December 30, 2024 • 35 mins
What does it mean to practice ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in a world often ruled by violence?
The Beatitudes aren’t just ancient sayings—they’re a bold, countercultural call to action. In this episode, we’ll explore how nonviolence isn’t just the absence of conflict—it’s the presence of love in action and creative activism.
We can create real change, stand up to injustice, and find the courage to choose peace every single day. Together, let’s uncover how these timeless words can guide us to heal wounds, build bridges, and create a more peaceful world.
John reads from the Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (from Matthew 5:1-11), and reflects on them not as an impossible ideal, but rather as a practical way to transform societal systems of power, justice, and relationships through Jesus’ vision of living a nonviolent life and working for a more just, more peaceful, more nonviolent world.
He will invite us to live out the Beatitudes and become people of Gospel nonviolence, peacemakers, the beloved sons and daughters of the God of peace.
Fr. John Dear is a priest, activist, and author of 40 books including The Beatitudes of Peace and The Gospel of Peace: Reading Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence, and the founder and director of www.beatitudescenter.org
See www.johndear.org
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Welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast. I'm John, Father John Dear, and this is the first
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podcast, a project of the BeatitudesCenter.org, where you can find other podcasts and Zoom
programs on the nonviolence of Jesus and practicing nonviolence and working for a more just,
more nonviolent world. I thought we could begin our series with a little reflection on the
Beatitudes, and I'd like to begin each episode with a little prayer. So I invite us to just take a
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moment and take a deep breath and relax. Maybe notice how you're feeling and enter into the
presence of the God of peace who loves you personally, unconditionally, infinitely.
And let's welcome the nonviolent Jesus here with us, and ask for the grace to follow him ever more
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faithfully and do God's will. God of peace, thank you for all the blessings of life and love and
peace that you give us. Be with us now as we reflect on the nonviolent Jesus and his Beatitudes, that we
might take his words to heart and put them into nonviolent action and follow him ever more
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faithfully and do our part to help end war, poverty, violence, racism, executions, nuclear weapons,
and environmental destruction, and to welcome your reign of universal love, universal compassion,
and universal peace to become people of gospel nonviolence, gospel peacemakers,
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Beatitude people. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. So the Beatitudes, the beginning of the Sermon on
the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, Gandhi thought these were the greatest teachings on nonviolence
in history. And so, did you know, he read from the Sermon on the Mount every day for the last 45 years
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of his life. It's still shocking to me as I read this. He considered the Sermon on the Mount a
handbook on how to be nonviolent, how to be a human being. So I invite us, dear friends,
to use the Sermon on the Mount as Gandhi did, as our own personal handbook, our textbook,
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a set of directions that we return to over and over again. Much of what I will reflect and share
with you here is from my books, The Beatitudes of Peace, and my most recent book, The Gospel of
Peace, a commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the perspective of nonviolence.
So let me read the Beatitudes first, and then I'll walk through them with you. And as I talk about
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the Beatitudes and as you hear them, I invite you to let the words sink in and to take them to heart
and to ponder them all over again and to choose, like Gandhi, to become a Beatitude, a Sermon on
the Mount person, to make them your daily guideposts and path and direction. So you might
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ask yourself, how can we more fully live out the Beatitudes this year?
As I'm reading them, which ones touch you, inspire you, and challenge you? What is God saying to you
through the Beatitudes? So here goes. This is from Matthew chapter 5, verse 1.
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When he saw the crowds, Jesus went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples
came to him, and he began to teach them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
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Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness, for justice, they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they
will be shown mercy. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the
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peacemakers, for they will be called the sons and daughters of God. And blessed are those who are
persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they
insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who
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were before you.
Recently, scholars have translated that opening phrase, blessed are, which begins each line
of each Beatitude, from the original Greek, which it was written in, back to Jesus,
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original language, which no longer exists, the Aramaic. So they're now saying each Beatitude
could really begin with the phrase, this would be the authentic translation,
arise, get up, get moving, start walking, and walk forth. Doesn't that sound like the nonviolent
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Jesus? So imagine 2000 years ago, he's speaking to poor oppressed people,
in Galilee, in the outback of the horrible, brutal Roman Empire, and he's empowering them
to get up, get moving, and join his grassroots movement, his campaign of nonviolence,
they're going to march to Jerusalem, like Gandhi or Dr. King. So I want to invite us to hear them
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that way too, and let Jesus encourage us to rise and walk forward.
