His kingship; why, then our parents, our spouse, our children, our property, ‘will be added unto us’, will be there, but as gifts, not earnings, and thus all the more precious. Not only will we find what we seek, i.e. the kingdom of God, but we will find ourselves showered with all those other good things that we thought we had but didn’t really until now, when we receive them all over again, as God’s gifts. And eternal life as well. 

One final thought: on the way to the kingdom of God, on the way of our pursuit, there may well be a cross. And that we cannot, must not brush aside: for He is the kingdom, and it is from the Cross that He reigns. At the very least there is death, for all of us; for some there is great suffering. But among the gifts we receive there is Resurrection -- Zoèn aionion, eternal life.