God's Calling

This weekend we get to one of the final two Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Of all Jesus’s teachings, this is one of the most dreadfully abused, especially by modern audiences.

Though the earliest church was composed of people from the margins, a switch flipped when the Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of the empire in the first half of the fourth century. It became the religion of the powerful. And the battle between Christ’s actual teachings and the desire of the powerful to pick and choose from what Jesus said to keep themselves at the top has been raging ever since.

This battle already existed when Jesus was alive.  Those in power within the religion of Christ’s own day, not to mention those in charge of the government (which also involved religious power), used their control and twisted God’s ways to keep people on the margins under their thumbs. Then they would pray all the louder in public to look “pious” and “sacrosanct” to the crowds.

The great prophets would often comment on how little God appreciates such actions and the sacrifices of such people. For God always knows the ways such “religious folk” actually treat those who God cares for - the poor, the hungry, the lost, the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner.

Just so, to this very day, those who cry “persecution” as Christians are most often those who very rarely exhibit any of Christ’s actual teachings from the gospels in their lives.

It is a dangerous thing to tempt the Lord of all Creation who has told us what is required to be recognized by Christ at the last judgment in this very same gospel. Even more so when it is also this gospel when Christ tells us that we are to live in “mercy, no self-righteous sacrifice.”

Even more once we finally learn that the kingdom of heaven has far less to do with the afterlife than it does with how we live here and now.

So, if that is the case, then is there a time we want to be persecuted? Something to ponder.