To rise and walk forth, that's what the scholar said. If you need a short phrase
instead of blessed are, it would be arise and walk forth. So to hear Jesus say to each one of us today,
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arise, get up, get moving, start walking, walk forth and do something. You who are poor,
mournful, meek, gentle, nonviolent, you who hunger and thirst for justice, and are merciful,
clean of heart, peacemaking and persecuted, and join my global grassroots campaign of nonviolence
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for justice, disarmament, and peace. So he begins, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. So the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount is all about the poor
and the economics of God's reign. Luke's version comes out bluntly and says, blessed are the poor,
woe to the rich. But in either case, Jesus insists that the poor, the powerless, those who have
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nothing, who are empty of spirit, have one thing the rich do not have, the kingdom of God, the reign
of God. So with these opening words, Jesus takes sides. He sides with the poor, the powerless,
those at the bottom of the society and over the world. And he empowers them to live in God's reign
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in total trust and to go forth. In doing so, he's calling all of us to let go, I think to let go of
everything, power, prestige, privilege, possessions, money, to share our hearts and lives with those in
need to practice downward mobility, not upward mobility, downward mobility and total surrender
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to God. So he's saying the poor already have the reign of God. So stand with the poor, side with
the poor, become one with the poor in spirit. As you live in solidarity with the poor and let go
of everything and focus solely on God from now on, like the poorest of the world, we enter a new
peace and nonviolence, not of this world. We move out of the culture of violence and greed and
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domination and empire and into God's reign of peace. Let me put it this way. I find this helpful.
If we're rich or rich in spirit, we don't need God. We've got our money and our possessions.
We're all set. If we've got guns, if we've got weapons and armies, if we have nuclear weapons,
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we don't need God. We've completely rejected God and placed our trust and security in these idols.
So we're first class citizens of the kingdoms of this world, the culture of violence and justice
and war. On the other hand, if we're poor and poor in spirit, we need God. We don't have anything
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else. We got no money, no guns, no weapons, no armies to protect us. All we've got is God.
So we place all our chips, all our hope and security and trust in God and rely totally on
God from now on. That's what Jesus is calling for here in the first sentence. I think total
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dependence and reliance upon God, not on wealth or power or weapons or anything else. So for me,
this comes down to the daily practice of surrender. And that's how I invite folks to consider it.
I surrender today, my will, my life, everything to God. You see this in the Gospels, first in
Mary of Nazareth, who says to the angel, behold, hey, I'm the servant of the God of peace. God's
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will be done. That's what you do if you're poor in spirit. Then I see Jesus doing this over and
over again, and finally praying this in the Garden of Gethsemane, not my will, your will be done.
And that's the one main prayer he'll go on and teach in the Sermon on the Mount, your kingdom
come, your will be done. So the first step of the Beatitudes, one way to look at it, is total
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surrender to God over and over, every hour, every day for the rest of our lives. We're on a journey
of downward mobility toward poverty of spirit. We let go of everything, including in the end,
our willpower and our lives. And we say, do with me what you will, God, your will be done. I'm
yours. And that's what Jesus does until his last breath on the cross in total poverty of spirit.
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Poverty of spirit, when he surrenders to God saying, into your hands, I commend my spirit.
That's the Beatitude life. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.
Billions of sisters and brothers around the world spend their lives mourning because their
loved ones have been killed by war, starvation, releivable illness, or systemic injustice.
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But here in the rich world, we're encouraged not to mourn or grieve. If anything, if you look
carefully, the media and their war machine, this is what my take, is saying, be angry, be afraid,
be depressed, be despairing because you're powerless. There's nothing you can do.
In this second teaching, Jesus instructs us about the emotional life of nonviolence.
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He'll go on later and say very specifically, do not cultivate anger or fear or worry
or anxiety. But here he's advising us to cultivate two emotions, mourn, grief for your brothers and
sisters, and later at the end, he'll call us to joy. So nonviolence begins with the basic truth
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that we're all equal, all children of God, all sisters and brothers, all one with all eight
billion people around the world, and all one with the creatures in Mother Earth. And what does that
mean? It means we're grieving because so many sisters and brothers are suffering and dying
unjustly from violence, injustice, and war. So we have to mourn for them and for the creatures
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and Mother Earth and let this grief be our new spiritual practice. And let our hearts break
and then open up to compassion and lead us to nonviolent action so that we're going to work to
stop the violence and injustice. So nonviolence begins with grief. If we mourn Jesus' promises,
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we will be comforted. I wonder if the opposite is also true. If we don't mourn, we will not be
comforted. If we do not grieve or mourn, we lose ourselves to the culture of violence and injustice
and refuse to enter God's realm of comfort and compassion. So I encourage everyone to take time
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regularly from now on to grieve and mourn for suffering humanity and creation.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Well, we now know that meekness
is the biblical word for active creative nonviolence. It's not like we've all thought
as if Jesus' blessing be passive and do nothing. He's talking about Martin Luther King Jr.
