The Beatitudes and Resisting Evil

Preached at Silverton Friends Church

July 24, 2025

Where I was a child in Africa, there was an imbalance in power between tribes. The ruling tribe were about 20 percent of the total population. When democracy came after the colonial power left, the parliament was populated in proportion to the population, 20% traditional rulers, 80% from the remaining tribes.  The historical rulers found this unacceptable and jailed or killed those elected from the 80%. My family was in the country at this time in the mid-1960s (I was 8 or 9 years old). This was followed later by a military coup which cemented in place that power for the 20%.  In 1972, refugees from the earlier brutality reentered the country bent on revenge. Armed with machetes and perhaps some rifles, they targeted and killed members of the president’s family and people of his tribe, estimates between 800 and 1,200 dead. The government responded with vigor and automatic weapons and helicopters. The army arrested many innocent middle-class folks from the 80% with above 8th grade education; they imprisoned some, often with torture, and executed others. Between 200,000 and 300,000 dead, an estimated 300,000 refugees, and a country thrown back many decades in its development. If you want more specifics, the Wikipedia article on Burundi can provide them.

This cycle of oppression, vengeance, and reprisals has been repeated across human history, and we can see it today. No wonder the law of an eye for an eye, one life for one life, was and is a step forward for humanity. 

I was affected by both of these events. In the first one, I saw bodies along the roadside and knew my parents’ fear.  In the second, I heard machine gun fire in the nights before I left for my boarding school in Kenya, and I lost personal acquaintances and friends. 

There was a singular sense of helplessness among the missionaries. They had no weapons to resist with, and they could not communicate with each other, given the lack of telephones and the confiscation of shortwave radios.  Some were deported. I asked several of them, retired to the same retirement community, to share their experiences. One spoke of visiting people in prison who had been tortured. Another still mourned his deportation.  All had been scarred, and they did not have the language to communicate the depth of that scarring.  

You can see why I’m jumpy today about current events. I think about various possible scenarios and what I can or should do.  Maybe you folks do, too. So today, we will look at two of the Beatitudes, bearing in mind that Jesus spoke to an occupied people, ruled by the Roman emperor and his governors, and locally oppressed by the military. Any rebelliousness was mercilessly put down and the rebels crucified. Therefore, I believe these Beatitudes can help us negotiate our way through our realities.  

Matthew 5:6-7

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. 

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

As is usual with Jesus, he borrows from the Jewish scripture to make these points, and what he borrows can help us apply them.

The word righteousness in Hebrew includes justice and truthfulness, and its root includes making or being straight, making or being innocent. It is opposed to wickedness, the root of which includes making a commotion or stirring things up, causing fear or terror.  Both are words that look at actions as well as the composition of the inner person, right doing vs wrong doing, right being vs wrong being. 

The book of Job and the Psalms are full of descriptions of righteousness.  Job 29:12-17 details Job’s intervention on behalf of the poor and powerless, Job 31 details his rejection of lust and greed and power grabbing, his generosity and advocacy for the powerless, his fairness to employees and to his enemies, his honesty and sincerity. His actions in secret line up with his public self. We can add to this David’s words that God the Shepherd leads him into paths of righteousness. St. Paul says that Abraham’s confidence in the character and word of God to him counted for righteousness, meaning it made him just the person God meant him to be.

The word in Greek from the New Testament likewise includes the idea of doing what is just and right, and also of being what one is meant by God to be.

These are things we can aspire to. Following the lead of the Good Shepherd, choosing to trust God with our present and future, doing what is straight and honest and fair and just, caring for those with less than we have, feeding the hungry. We are a part of the promise in Luke 6:21, where Jesus says, “Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be filled.”

I will add that hungering and thirsting for righteousness means to me not only growing personally in doing and being right, but also my longing to see righteousness more operational in my society and my world. There are things I can do in my day to move myself and my world in that direction, and of course, I can and must pray for God to bring about a more righteous world.

The following Beatitude sits alongside hunger for righteousness: Blessed are the merciful.  

I’m sure it is obvious that Jesus knew some would implement their hunger for righteousness in ways that were oppressive, violent, and cruel. We can see this throughout the history of the religions of the Book—Judaism, Christianity, Islam.  Crusades, holy wars, Inquisitions, forced conversions, martyrdoms, holocausts, and so on. No wonder Jesus followed it up with mercy.

