Righteousness and Peace Have Kissed Each Other, and the Pure in Heart See God

Preached at Silverton Friends Church

Nov. 23, 2025

Four more Beatitudes:

Matthew 5:8-12

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God,

Blessed are the persecuted for righteousness’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of me, for so they persecuted the prophets before you; rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

Like some of you, I grew up during the hot era of the Cold War, learning in high school how to crouch under my paddle desk in case of nuclear attack.  My teacher, who had a dark sense of humor, said, “It will be as much use to hold this civil defense book over your head.” I also read a book around that time called I Found God in Soviet Russia by John Noble, and I was pretty sure that the main enemies of Christians were communists. So when I read where Jesus says, “Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, on account of Me,” I was pretty sure that the “they” in this sentence were the communists or at least atheists, and that my crime would be identifying as a Christian.

I don’t feel sure of that today, here in the U.S.A., and if I look at Jesus’s life and death, I am even less sure that my opposition is likely to be systems outside of Christianity. The people who hounded Jesus to death were of his own religion, and they were both the intellectuals and the Torah literalists, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. And these four other beatitudes we’re looking at today may help us see how to live in precarious times, when a person’s enemies may be members of their families (see Mt. 10:36). 

First, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.  As we’ve seen before, Jesus brings into his gospel many insights from the poets and prophets of the First Testament, our Old Testament, helping us see that God has not changed somehow between testaments.  Jesus nearly quotes Psalm 24:

“Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart…” 

In other words. the pure in heart are the ones who will see God.  And the identifying marks of the pure in heart are these: truthfulness, honesty, integrity—and actions that line up with a pure heart, symbolized by clean hands.

Hidden in the word for pure are the metaphors of pruning or being purified by fire, like gold.  So it isn’t a static word, it’s an ongoing process word. We can remember John 15, with its extended metaphor of pruning and abiding; parables about sifting out chaff which is thrown on the fire; and an acted parable about washing the feet. Staying open to God’s actions to bring us into our best selves, our truest selves is being pure in heart. You are clean, Jesus says, through the word I have spoken to you (John 15:3).  And Jesus is still speaking through the Holy Spirit.

This brings to mind what Jesus said about being clean, about being pure. Jesus advised his critics to clean the inside of the cup first, to admit the death hidden in whitewashed tombs, to allow God to make their inside pure so their outside could be truly pure. He told those most committed to purity, the Pharisees, to start from within, to be honest, and then to act out of that pure heart, actions of generosity and mercy.

Every committed movement has its purity laws. You must boycott this, you must praise this, you must make followers who are as zealous as you are, which Jesus referred to as making them twice as fit for hell as you are yourself. Those purity laws are focused on external behaviors but do nothing to remedy the hot mess within.

I advise you to sift through St. Paul’s pastoral advice to see how he tries to help people disallow harmful activities at the same time as he encourages them to embrace the liberty of the children of God. There is no way except to rely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the example of Jesus. And that means that one additional characteristic of the pure in heart is humility.  

The second:  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. It may not surprise you that there isn’t a lot in the history of Israel praising peacemaking. But peacemaking does show up in the poets and prophets. Psalm 34:14 “Depart from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.” Psalm 85:1: “Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” Isaiah foretells the coming of  the Prince of Peace (9:6) and says,  “the work of righteousness will be peace, and the service of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever” (32:17).  “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace, and brings good news of happiness, who announces salvation, and says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” (Is. 52:7). 

The peace we are talking about refers both to tranquillity and quietness and also to reconciliation and to fearlessness. So we can see that it is evident both in stillness and in action.

This Hebrew word, shalom, has so much embedded in it. Not only is it used to describe our relationship with God, where our reverence is not tainted with fear, but also our relationship with others. The messengers of God greet frightened humans with “Fear not!” Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid of those who can kill the body.” It includes contentment, which derives from having enough to meet our daily physical needs (our daily bread) as well as our need for love. It includes friendship. It includes wholeness, wellbeing, and safety. 

Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you” (John 14), the peace of an untroubled heart.  “You will have tribulation, but in me you can have peace."  This speaks to centeredness, and clearly connects to the idea of being pure in heart. 

St. Paul consistently opens his letters with “Grace and peace.” All of Romans 12 can be read as a manual for peacemaking, ending with “as much as is possible, live peaceably with everyone.” Ephesians 2:14 identifies Jesus as our peace, who has reconciled opponents with each other and has broken down the walls between us.  Hebrews 12:14 says, “Follow peace with all and holiness, without which no one shall see the Lord.”  

Following Jesus means to do what we can to help create a world where people can live tranquil, fearless lives, where we work to bring down walls and to bring opponents together in harmony.  This work, surprisingly, is counter-cultural in every culture, since each culture or subculture identifies “us vs. them” groups, people who belong inside vs. people who belong outside.  And we ourselves need to live without walls, without fearing our opponents, without our hearts being troubled. Believe in God, Jesus says, and believe also in me.