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and Dorothy Day, those who practice active creative daring nonviolence. But what's so weird is,
notice that Jesus connects the life of active creative nonviolence with oneness with creation.
They'll inherit the earth. He says, if we're actively nonviolent, we will be one with all
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of creation. Well, I got to think, and that means the flip side is also true. If we're actively
violent and war making and support the culture of violence, greed, and war, we will not be one
with creation. And because we have so thoroughly rejected Jesus' way of nonviolence, we have
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disconnected with creation and created a culture of permanent warfare, including war on Mother Earth.
And now we have catastrophic climate change. A measure of our nonviolence, according to the
nonviolent Jesus, is our oneness with creation. The more we side with all of humanity, especially
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the suffering and dying, but as well with all the creatures in Mother Earth, the more nonviolent,
loving, and compassionate we will become like Gandhi, Dr. King, and Dorothy Day.
So what's happened over the past century? We've dug up fossil fuels, filled the atmosphere with
carbon, which has raised the earth's temperature, caused the ice caps to melt, and raised the sea
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level. And now we have the hottest years on record and hurricanes, droughts, blizzards, tornadoes,
fires, and floods. And over the next century, everyone says, the scientists, there'll be
hundreds of millions who have to flee coastal areas and many more wars over land and water.
So the solution is to stop removing fossil fuels from the ground and create renewable energy
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through solar and wind power, as well as to end warfare. So I wrote a whole book on just this one
sentence, this beatitude, it's called, They Will Inherit the Earth, where I suggest the only way
that this can happen, I think, is not from the top down doing it, but a bottom up, through a global
grassroots bottom up people power movement of active nonviolence, the likes of which the world
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has never seen, to help end environmental destruction and permanent warfare and start the healing
of humanity and Mother Earth. Notice we're only three sentences into the sermon on the mount,
and he's already pointing to a very specific path. Oh, I love this. I think this is wonderful.
The life of nonviolence leads to oneness with creation. And we can reflect on, as we want to
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deepen into nonviolence, we want to deepen into our unity with all of creation. And that means,
according to Jesus, apparently, we have to take up the nonviolent struggle for justice.
And so we get the next one. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice,
for they will be satisfied. So justice is a much better translation than the Hebrew word,
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which is usually used, righteousness. So here he's speaking, actually, as I understand it,
from studying this for decades, he's calling this to social and economic justice. And he's empowering
and encouraging these poor oppressed people to be passionate for social and economic justice,
work for justice, work for social, racial, economic, and even environmental justice,
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hunger and thirst for justice. That means work to end systemic institutionalized injustice
and bring justice to the poor, the oppressed, the creatures, and Mother Earth.
But what, again, is so mysterious and interesting, Jesus says, if you do these things,
you will be satisfied. I've thought about this my whole life. I decided, I think,
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he means you will find meaning and purpose in your life. In the Viktor Frankl sense of his great book
Man's Search for Meaning, you may remember he was the Holocaust survivor who said, that's the key.
In other words, the most meaningful thing we can do with the gift of life
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is to enter the struggle for justice. I love that. I hear this beatitude as a call to join
all local, national, and global groups working for justice. In other words, to pitch in,
do our part, even take to the streets in a nonviolent demand for justice. And to see this
as part of the spiritual life. This is what life with God looks like. This is what it looks like
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if you want to do God's will in an unjust world. But then the next beatitude,
blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. So, on the one hand, we're struggling for
justice, and on the other, Jesus says, we offer mercy, especially toward those who have heard us
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and seek our forgiveness. Even better yet, toward those whom the culture says do not deserve mercy.
Jesus says, as the scriptures teach, that mercy is the very heart of God. And later in the sermon
on the mat, he'll call us to be as compassionate, as merciful as God. In other words, universal
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mercy, universal compassion. Well, I looked it up in the dictionary, and there mercy is defined as,
refraining from harming or punishing offenders, enemies, or persons in one power.
