The downtown church I served in California had a bar and nightclub across the alley behind the church building called Bogarts and Lulu’s. I was invited to attend a party to celebrate the bar’s two-year anniversary.
Jill, the manager, took the microphone to speak to the assembled group of 40-50 people.
Before she thanked the local dignitaries or any other people for attending, the first words out of her mouth were to thank the members from our congregation who had prayed for her, her staff, and the safety of her customers every Wednesday afternoon. She told her audience that these prayers began almost a year earlier after a newspaper article highlighted the violence associated with her nightclub–especially on Wednesdays, their busiest night–which prompted the church to reach out to her.
Jill said she now looked forward to Wednesday! She said since our people began showing up to pray every Wednesday afternoon, not a single incident had occurred in over a year. Our prayers made “an incredible difference.”
To my surprise, a group of folks from our church—all over 60—also came to this celebration after reading about it in our church newsletter. After Jill spoke, I went over to thank them for coming. In the midst of the people drinking around her, one lady looked around herself uncomfortably and told me, “I never expected I’d ever come here.” I understood exactly how she felt out of her comfort zone.
And then her good friend standing next to her (whom I later realized prompted all of them to attend), replied to her, “But this is the just kind of place Jesus would have come.” She was a peacemaker.
Blessed are the Peacemakers
“Peace” is the Hebrew word “shalom” and it means far more than simply absence of conflict—it means human well-being and human wholeness in every dimension. Peacemakers work for wholeness wherever human lives are broken, including fighting injustice that keeps people from ever becoming whole.
Dale Bruner in his Matthew biblical commentary offers an excellent visual example:
“…the Hebrew word depicts a circle that embraces the whole community, internally and externally, and puts person who are at peace in right relations with the whole world of realities. If we could translate “blessed are the circle makers” and make sense, we would. To bring peace, in Scripture, is to bring community. Peacemakers are reconcilers.”
Jesus became the ultimate peacemaker on the cross:
“For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” (Col. 1:19-21)
But while Jesus’ ultimate act of peacemaking was on the cross, Jesus also made peace every time he reached out to down-and-out prostitutes or up-and-out tax collectors. Jesus made peace every time he stood up for right relationships, even if that meant conflict, like arguing with the Pharisees and other religious authorities.
The common assumption that Jesus is only interested in individual, internal “spiritual” peace finds no support in Scripture! As Bruner rightly concludes:
“…biblical peace is hardly touched when it is described as inward tranquility; the circle of right relations that is peace will often, in a crooked world, be relations that pass through struggle and confrontation.”
Jesus and Politics
Jesus was not “non-political.” Jesus was in the middle of the rough and tumble 1st century Jewish politics, where aristocratic Sadducees temple toadied to the Roman overlords while the revolutionary Zealots tried to overthrow them (remember, Simon the Zealot was one of the 12 disciples).
There is no support for the notion that because Jesus is “above” politics, he leaves decisions about how to handle politics up to us. Rather, as Bruner summarizes:
“Jesus is Lord, even of conflict, and Lord on this earth, and of our politics, and of the way we do our politics. We will not need to be afraid of conflict if we allow it to occur under the aegis of Jesus. But if conflict goes to school to macho masters rather than to Jesus of Nazareth, if it is success- or effective-centered rather than Sermon on the Mount centered…it becomes demonic.”
I and others need to hear this today, for we, especially we evangelicals, have let our politics more and more often be led by “macho-masters,” rather than Jesus.
Today, the polarization in our society has invaded our churches as never before in my lifetime. Studies suggest that political affiliation is now (especially among evangelicals) a deeper shaper of identity and behavior than Christian identity.
Do we still see Jesus’ church as a hospital for recovering sinners, including us? Do we, in fact, see ourselves as a wide assortment of what the world calls “losers”–we mourn, we are meek, we are merciful–all whom the Beatitudes tell us God will especially bless?
Or, are only the only “losers” today in the other political party, on the other side of issues? Indeed, in the tidal wave of messages telling us the other political party is not only misguided and wrong but purely evil, do we now decide we must use any possible means to defeat them?
The liberation theology movement, popular in the 1960’s and 70’s, stipulated that “peaceful” peacemaking was a fool’s errand. Real shalom (justice and well-being for the whole community) could only be achieved by confrontation, partisan struggle, perhaps (they hinted) even violence. As a seminary student in the 70’s, most evangelicals were horrified by such a “political” reading of the Bible.
Liberation theology leaders still around today must be wryly smiling as some evangelicals support any unethical behavior, any violation of democratic norms, a “no holds barred” view of conflict, all in the cause of “winning.”
Dale Bruner offers some wise words that anyone interested in peacemaking today needs to take to heart:
Everything depends, of course, on whether conflict proceeds in a christic, nonviolent way, or whether the real momentum of the movement is captured by forces not afraid to use the violence that is used against them. The Christian conflict will in present circumstances have to be as much against one’s overzealous fellow conflictualists as against the enemy.
For the enemy is invariably as much we ourselves as it is others, and any strategy that locates all evil outside oneself and outside one’s circle ceases to be discipled. Christian conflictualism will be as vigilantly self-critical as it is social-critical.
“…any strategy that locates all evil outside oneself and outside one’s circle ceases to be discipled.”
We begin as peacemakers today by envisioning a circle of shalom that includes everyone, even our enemies (whom Jesus, by the way, commands us to love.)
I recognize such a personal desire to become peacemakers may take us far outside our comfort zones.
Thank God that my retired church member, a true peacemaker, walked into a nightclub with a notorious, even violent reputation (a place for losers), simply because “this is the kind of place Jesus would have come.”