Third, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. As the Psalmist says, Righteousness and peace have kissed each other. So it will be helpful to delve a bit into what qualifies as righteousness. 

Though it came to me from the church much laden with baggage, this word righteousness means simply the state of being who we are meant to be, our true selves, our right selves. In a narrower sense, it also means justice, or giving each other what is due to another human being. What do we feel we are owed as a human? Give that to others.  

But surprisingly, giving other people their natural rights as human beings, acknowledging their inclusion as children of God, carriers of the image of God, can make some people mad.  So if we’re part of a culture, which we are, that identifies insiders and outsiders, some in our culture may well want to protect that by suggesting that outsiders are not due their rights as human beings, or maybe aren’t entirely human at all. 

Insisting on the human dignity of outsiders can turn us into outsiders, and then we will be persecuted. Persecution means driving people away, forcing them to flee, harassing them, molesting them, troubling them, mistreating them. We have seen this on viral videos in recent times.  And it is soooo hard to remain peacemakers, so hard to center on God and to keep our hearts open to God’s purifying work, so hard to be just to our opponents. 

I turned to my World War II thinkers and survivors for help on how to remain fully human and humane, how to be righteous, in hard times.  A French Orthodox Christian who was for awhile in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation, Olivier Clement wrote this:  “The war threw me into political action…I joined the French Resistance. But total war makes for total politics as well, and … total politics justifies anything and everything.  It justifies lies and violence, with no longer the recognition of any limits—whether …honor or…cannibalism.” (43)“The worst is when the shedding of blood is premeditated…During the last months of the war, this was something I could not subscribe to. So I became involved in other forms of resistance. We still risked our lives, but in order to save lives.” (44)  Clement had to leave the Resistance as a movement to remain his true self, but still he participated in actions that made others safe. (The Other Sun: A Spiritual Autobiography, tr. Michael Donley, Chester, UK: 2021)

Tzvetan Todorov looks at a Dutchwoman, Etty Hillesum, who was 27 when Nazis occupied Holland.  She felt called to minister to her fellow Jews who were in transit to concentration camps by showing them “the way to their own interior in a time of great adversity.” She constantly spoke to God, not as a potential savior, but as a power inside herself that had to be nurtured. (see Wikipedia article). Todorov writes, “Though she never stops fighting the injustices of the camp, hatred remains her chief enemy” (200).  (Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, [New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996)). She was eventually deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

Todorov is not sure that such nonviolence is the only or the most effective response to totalitarianism, and he acknowledges that even “those whose cause is just” may exchange being the hunted for being hunters, in which case “the new kingdom…will not be so new after all.” (216) He quotes Victor Frankl, survivor, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to him.” (217) He admits that “moral action [as opposed to political or military action] can perhaps be more effective than we think” (201).

I want to acknowledge that I also would like to persecute a person or two, but I’m not going to, and that is the difference between the capacity to act and the action itself. At the present time, I’m praying for those I want to persecute to meet Jesus like Saul did on the road to Damascus, as he was traveling in order to persecute followers of Jesus.

Here’s a prayer I heard on the Canterbury Cathedral choral evensong for Wednesday, Nov. 19:

“Loving God, we give thanks for the precious gift of life.  Give us strength and courage to speak out against all forms of abuse. …Lord, we pray for your world. In times of hostility to immigrants, we pray for a more generous understanding of the needs of others throughout our world. For an openness to the value that people different from ourselves can bring to our life. And for a recognition that it is only by working together that we can serve the good and the prosperity of all.  Generous God, to you all people are equal and from your love nobody can be shut out.  Inspire all peoples with this vision of your equal love that we may learn to expand our hearts in reaching out to others and find by looking on their faces with gentleness the true image of your son Jesus Christ our Lord.” (YouTube, Canterbury Cathedral Choral Evensong, Nov. 19, 2025)

Let’s move forward in our times and places with the commitment to be fully human and humane, to be true inside and out, to work for the dignity and peace of others, and to center ourselves in our experience of God’s presence and the example of Jesus. And then let’s commit to listening to the Spirit of God and doing what we are told to do.

 

Jesus and His Bible Part 6

One Misunderstanding after Another

After Jesus had chided the disciples for worrying about having literal bread, and he had healed a blind man, they walk along through the villages of Caesarea Philippi. He asked them what they think about him. Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” 

Jesus followed this up in a way that surprised his disciples. He told them plainly that the Christ, the Son of Man (Jesus’s preferred title for himself), must suffer and be rejected and killed, only to be resurrected on the third day. Peter objected, and Jesus treated his objection as he did the temptations of the devil in the desert. All this must have been very surprising to the disciples and likely hurtful to Peter.  

