Matthew 5

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.- Matthew 5: 11 & 12

We've been challenged by the deacons in our church to read through the New Testament this year and so I've been dutifully slogging through Matthew. First observation: Matthew is no great storyteller; he's a man of lists and summaries, a chronicler of that which he considers to be essential to his purposes, an omitter of that which he considers to be superfluous to his vision. If Matthew was a prof in Christianity 101, he'd have a nickname, like “Old Drybones,” maybe.

      From Jesus' birth to the sermon on the mount takes about 15 minutes of reading. It's obviously not a biography.

      But then, many of Matthew's aphorisms carry a bit more flesh than do those attributed to the preacher in Proverbs, where without introduction or amplification we read, for instance: “A wise son brings joy to his father, but a foolish son brings grief to his mother.” But the cultural continuity from one to the other can hardly be missed, particularly in the way a message is written, likely in the way it was meant to be understood. Jesus and the prophets are assumed to speak from the podium of authority; they speak like anointed leaders, not like democratically elected functionaries. Listeners are meant to bend their ear under the dictates of obedience, not as equals in debate.

      In our day, reading that one can be “blessed” when suffering insult for one's faith seems like an oxymoron. When Christians in Libya are beheaded en masse simply because their faith is Christian, the “blessed” part of their terror may ring hollow except that a heavenly reward is promised in Matthew's re-imagining of Christ's sermon. What with ISIL atrocities so much in the news these days, we have an ironic confluence of similar ideas: those who persecute unbelievers in the name of God hope for a blessing in heaven from Allah (God); those who are persecuted hope for a blessing in heaven from God according to Matthew's gospel.

      If both are correct, they could theoretically meet again in the realms above, an absurdity that could lead us to the opinion that faith in afterlife-reward/punishment may be unnecessarily creating a great deal of havoc in this present life.

      Obviously, the New Testament is written into a war zone. Matthew's Gospel is both encouragement and comfort to those who are actually persecuted, who are actually ridiculed in Christ's name. For a pastor today to seek to comfort us in our persecution here in Canada in 2015 based on the Sermon on the Mount seems almost a gratuitous defence of a gospel message that can only marginally be applied; in the Western world today, Christians are just as likely to be persecutors as they are to be persecuted.

      There was a time when Anabaptists in Europe were hunted down, tortured and burned or drowned by—ironically—other Christians! At such a time, some of those dying “went gladly to their final reward,” bathed in the glory of martyrdom for Jesus' sake, singing hymns as they perished. (The story of the martyrdom of George Friesen, cabinetmaker, and the psychological torture of William van Keppel, priest, on page 661 in the Herald Press publication of the Martyrs Mirror makes fascinating reading after Matthew 5:11 & 12.( It's the big, yellow book in the church library.) George Friesen was essentially drowned in the Rhine River for refusing to recant his belief in the inefficacy of child baptism.)

      So, how to read it today? For me, the admonition in Matthew 5: 11 & 12 is not so much about persecution and insult as it is about apathy; there's prejudice, discrimination, insult and injury being perpetrated all around us; as Christians we are vocal advocates for the oppressed, the discriminated-against, the insulted, the impoverished. Although not ourselves in immediate danger, we live in a culture-in-danger and if we're not speaking forthrightly (and possibly in a way that could invite criticism—if not persecution) what reward can we hope for under Matthew's aphorism?

      In as much as you did it for the least of these my brethren, you did it for me.