THE BEATITUDES XI

THE BEATITUDES XI

Today's text continues somewhat the verse from the previous beatitude. It really just expands or builds on it:

5:11 “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil things about you falsely on account of me. 5:12 Rejoice and be glad because your reward is great in heaven, for they persecuted the prophets before you in the same way.

Whereas verse 10 talked about being persecuted for righteousness, this verse is more specific. A person can be fairly good, some might even say righteous, in the eyes of the world. This might even be said of a non-believer, a non-Christian. A person who is so good might make others jealous and 'persecute' them.

However, we have talked about true righteousness, complete righteousness, being only that which God can give us. We can't earn it on our own. To attain, to get that, requires, necessitates, belief in Jesus and what he did. So, Jesus ties this together by adding here to verse 10 that it is when we are persecuted because of our connection to Him that we will be blessed. Furthermore, it is when people tell lies about us, accuse us falsely, because of Jesus, that he is talking about. As Jesus' chief disciple Peter wrote later (2:20): "What glory is it if, when you are criticized for your faults, you take it patiently? But if, when you do well and suffer for that, you take that patiently, that is acceptable to God." In other words, if you get in trouble for your own wrongdoing, there is no merit, nothing praiseworthy in that. It's only if you get in trouble for doing well, that God rewards you.

You see, when you do well, do what is right and others around you have not, it bothers their conscience. It points out their ways of error. It gets on their nerves. They understandably don't like it. They don't like to be 'shown up' as we say. So, they get angry and want to get back at you. They can't really say anything bad about you because you have done nothing bad. So, they turn to insulting you, or saying things falsely, lying, about you. They have no other option, no other way to express their anger. This is what happened to Jesus and his earlier followers as we can read in our Bible. Time and again it is recorded that their persecutors brought false charges against them because they really had nothing actually negative to say about them.

Jesus then goes on to try to comfort his hearers by saying they are in good company if this happens to them. The prophets, the religious leaders of Israel's own past, were also persecuted for doing God's will, doing the right thing. Jesus refers to this more than once. Just a few days before his own death, he looks over the city of Jerusalem, the city of Zion, and accuses its inhabitants of killing the prophets and other messengers god sent to them and then says (Matt. 23:29-39 but especially vs. 37), "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets, and stone those who are sent to you, how often would I have loved to gather your children together, just like a hen gathers her chicks, but you would not let me! Look, [because of that] your house [your temple] is left desolate [empty]."

There is another way of looking at this. If we never get persecuted, if no one is convicted enough by our behaviour or our words to make false accusations against us, we should perhaps be asking ourselves, Is our life really showing the Light of Jesus?' Are we speaking out against the wrongs of this world, for what Jesus wants done in this world? If we really were, we would probably sooner or later get persecuted.  Then we will be rewarded for really doing what we ought. Then we can be glad and rejoice because we will know we are making an impact, we are having the effect on our world that Jesus wants us to have on it. We are being the salt and light that he wants us to be. Those are figures of speech that come from a subsequent passage in Matthew.