Also, kindness exceeding what may be expected. That's beautiful. Or demanded by fairness.
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Or forbearance and compassion. Or imprisonment rather than the death penalty imposed on those
found guilty of capital crimes. A disposition to forgive, pity, or be kind. The power to forgive,
or be kind. Clemency. So, mercy is all of that. It means feeling empathy for others,
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showing compassion to them, practicing unconditional love for those who are unloved,
poor, or marginalized, disenfranchised. In other words, like mercy means letting people off the
hook, granting clemency to those who are deemed unforgivable, being kind to forgive, and being
kind to those who are taught don't deserve our forgiveness. It means we don't retaliate
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or seek revenge ever again. Here's the catch. It's right there in the Sermon on the Mount,
over and over again. We forgive everyone who ever hurt us from now on. We offer compassion to
everyone. We grant everyone a second chance. So, we show mercy and compassion as Jesus did to those
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who don't receive it from society. Who are they? The poor, the sick, the weak, the elderly, the
immigrant, the marginalized, the disenfranchised. Of course, the enemy who we try to kill. And
further, we pursue the politics of mercy. We pursue the
politics of mercy. We want to institutionalize mercy. That's where Dr. King was going,
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and create a new culture of mercy, a culture of nonviolence. So, we work under this beatitude to
abolish the death penalty and racism, poverty, and war, and for restorative justice and a culture of
reconciliation. And here's the promise. As we show mercy, we sow seeds of mercy, and mercy will be
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shown to us. You know, if we want God to show mercy to us, we have to show mercy to everybody
else too. It's not brain surgery. Maybe it's harder. And along the way, of course, you begin
to notice just how God shows infinite tender mercy to each one of us when we don't deserve it.
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Blessed are the clean of heart, Jesus says, for they will see God. So, this is about Jesus'
public stand against the cleanliness laws, which he violated and broke over and over again. Jesus
committed nonviolent civil disobedience every single day and was being punished or should have
been punished for it. He's breaking the law. He challenged the hypocrisy of institutional religion,
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which sets up rituals, rules, and traditions from which the religious authorities, the religious
elite profit, and which they collaborate with the empire and all the systems of injustice.
And Jesus comes along and said, hey, instead of cleansing their dishes and washing your hands for
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God as the first law of God, clean your hearts. Give your hearts to God. So, I prefer the
translation Gandhi used, blessed are the pure of heart. When Jesus calls us to purity of heart,
he's calling us to the inner journey of nonviolence, to have a nonviolent heart,
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to the ongoing daily journey of prayer, where we come before God, give God all our inner violence
and let God disarm our hearts and give us new nonviolent hearts that work and grow in compassion
and universal love, as wide as the world. So, I hear this beatitude, which Gandhi thought was the
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most difficult and the most important. Isn't that interesting? I hear Jesus inviting us to the daily
practice of disarming the violence within us, cultivating inner nonviolence, being nonviolent
to ourselves. Go ahead, let God break open our hard violent hearts and develop new soft nonviolent
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hearts that we might become what? Tenderhearted people who struggle for justice for the poor
and peace for the human race. I think Jesus could teach this because he did it. He had a pure heart,
a clean heart, a nonviolent heart, which the church calls a sacred heart. At one point in Matthew
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chapter 12, I think, he confides to his friends that he is doing the right thing. He says,
he confides to his friends that he is gentle and humble of heart. Wow, whoever says that? What a
thing to aspire to. Jesus didn't have a drop of violence in him. Jesus was saying that all violence
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comes from within, so he wants us to have sacred disarmed hearts too, so that we can join his peace
movement, but come from a deep authentic place of interior peace. And that's going to require daily
meditation. So when we go and sit with God, what we want to do is try to give God all our inner
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violence, which means all our anger, hatred, resentment, bitterness, fears, worry, anxieties,
all of it. Let it all go and let God disarm our hearts into nonviolent hearts that we might have
pure, clean, peaceful hearts. But what's so weird, notice how Jesus connects our hearts with our eyes.
