Blessed are the Peacemakers

We live in a world of violence, not peace. It’s all we’ve ever been familiar with. For almost as long as human beings have been around and have had to live together, our planet has been characterized by conflict, chaos, disharmony, and violence.  There may be pockets of peace, of course, but overall we recognize that human history is a history of trouble and violence.  This was as true in Jesus’ day as it is in ours. Jesus came announcing the kingdom of God. Well, Israel was very aware of how kingdoms come into being: by force. And Jesus’ listeners would have been well-acquainted with this phenomenon. Prior to Jesus’ arrival on the scene, the Jewish people had been conquered by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Romans. They had enjoyed a brief window of autonomy after a revolt led by the Maccabeus, but this was short-lived. In each case, it was violence that brought a new reality into being. Jesus’ people knew very well that kingdoms were founded and maintained by violence. And to these people, Jesus says: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Peace is something that we desperately need and long for, but it seems to lie beyond our grasp.  Our experience as individuals with families and friends, as members of churches, as citizens of provinces and nations, global citizens seems to lead to the conclusion that peace is an impossible ideal. When has peace ever been anything more than a brief experience in our world, after all?  This frustration between the ideal of peace and its lack of realization is captured in a song by U2 called “Peace on Earth”.  The first and the last stanzas of the song go like below:

Heaven on earth, we need it now

I’m sick of all of this hanging around

Sick of sorrow, sick of the pain

I’m sick of hearing again and again

That there’s gonna be Peace on earth

Jesus sing a song you wrote

The words are sticking in my throat

Peace on earth

Hear it every Christmas time

But hope and history won’t rhyme

So what’s it worth

This peace on earth

There’s a real sense of frustration here and a deep longing for “heaven on earth,” an understanding that human beings were created for peace, not conflict. Yet there is an almost hopeless skepticism as well “hope and history won’t rhyme” and “peace on earth” seems like a hollow, meaningless phrase.  And what is true on a global level where there are always “wars and rumors of wars” is true in our own lives as well. The peace we want and need is elusive.

Our relationships with children, co-workers, parents, and friends are, at various points in our lives, characterized by mistrust, envy, defensiveness, antagonism, and selfishness. We have competing desires and expectations of each other, and these bump up against each other regularly.  We might not offer quite that bleak an assessment of human nature – many of us do enjoy seasons of relative peace and harmony in our relationships and many of us may have been blessed to have lived an entire lifetime in a country free from war but an inescapable element of the human condition on this side of eternity is conflict.

Peace on earth is something we long and hope for in the future, but we only get glimpses of it now. For some, those glimpses are few and far between, for others they are more frequent, but we all know that the peace that we were created for is something foreign to our experience and will only take place in another kind of reality.

Jesus calls us to be peacemakers and, fundamentally, choosing to be peacemakers is an act of trust.  As is the case in all the beatitudes, the announcement that Jesus is making about the kind of people who are blessed, the kind of people who signal the kingdom of God, asks for a radical trust in God to usher in his kingdom in what seems to be counterintuitive ways.  It forces us to declare, by our actions as well as our words, that we believe that God really does stand over our individual stories and the larger stories in which we find ourselves; that he really does promise to deal justly with us and those we find ourselves in conflict with, that peace and love really are stronger than violence and hatred, no matter how things may appear in the present; that the upside-down way God has of working in the world really is right-side up and really does point to a future of shalom.  If God isn’t who he says he is, it makes no sense to be peacemakers in the present or to take the beatitudes as a kingdom-way-of being-in-the-world. Only if a God of peace stands at the beginning and the end of history does it make sense to be peacemakers in the time between.

As with all of the Beatitudes, we must remember that this is not just good advice but Good news a new possibility for the world being inaugurated in and through Jesus.  And we must also remember that these are not just words; Jesus not only preached the Sermon on the Mount, he lived it. He was poor in spirit, he mourned, he was meek, he hungered and thirsted after righteousness, he was merciful and pure in heart; he made peace between God and human beings and between people; he was persecuted because of righteousness, he was insulted and had evil spoken of him falsely.  All of these things were part of Jesus’ announcement that a new covenant between God and human beings was beginning with him. A new possibility had been introduced, and it was up to his followers to embody and point to these new possibilities.  So how can we be peacemakers? How can we embody this new possibility for the world, this new way of being human that Jesus points to here in the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes?

For most of us, peacemaking will occur in the fairly “ordinary” contexts of everyday events and relationships. For most of us, peacemaking will involve doing what good we can in the contexts God has placed us, the doors he opens up for us, allowing the vision of Isaiah to inform our words and actions.

Being a peacemaker involves so much more than the absence of war, or being “against war.” It means working for God’s vision for his world.  It means having a clear, biblically-formed vision of the future God has promised and allowing that vision to permeate all of our actions, from the seemingly insignificant to those with global consequences; it means pursuing justice, wholeness, and harmony in our relationships, seeking reconciliation and restoration both when we wrong others and when they wrong us; it means turning the other cheek, choosing to be wronged rather than be a source of enmity; it means doing the hard work of reconciling with our enemies without resorting to violence; it means getting involved politically and socially, promoting whatever peace can be achieved and always working for human flourishing in whatever context we find ourselves; it means sacrificially pursuing the good of others, sometimes at personal expense. 

Wherever we find ourselves there will be conflict, disharmony, fear, and confusion. Our job, as kingdom people, is to bear witness through our lives to the Prince of Peace because we believe that it is in living as Christ did that the world begins to be transformed into something beautiful and good and hopeful.  We are not charged with the task of bringing the kind of peace that only God can bring; but we are called to embody, as in all the beatitudes, a kingdom-way-of-being-in-the-world.  We are called to be peacemakers because we are children of a God of peace. God’s children do what God does, and there is no more God-like work for us to do in the world than peacemaking. 

May God help us to be peacemakers!

Kasta Dip