Jesus’ Way of Peace

[Jesus said,] ⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’

⁴⁴ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

⁴⁵ so that you may be children of your Father in heaven,

for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good

and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

From the “Sermon on the Mount” Matthew 5:43-45

Dear Friends,

On Sunday, I preached about the fruit of the Spirit: peace. The JRS song that I chose was Where Is the Love? by the Black Eyed Peas. I used it to illuminate how being a peace-maker involves a commitment to work toward a more just world and society… to work for a more equitable, non-racist, person-honoring society. This call to justice is one of the recurring refrains from the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus’ teaching.  When I think about Jesus’ teaching, however, there is an even more “radical” insight into peace-making.

In his Sermon on the Mount recorded in the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus provides the teaching that I’ve quoted above. It takes head-on how Jesus calls us to relate to people that we consider our “enemies.” In very simple terms, Jesus says to love them and pray for them!

I don’t know about you but this goes against almost every impulse in my body when someone does something mean or hurtful to me. If they hit me, I want to hit them back harder. If they mistreat me, I want them to be punished. If they’ve harmed or injured, I want to seek revenge. As understandable as this impulse is, Jesus is calling us to a different way of being in the world… a different way to relate to people.

One handle on this new way is to “try on” that Jesus never saw another person as an enemy. Jesus did not see the religious leaders, the Roman leaders, and even the soldiers that executed him as his enemies. He saw other children of God who were trapped by worldviews, right-ness, fear or mindsets that had them do things that were harmful and even deadly to Jesus. Jesus never gave up on them but tried to shift their thinking by what he said and how he acted. This is the kind of peacemaking that Jesus calls us to. And… it is incredibly hard and challenging!

I would venture to say that many Christians just choose to ignore this teaching. It is much easier to just act on our impulses. We can find all kinds of rationales to justify not relating to people this way. We can continue to seek revenge, retaliate, pay people back for what they did, and even try to kill or eliminate all our enemies… but this will never produce real peace.

Just as I keep praying for the will and ability to be this way in the world, I invite you to also pray for the will and ability to be this way in the world.

But the fruit of the Spirit is… peace.

Peace,

Pastor Phil