Jesus’s testament is also full of references to mercy. There are many references to the merciful character of God throughout, and many prayers for mercy for both individuals and for nations (sometimes in the same prayer as the request for judgment or vengeance on enemies). Psalm 107:1 celebrates God’s mercy which endures forever, a phrase which recurs throughout the Psalms. Mercy is a part of God’s goodness. Psalm 103 is a beautiful praise song to God for how God cares for us and pities us; God knows our frame, and remembers that we are dust. In Luke 6:36, Jesus says, “Be merciful just as your Father also is merciful,” and he surrounds those words with these, “Do unto others as you want them to do unto you,” don’t judge, don’t condemn, forgive, give.

Inhabiting the concept of mercy in the Hebrew are the ideas of sparing someone, bearing with someone, commiserating with someone, showing compassion or sympathy, being kind to the miserable and afflicted, caring and helping.  And the promise Jesus made echoes what David says in Psalm 18, “With the merciful you will show yourself merciful.”

In just a few words, I want to bring this into the realm of how we live together in society, in other words, politics.  

I recently read Tzvetan Todorov’s book Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996). Todorov grew up in a Bulgaria that was both communist and totalitarian, and later emigrated to the West. As for many Europeans, World War II casts a long shadow for him as he tries to understand how so many ordinary people did so much evil.  He points out that consoling ourselves by maintaining that humans are fundamentally good can unwittingly abet the spread of evil.  Indeed, if we are honest with ourselves, we will see that “‘the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts’” (136). [Todorov here quotes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who grew up in Soviet Russia and wrote about the gulags.] This realism about humanity helps us see more clearly both the need to be righteous and the need to have mercy.

Todorov says that it is necessary to judge the guilty for their precise acts and responsibilities, and also that we must “recognize our similarities to them, we must not demonize them, we must not generalize their guilt to all others of their group or nation” (229).  This clear-sightedness and fairness are characteristics of righteousness. 

Todorov looks at those responsible for concentration camps, particularly those who worked in them.  He notes that the proportion of the guards who were fanatics and sadists was similar to the general populace, and that the majority of guards were conformists, “willing to serve whoever wielded power and more concerned with [their] own welfare than with the triumph of doctrine [in this case, Nazism]” (123-24).  He says that what made the evil of concentration camps so dangerous was that it was easy for ordinary persons to ignore or tolerate (125).  When I visited Dachau in Munich, I was shocked to see it embedded in a residential neighborhood, and to discover that the neighbors simply chose to ignore what it was for. 

Todorov sees that conformity can make evil easy to tolerate and even do. In contrast, those who give themselves to saving people in mortal danger, the rescuers, are often non-conformists, distinguishing for themselves between good and evil, living by their keen consciences, recognizing the common membership of all in the human community, devoted to defending not ideals but people of flesh and blood. They do not want to be considered heroic, and they refuse to emulate the enemy by mirroring their hatred.  “The good person does not ignore evil, but he [or she] hates the system, not the individuals who serve it” (224-25).  

People do evil because of ordinary vices: they separate conduct from conscience, they depersonalize other humans, and they enjoy exercising power over others, particularly the power of life and death.  Depersonalization includes “reducing them to nakedness, filth, starvation, stripping them of their names, giving them numbers or euphemisms, killing in large numbers, refusing to meet their eyes” (164).  

The opposite actions can be seen as acts of resistance: clothing them, washing them, feeding them, calling them by name, recognizing the individual, meeting their eyes. These actions personalize others. (Jesus also taught that these actions characterize the righteous.)  Also, we resist evil when we repudiate lies and expose the truth. The ordinary virtues are dignity, which derives from internal consistency; caring; and working for understanding and beauty. These attitudes and actions resist evil.

This reminds me of Jesus, who knew what was in the hearts of humanity and therefore did not place his confidence in them, but who also was moved with compassion and indignation to speak truth and to heal. He embodied and embodies righteousness and mercy in human form, revealing his Father, described in Psalm 59, “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; mercy and truth go before your face.” 

These two ideas—righteousness and mercy—are not opposites, even though in our human frailty we can fall off the path that takes in both. We can be fanatics in either direction.  But righteous actions and merciful actions are often the same actions.  Job’s description of his righteousness includes many actions we can see are merciful.  Psalm 37:21 says, “The righteous shows mercy and gives.” Proverbs 21:21 says “[The person] who follows righteousness and mercy finds life, righteousness and honor.” And Jesus says,”Be like your Father, who sends rain on the just and the unjust.”

When we pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, we could hardly visualize it better than this from Psalm 85:  “Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed.”

What we are talking about at the core is living out of our whole humanity, the integrity that keeps inner and outer selves in harmony, the vision that sees the human in each other person and the divine in all God’s works, and lives by that vision and by the inhabiting grace of God’s Holy Spirit. 