I wonder if this relates directly to the two-part healing of the blind man, especially after Jesus pointed them towards the double meanings of his actions. At first the blind man saw unclearly, similar to their understanding of the work of the Messiah. It was not enough that they identified Jesus as the Christ because they also continued to misunderstand the work of the Christ. So Jesus went to work to clarify their vision, and they did not get it even then.

And Jesus makes it more poignant by insisting that those who want to follow him should expect their own cross, should expect to trade their whole lives in for the work of following Jesus. 

Jesus then took Peter, James, and John up the mountain where they saw him transfigured and accompanied by Moses and Elijah. They were astonished, and Peter blurted, “Let us make tabernacles here for the three of you.”

God replied, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”

They did not yet understand what Jesus was telling them about dying and rising again, and they were still unable to look at the scripture with imagination, so they asked when Elijah was to come to herald the Messiah. Jesus said, “He has already come, and they killed him.” From this they could have realized that the prophecy was a parable also, and that John the Baptist had filled the function of Elijah. 

They arrived back with the other disciples to discover that a child had been brought for healing who was so oppressed by evil so that he could not speak and had dangerous seizures. The disciples could not heal him, and the father begged Jesus to intervene “if you can.” Jesus admonishes the father to have faith and then heals the boy.

When the disciples got Jesus alone, they asked why they could not cast out this evil. It is not surprising they were puzzled because earlier Jesus had given them authority to do just this (see Mark 6). Jesus responded that this kind came out only by prayer, which must have puzzled them further, and still puzzles people today.  

On the way to Capernaum, he again told them he must die and then rise again; their response this time was to talk among themselves about which of them was the greatest. Jesus had to correct their understanding of greatness by telling them that whoever wanted to be great must serve everyone else.  

So they’ve made three mistakes in understanding Jesus since the one about leaven. They refused to see that he must die, they wanted to make him an object of worship, and they thought he would set them up in a hierarchy. 

These are mistakes we still make today. We judge people based on their obedience to religious traditions. We deny the necessity of dying, the requirement to take up our own cross every day, the unavoidableness of suffering. We want to keep Jesus in a religious house where we can go to worship him. And we think Jesus set up a hierarchy.

We come to one more error, one which resonates today in the midst of our culture wars here in the United States and similar conflicts everywhere.  John told Jesus, “We found someone casting out demons in your name and we told him to stop because he wasn’t one of us.” 

This was a fraught issue, given that they had just failed to cast out a demon themselves, so it is not surprising they were unhappy to see someone else being successful. It is a human tendency also to want to keep any kind of power within one’s own in-group.  

But Jesus told them that “whoever is not against us is for us, whoever gives you water to drink because you follow me will be rewarded, whoever causes a little one who believes to stumble would be better off drowned in the sea; if your hand, foot, eye, causes you to stumble, get rid of it; better to enter God’s kingdom maimed than to be cast into Gehenna ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ For everyone will be salted with fire (Mark 9:48). 

We can learn from what Jesus says that those doing good in Jesus’s name should be encouraged to continue, that those who cause other believers to stumble would be better off dead, and if we are controlled and hindered in discipleship by our ability to control, to be mobile, or to oversee our world, we’d be better off losing all control, mobility or vision in order to be able to enter God’s kingdom.  

The quotation is from Isaiah 66:24 and is for those who rebelled against God: “For their worm shall not die and their fire shall not be quenched” and they shall be an abhorrence to all humankind. And who are those rebels? Those who perform the rituals but prefer their own way. God promises to come in fire and whirlwind and execute judgment by fire on them. I am reminded of the cautionary comment in Hebrews, “Our God is a consuming fire”  (Hebrews 12:29), and of the passages in Paul’s epistles where our works are tested by fire in the judgment. Fire and wind are purifying and sanctifying agents, as witnessed at Pentecost with the sound of a strong wind and tongues of fire. By invoking this passage in Isaiah, Jesus taught his disciples to expect that God would indeed purify and sanctify them from their dependence on religious rituals and their preference for their own way.  

Isaiah goes on to add: “But to the ones who are humble and contrite and tremble at my name, I will extend peace and I will comfort like a mother comforts and nurses her children.  I will take some of them for priests; all humankind will come to bow down before me."  

What we learn: God prefers the humble, the contrite, and those who are awed by God’s name to any who set themselves up as enforcers, or any who perform the outward signs of religion while secretly following their own lusts and disobeying, or any who simply prefer their own way to God’s way. Jesus reinforces that by puncturing the disciples’ sense of being special: whoever is not against us is for us. I am not just for you twelve or seventy-two or the inner circle. 

And forbidding others to do good in Jesus’s name is like offending one of the little ones who believe in Jesus. It is a serious crime against life.

Jesus continually corrected the disciples’ misunderstandings to emphasize to them that they had to embrace suffering and humility and graciousness in order to follow him.  

