Blessed are
the gentle; they shall have the earth for their possession. As I read through
this morning’s Gospel reading, that was the verse that caught my eye, though I
have to confess it did so for a slightly unworthy reason. I was reminded of a
poster I saw on a railway station platform, which simply said, paraphrasing
that verse, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Underneath, someone had
written, one of the meek, presumably: “If that’s all right with the rest of
you.”
For it does
seem a bit far fetched, don’t you think, that the meek should inherit the earth.
How’s that going to happen? If, for example, you take a very literal view of a
re-created earth like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Christadelphians do, then
yes, the gentle and meek are left to take possession of an earth just like this
one but with all the bad bits taken out. That isn’t quite what I believe, but
I’ll come back to that.
It seems to
me that on the whole, religion these days is getting less and less meek. A
hundred or more years ago, murders and bomb outrages were likely to be
perpetrated by young atheistic anarchists, but now the bombs are liable to be
planted by young converts to Islam, or perhaps young people converted within
Islam to a form of the faith they believe to be purer and truer, and to a war
which they believe – and are taught – God is requiring them to fight. The
carnage their actions produce is they believe blessed by God, and they
themselves are blessed by God, the more so if they die as martyrs to this holy
cause. I find it hard to comprehend how anyone can choose to believe in a God
who calls us to kill and maim and destroy; but when I said that to a
non-religious friend he pointed out that the Bible is full of instances where
God does seem to demand just that from his people.
So that
caused me to think again. The Old Testament very vividly recounts occasions
when people were slain in their hundreds and thousands, and whole families
executed for what seem to us trivial reasons, and kings brought low for not
slaying and destroying everything they should have. It can make uncomfortable
reading for the naturally meek and gentle.
“This is
the word of the Lord” we say at the end of a reading. But it doesn’t always
quite feel like that. Or not always when it’s from the Old Testament, anyway.
Someone asked me the other day whether I was a fundamentalist where the Bible
is concerned, and my answer was “Yes and no”. Yes, in that the Bible is
fundamental to my faith, and this is where I must go, and do repeatedly go, to
discern the word and the will of God. But no, if what you mean by
fundamentalism is the “every word is holy” attitude that has to give each part
of this amazing collection of literature the same prescriptive power and
authority.
In other
words, I value and I use the Bible, but I’m not held prisoner by it. And more
to the point, when I read the Bible I do so as a Christian; my beginning point
is the Gospels, the story and the words of Jesus, and the New Testament provides
the glass, the prism, through which I may read and understand the Old. Not
rejecting it or throwing it out, for, difficult though they may be, these Old
Testament verses are the scriptures that informed and empowered our Lord
himself; but at the same time, not reading them and being bound by them as
though our Lord Jesus had never walked among us and said and done the things he
did. I think of the Old Testament as the winding quest of a people seeking to
follow and serve and discover the God who is fully revealed in the witness of
the New Testament, and in the person of Jesus. And whatever I read, I read from
the foot of the cross.
There are
many Christian martyrs, and indeed most I would think of the saints we honour
at All Saints’ Tide will have died as martyrs. Nowadays martyrdom is maybe the
ambition of young idealistic Muslim jihadis, but that’s a martyrdom achieved in
the course of killing others: scandalously, all too often those who have never
lifted hand against them, sometimes those who have actively sought to help, and
indeed many who were themselves fellow Muslims. How does that compare to what
we read in scripture? It’s maybe not too far from some of what we read in the
Old Testament, but it’s a world away from the Gospels; and when we stand at the
foot of the cross, and see the nails and the spear and the crown of thorns,
what rules there is meekness and gentleness, and I am reminded of the words of
Graham Kendrick’s lovely worship song “Meekness and Majesty”, or the immense
words of Isaac Watts, “When I survey the wondrous cross”.
A number of
the early Christian martyrs died not in the course of killing but because they
would not kill, and many more because they would not speak against their Lord,
or deny him, having given their lives to him. The hallmark of such people was
meekness, but let’s be sure about one thing here: such meekness was not a wishy
washy doormat sort of a thing, in which you let everybody walk over you because
you’re afraid to stand up for what you believe. Not for a moment: what we see
in the saints we honour today, and in the martyrs of our Church especially, is
a tough meekness that knows what it believes, and will not let go of that
whatever threats may be made. What these men and women have in common with
today’s Islamic so-called martyrs is that they have found something that is to
them of more value and importance than anything else, even than their own life;
but for the Christian saint everything rests in Jesus, and the only way of life
– or of death – is to be as like him as we can be.
I said “as we
can be” to make the simple but important point that though we tend to reserve
the word saint for specially good and holy people, in its original use the word
was used for anyone who follows Jesus. If we use the word in that way, then we
are all saints; and we should all aspire to the meekness and the gentleness we
find in Jesus.
And in so
doing we shall inherit the earth; or, in the version from which I read this
morning, we shall have the earth for our possession. Here is what I think that
means: it means that the things that will truly endure in this world are cross
shaped things. It may look as though might will always win the day, and that
those who by their guns and bombs instil fear in others, the tyrants and the terrorists,
and for that matter the greedy and the grabbers, will always have the upper
hand, but the reality is that nothing built on those foundations can last. As
Jesus himself said, “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.”
In a way I
feel sorry for the idealistic young men, young women too, who have been seduced
into fighting for ISIS, or engaging in acts of more or less random terrorism,
in the name of Islam and in the belief that they are serving and pleasing God.
I mourn with a heavy heart for their victims; but I have nothing but contempt
for the twisted and bitter teachers who hijack the name and the authority of
imam in order to twist and poison idealistic young minds. These so called holy
men bear if anything by far the greater guilt. These are men with hands covered
in blood. They proclaim a god who loves the righteous and hates in the infidel
. . . but what sort of righteousness involves a man covering his hands in
innocent blood? We proclaim the God who from the cross proclaims his meek and
gentle and forgiving love for all the world, and even for those who nailed him
there and left him to die.
Those who
live according to the Spirit of this man will always be life-affirmers rather
than life-deniers. The offering of our own lives is not an attempt at earning
or cadging our way into heaven, but our response to what has already been
achieved for us, on the cross, and that what the cross stands for is not ours
alone, but a message for the world, a word of love that everyone needs to hear.
There will
always be those in the world who will stop their ears to it; for them, might is
always right, and they will even find religious excuses for their cruelty and
barbarism or to justify their greed. Often it will look as though they are winning,
but nothing they build can last. Only in the meekness of the man who died at
Calvary can we find the true majesty we take as our model of how to live, by
his grace, and as givers and enablers and life-bringers. We honour this in the
saints, men and women whose lives were transparent to that great example of
love; may that same light shine also in us, and in the meek and courageous
witness of his Church in all the world.
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