Being right is only a beginning: a reflection on the third Beatitude
Let’s say you’re right.
You’re right about vaccines.
You’re right about masks.
You’re right about abortion.
You’re right about who won the 2020 election, who should have won, and who must win in 2024.
You’re right about immigration, taxes, and voting rights.
You’re right about baptism.
You’re right about women’s roles in the church.
You’re right about exactly how God created the earth.
You’re right about how churches should be governed, how they should worship, what music they should use, and, while we’re at it, who’s qualified to teach Sunday school and offer communion meditations.
For the next few hundred words, we won’t argue with you. You’re right.
You’ve consulted experts you trust. Your favorite news sources support your views. You’ve read the websites and done your research. You’ve listened to political analysts, scientists, and theologians, all of them smart and all of them correct and all of them affirming your conclusions.
You’re right.
And being right puts you in a position of strength, great strength. How pitifully weak it is to be wrong.
Me, too
Lest I seem critical or sarcastic, let me assure you, I know what’s right, too. With every issue I’ve named above, I’m baffled by the fact that some can’t see what’s right. Sometimes I don’t show it, but in private I regularly shake my head in bewilderment and, yes, pity at their flawed conclusions. How good it is that I’m right. How sad that they’re wrong.
I got to thinking about this when my small group arrived at “Blessed are the meek” in our survey of the Beatitudes. I read again the classic definition explaining how “meek” is different from “weak.” Meekness is strength under control, the commentators tell us. The wild stallion that has learned to submit to the reins of its rider is not weak because of that obedience. It has simply been trained to use its strength for something more important than flaunting it in the herd.
I asked the guys in my group to name their own strength. And then I hit them with, “So how is God using your strength for his purposes? How have you submitted your strength to his control rather than using it just to build up yourself?”
My strength
As for me, I’ve never been physically strong. I was never an athlete. My buddy can heave two bags of topsoil into the wheelbarrow while I’m struggling to lift just one. I’m not mechanical. For many years, if a visiting worker needed a tool, I asked my wife where we kept them.
But I can talk. And I can write. I can make you laugh. Often I can inspire or persuade. So I had to come to terms with the answer to my own question. How have I submitted to God my practiced ability with words? If meekness is strength under control, how have I given God control over what I call my strength? Am I sure my words are always for him? Or have I slipped into the current stream of writing or speaking to prove to myself how right I am and how you are desperately wrong?
Our strength
If I’ve made this error, at least I can know I’m in good company—except that this clamoring crowd isn’t good. Strident, self-righteous voices among Christians, even the many arguing for positions I would take, have done more damage than good.
Frankly, I don’t think much of the world cares about our debates. They hear one of us contending with another and they turn away. And if my argument becomes unkind or ugly, they reject me and my movement altogether. The love of Jesus is hidden in the hubbub of our hubris.
This is a bigger problem than any one Facebook rant or blog bombast. Some observers of the current scene say the evangelical church in the U.S. is splitting apart because of the way Christians have submerged themselves in our country’s current cultural divide.
Peter Wehner examined this crisis in The Atlantic last October. This week a friend reposted a paragraph from Wehner’s essay. He had surveyed many church leaders to hear their analysis of the current scene, and Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, said this:
. . . the early Christians transformed the Roman empire not by demanding but by loving, not by angrily shouting about their rights in the public square but by serving even the people who persecuted them, which is why Christianity grew so quickly and took over the empire. . . . once Christians gained political power under Constantine, that beautiful loving, sacrificing, giving, transforming Church became the angry, persecuting, killing Church. We have forgotten the cross.
When Constantine’s Christians claimed strength, their impact for God grew weak. I fear it’s happening among us today.
Start here
Of all the ways to address this problem, maybe the third Beatitude is a good place to start. We will not save our nation (much less “inherit the earth,” the promise of this blessing) by asserting our strength. No matter how right our beliefs, a divided nation will not be healed by a bickering, protesting church. Of course we cannot fail to stand for what’s right. Many will hasten to quote Peter: “Always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” But let us also ponder the rest of the instruction: “Yet do it with gentleness [another translation for “meekness”] and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).
Even if we believe another Christian’s perspective is anti-Biblical sin, the Scripture asks for a tender approach: “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted” (Galatians 6:1).
His strength
I’ll admit the temptation to skewer an erring brother has come close to overtaking me, especially when one of them has attacked me or someone I love. I need to remember the example of Jesus. “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:23-24).
What a perfect picture of strength under control. What a shining model of meekness. What a challenge to how I view myself and my strengths and how I relate to those I view as weaker. What an example for every Christian who today considers “Blessed are the meek.”
Studying the Beatitudes with my small group has helped me reevaluate how I’m living out my faith.
This is the third post in a series sharing some of my reflections.
Photo by Tara Winstead from Pexels, by KirstenMarie on Unsplash, and by Maria Thalassinou on Unsplash
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