Jesus and His Bible Part 4

 Jesus and Purity

The next time in Mark that Jesus quotes his Testament is in Chapter 7.  In the intervening story, Jesus has done the following:

• Told more parables about the Kingdom of God—the seed growing, the mustard seed growing;
• Stilled the storm on the sea;
• Freed the Gerasene (Gentile) madman from his demons;
• Brought Jairus’s daughter back from death;
• Healed (inadvertently) the woman who had bled for 12 years;
• Met unbelief in his home town; 
• Sent the 12 disciples out in pairs to preach;
• Fed the 5000 men plus women and children with 12 baskets left over
• Walked on the water to his disciples’ boat.

The level of activity is breath-taking to read. In these encounters and events, we see the growing awareness among his followers that he is not a run-of-the-mill itinerant preacher or prophet. They add to their undoubted affection and admiration a streak of fear when he stills the storm and walks on the water.  We also see that his home town is blind to his worth and that the Gentiles want him to go away. Mark’s Jesus inspires awe, and yet desperate people continue to beseech him for help.

 Jesus quoted his Testament in the context of a dispute with Pharisees over ritual purification.  In Mark 7, Pharisees noticed that the disciples ate with unwashed hands. Pharisees asked Jesus why the disciples did not keep the traditions. This  reflected on Jesus as a trustworthy teacher, so they were really asking about his relationship to the Law and ritual.

 Jesus said, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Mark 7: 6-7).

This is a reference to Isaiah 29:13:-14: "Then the Lord said, ‘Because this people draw near with their words and honor me with their lips, but they remove their hearts from me, and their reverence for me consists of tradition learned by rote,  therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people…and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be concealed.’”

The context in Isaiah is a prophesy against Jerusalem, specifically that the city will undergo a military siege, defeat, and a return to dust, accompanied by thunder, earthquake, tempest, and the flame of a consuming fire. Strikingly, God tells Isaiah that this vision will be like a sealed scroll to his audience, a scroll the literate will reject because it is sealed, and the illiterate because they cannot read. It is followed by the pronounced woe to those who act secretively, who consider themselves wiser and more understanding than God, who are like pots thinking themselves equal to their potter.

This chapter in Isaiah ends with a prophecy concerning bringing hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, gladness to the afflicted, causing the needy to rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. But also ending the ruthless, finishing the scornful, cutting off those intending evil, those who pervert justice with lies and bribes. Christians will see Jesus in these words, which express the hopes of humankind for a better future. 

It is clear where Jesus included those who were preoccupied with ritual purity—they were among the ruthless, the scornful, those willing to bully, lie and cheat for their own ends. 

Jesus went further with his indictment of Pharisees. Jesus said they put traditions ahead of the commandment of God, quoting Moses: “‘Honor your father and your mother’ and ‘he who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death’ but you say ‘If a man says to his father or his mother, anything of mine you might have been helped by is Corban—given to God’—thus invalidating the word of God by your traditions which you have handed down, and you do many such things like that” (Mark 7:9-11).

This commandment to care for parents deals directly with human relationships, calling the young to care for the old. The familiar context is the 10 commandments given to Moses by God on the stone tablets: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Ex. 20:12, see also Deut. 5:15). It is worth noticing that Jesus quoted only the command. When God says to do something positive, do it regardless of outcome, may be the message.  [Robert Alter notes that “it is hard to square the causal link between honoring parents and longevity with empirical observation, and one probably has to regard this as part of the traditional wisdom of the ancient Near East, the sort of hopeful moral calculus reflected in the book of Proverbs” (Moses, 297, n.).]

Jesus also invoked the flip side of caring for parents. In a list of capital offenses is included the following: “And he who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death”) (Ex. 21:17, see also Lev. 20:9). Robert Alter translates “curses” as “vilifies,” and notes that it connects with treating parents with contempt. (Moses, 303, n.). Jesus condemns the tradition that makes it a good deed to give away “to God” money or goods  that one’s parents need. He makes clear that human need is more important than looking good.

Jesus followed this by an address to the multitude: “Listen to me and understand: there is nothing outside the man which going into him can defile him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile him” (Mark 7:15). Jesus directly confronted Jewish dietary laws about what could and could not be eaten. He explained to the disciples that, literally, what a person eats goes into the stomach and is eliminated, causing no impurity.  Mark asserts that this means “he declared all foods clean,” an interpretation confirmed by Peter’s vision on the rooftop detailed in Acts 10. This vision expanded the acceptability of all foods to include the acceptability of all persons, whether Jewish or not. Those of us who yearn for rules and guidelines that will make us acceptable to God are out of luck.

What is defiling before God are the ways we harm each other that derive from evil thoughts, pride, and foolishness. Again Jesus sets to the side the interpretations of the Law and the religious traditions that hinder us from caring for the human needs we encounter.