The Beatitudes and Political Realities

Preached at Silverton Friends Church

July 20, 2025

I have a lifetime of reading the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12, as statements to me of how my interior life ought to be. Perhaps you also have heard the saying, “beatitudes are attitudes to be.” This (like many clichés) is only partly true.  I’ve also argued with these pronouncements, particularly those that seem to promote spinelessness and subservience. Since Jesus was neither spineless nor subservient, I figure I have misunderstood something about what he taught in these massively important words. So I’ve gone looking for context to help me update my understanding, particularly in relation to the turbulent times in which we are living. I want us to look at the beatitudes for their prophetic content.

Luke’s gospel records the moment when Jesus announced to his hometown congregation what he had come to do (Luke 4:17-21): “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Is. 61:1-2). This announcement sets context for Jesus’s mission here; Jesus places his calling in the line of prophets from ancient history. Therefore, we can expect to find precedent for his teaching in the Jewish Testament. We can also notice that Jesus stopped short of this word: “the favorable year of the Lord, the day of vengeance for our God.”  All his hearers would have noticed that he omitted this phrase.  

Luke includes a second version of the beatitudes, one less likely to be spiritualized and individualized (Luke 6:20-38).  Luke also includes the “woes”—the day of vengeance for our God. I’m not implying one is accurate and one is inaccurate; I’d guess instead that Jesus said these things more than just one time on a hillside.  

Today I want us to consider these three beatitudes from Matthew.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. 

These three beatitudes communicate the shocking idea that those who are beaten down are blessed, or happy.  No one actually thinks this is true. In the Greek,  “poor” connotes beggary, crouching in fear, helplessness; “mourn” connotes profound and irreparable loss; “meek” connotes downcast eyes, oppressed, depressed, lowly, tamed (though I have to include the meanings of gentle and humble).

It is hard to aspire to these conditions, even though Jesus announces that the law of the universe is that these conditions will be rewarded, or perhaps, if I understand the second part of the beatitudes more accurately, will be remedied far and above the harm.

Let’s look at the poor in spirit.  In Luke, Jesus says, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”

This is a common theme of the Jewish Testament. God is on the side of the poor, and will  recompense their misery.  Psalm 113 says, “Who is like the Lord our God, who is enthroned on high, who humbles himself to behold things in heaven and in the earth. He raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with nobles, with the privileged of his people.” This is the tip of the iceberg of prophecies and psalms where God excoriates the rich for grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt and asserts that their wrongs will be redressed and those who wrong them will reap what they have sown.

Jesus, who grew up in a family with royal forbears and was part of the working class, may not himself have had this grinding down experience of poverty. But he gave up home and livelihood to obey the will of God—to preach the good news to the poor. The rich who came to him were confronted—Zacchaeus offered to pay back all he had defrauded at a rate of 4 to 1, and the rich young ruler went away sad because he couldn’t bear to part with the security of his wealth. Matthew himself gave up his lucrative tax practice in order to follow Jesus, and Mary poured a fortune in perfume onto him in worship. Detachment from wealth and increased generosity developed in Jesus's followers.

It’s tempting to think that Matthew, likely well-to-do, emphasized the “in spirit” version when Jesus said it, because those of us not impoverished also want to be eligible heirs of the kingdom of heaven. And Matthew also omits the “woes”: Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” The rich believe their needs have been met and will be met by the cushion of wealth.  They are comforted and comfortable. Wealth is their comforter.

I’ll refer you to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus the beggar, in which Lazarus ends up being comforted in Abraham’s arms and the rich man ends up in flames, begging for a drop of water to drink. Abraham said to him, “Son, remember that in life you had all the good things and Lazarus had all the bad things, and so now he is comforted, and you are in torment” (Luke 16:19-31). This parable teaches us the same thing as the sheep and the goats—those who have must share to alleviate the suffering of those who have not, or there will be hell to pay.  

The poor sit next door to those who mourn.  Proverbs 29:2, “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people mourn.” Psalm 55 is a long and bitter lament mourning the loss of a friend who betrayed the psalmist, and crying out to God to set things right. And just after Jesus’s mission statement from Isaiah 61 is this: “to comfort those that mourn, … to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.”

It is difficult to overstate how much of the Jewish testament is given over to mourning, to lament, often followed by entreaties for God to take action and execute judgment and even vengeance on those who have done the harm. The beautiful psalm that begins with “By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept for thee, Zion” ends with a  bloodthirsty prayer that asks God to require an eye for an eye, an infant for an infant.

Even the Revelation of John includes the martyrs under the throne of God crying out for their blood to be avenged. 

It is hard to mourn without also blaming someone for the loss. And just after Jesus’s mission statement from Isaiah 61 is this: “the acceptable day of the Lord, the day of vengeance for our God, to comfort those that mourn.” But over and over, the Bible disapproves of taking personal revenge, even in the Law of an eye for an eye. At least that limits revenge, so that the wronged person doesn’t take more than was taken.  

Paul reminds his readers, “ Don’t repay anyone evil for evil, because ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord” and Jesus pushes beyond that to require us to pray for those who misuse us, who cause us harm. In fact, Jesus wades into the deep waters of turning the other cheek, offering no resistance to evil, and loving the enemy, all of which are unnatural to human beings and require us to seek the intervention of the indwelling Spirit of God to teach us how to respond to loss, to undeserved harm, to intentional evil. 

And finally, Blessed are the meek. Within this word is a picture of a tamed animal. For instance, the horse, while dangerous due to its size, is a prey animal, and lives in a state of readiness for alarm, even when tamed. A horse with a rope around its neck can be led by a small human. And anyone who has read Black Beauty knows how a horse can be abused by its owners, despite having the potential to trample said owner into the ground. 

The negative side of meekness is this subservience, this loss of belief in one’s own power to effect change, the resignation of the hopeless. And yet, in a direct reference to Psalm 37, “The meek shall inherit the earth, and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” Jesus says, “The meek shall inherit the earth." This psalm offers a picture of meekness: Trust in the Lord, do good, don’t fret because of evildoers, delight yourself in the Lord, commit your way to the Lord, rest in the Lord, wait patiently for him, cease from anger, believe that the Lord will set things right.

It’s pretty difficult not to fret because of evildoers, and anger seems unavoidable when we see evil prosper.  The Psalms are full of this anger, and yet they provide us with a way to move toward meekness. Taking the harms and the evil we see being done to the vulnerable among us, and to us ourselves at times, taking those to God in passionate, angry, justice-seeking prayer is a positive action.   

I’ve recently read Jacques Ellul’s book, Hope in Time of Abandonment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).

Writing in the early 1970s, Ellul responded to the chaos of his times, expressing his observation that God has abandoned history. Ellul allowed for the perceived presence and activity of God in the lives of individuals, but he did not see God intervening in elections, in wars, in technological developments, in disasters natural and human-made.  He did not see God setting things right on behalf of those who need everything, those who lament irretrievable losses, those who are beaten down to the point of no resistance.  And, if I’m honest, these times are not better.  Ellul set out to write about this abandonment, but instead, he wrote, “hope asserted itself” (Preface, viii). It was precisely in this recognition of abandonment, this awareness that no human initiative or institution or election will redress the miseries of the world, this realization of the childishness and impotence of the church to bring positive change, it  was in this chaos that hope asserted itself.  

Ellul says this, “There is little attraction in prayer. It is boring. And yet, … without prayer there is no hope, not the slightest” (272).“Prayer is the assurance of the possibility of God’s intervention, without which there is no hope” (271-2).  

“Hope is based on God’s promise constantly fulfilled and renewed. But how can we forget that, throughout the Bible, this promise is linked with the ceaseless outcry of prayer? It is [our] prayer which demands the fulfillment and its ongoing. Without prayer, the promise and its fulfillment are forces just as indifferent and blind as fate and necessity” (273).  Prayer is the only basis for hope, and at the same time it is the means of hope and the expression of hope.  “Prayer is the referral to God’s decision, on which we are counting” (272).

Jesus pointed us in this direction with his parable in Luke 18 of the persistent widow and the unjust judge, “a parable to show that at all times [we] should pray and not lose heart.”

A widow, one of the poor, the mournful, the meek, petitioned a judge to avenge her on her adversary.  He ignored her.  She brought her case again, and then again, and then again.  Finally, the unjust judge said, “Even though I do not fear God nor respect human beings, I will avenge her. She is wearing me out, bothering me beyond endurance.”

And Jesus said, “Now shall not God bring about justice for those he cares for, who cry to God night and day?”

What can we learn from these beatitudes and the Old Testament sources they derive from? We learn that centering our hearts on God’s character and God’s faithfulness is the place to start. (I’m trying contemplative prayer for this purpose.)  It is always right to pray. It is not the last resort; it is the only resort in hopeless times. Prayer is the expression of hope when there is no basis for hope. 

Prayer is modeled throughout the Bible, and recommended (!) by Jesus in the face of injustice and evil leadership.  Prayer expresses the anger and despair we feel about the power evil wields in our world and channels our feelings towards God, who can absorb them, so that in our daily lives we can act and react with non-violence in word and deed, but still act in ways that make life more bearable for the poor, the mournful, the beaten down. 

We pray because God told us to, and we then do what God tells us to.