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So he's saying, as only he could, that as we cultivate inner nonviolence and allow God to
purify and disarm us deep down within, we're going to begin to see God everywhere. Isn't that
beautiful? Inner nonviolence helps us to see with the eyes of universal love, compassion, and peace,
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to get beyond our narrow nationalism and recognize every human being as our sister and brother,
and see God in everyone. In other words, to have a universal vision. And this leads to the climax
of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be called the sons and daughters of the
God of peace. I think this is the core of the gospel, the great mission of discipleship to the
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nonviolent Jesus. We are all called to become peacemakers. It's a beautiful way to look at
our lives. We can ask ourselves, how have I been a peacemaker during my life? What does it mean to
be a peacemaker? How can I consciously live from now on as a peacemaker? Wouldn't that be a beautiful
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way to see the rest of our lives? Well, I think that means, first of all, that we can no longer
be war makers. I mean, it's kind of obvious to me. We cannot support war or participate in war
or pay for war or promote war or bless war or send our kids off to war. Peacemakers work to end war
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and create peace. So, I think with this Beatitude, every follower of Jesus, every Christian in the
world is banned from participating in warfare ever again and called to spend our lives in peace,
welcoming God's reign of peace, making peace, and working for peace. So, peacemakers are people of
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nonviolence. We are peaceful toward ourselves, peaceful toward all people everywhere, all creatures,
and all creation, and we do our part actively publicly to create a more peaceful world.
We make peace by loving and reconciling with everyone, especially those who are divided
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and at war with each other. We teach peace and nonviolence. We support the grassroots movements
of peace and disarmament. We promote nonviolent alternatives and global nonviolent conflict
resolution and work to abolish war itself. And that means weapons of mass destruction and nuclear
weapons and the causes of war. And we do that through various movements and campaigns. So,
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we try to stop the building of weapons and the funding for war preparations and spend those
billions of dollars instead on providing food and clean water and housing and healthcare,
education, employment, and dignity toward every human being on the planet. That's the vision.
We work to educate every human being at every age, in every class, in every school on the planet,
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in the methodology of nonviolent conflict resolution so that nonviolence can someday
become the new normal. So, everyone is trained to be a peacemaker and live in peace. All of this is
achievable. The United Nations says all of this is doable. This is not idealism. This is not
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impractical. This is not a dream. In fact, this is the only practical solution. It just needs our
total spiritual and political will together to work toward it. But what's so shocking here
is what Jesus says. He announces that God is a peacemaker. What? Jesus describes the nature of
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God as nonviolent and peaceful. And with that, he throws out thousands of years of belief in a
violent God, a God of war. And he does away with any spiritual justification for warfare and the
great lie that God might bless our wars or our armies or the troops or our weapons. He says,
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the living God is the God of peace, and you are the children of the God of peace.
This is who you are. This is from now on our basic fundamental identity. We're not Americans
or children of some other nation. We, from now on, claim our true identity as the beloved
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sons and daughters of the God of peace. And so, it's just natural we rise and walk forth
into the culture of war and make peace. That's just our normal. But of course,
if you stand up publicly for peace in a world of permanent warfare, you're going to get in trouble,
and so we reach the last beatitude. Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice.
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Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So, in a world of total violence, war, and injustice,
if you stand up for justice and disarmament and peace and try to change things nonviolently,
people are not going to like it. They're not going to thank you or honor you. They're going
to get mad at you and tell you to stop rocking the boat. But that's when we get to practice
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nonviolence. That's when you get to see really how nonviolent you are, how seriously you're
following the nonviolent Jesus. If we keep at this public work for justice and peace,
we're going to get in trouble, good trouble, as my friend John Lewis said, and we're going to be
persecuted and maybe even arrested and jailed, as I've discovered. The nonviolent Jesus spoke out
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every single day for justice and peace. And so, he nonviolently resisted the Roman Empire
every single day and proclaimed the coming of God's reign of nonviolence. And so, he was
constantly harassed and threatened and persecuted and eventually arrested and killed. This is the
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job description. This is the path of active, creative, daring, prophetic, revolutionary
nonviolence, the path of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount that Gandhi and Dr. King and
Dorothy Day and Archbishop Romero and all the saints walked. And it's the greatest blessing of
all because it means the reign of God is already ours. As we said at the beginning, we let go of
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everything and we're already living right now in God's reign of universal love and peace.
So, I think Jesus wants us to rock the boat and disrupt the culture of violence and war
and to be nonviolent troublemakers who work for an end to all injustice, poverty, war, racism,
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executions, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction, to take nonviolent risks for justice,
disarmament, and creation. And when we get in trouble, we maintain our nonviolence,
and we forgive those who hurt us and trust in God, but we go forward and speak truth to power with
all the love in our hearts. This is how positive social change works according to the Beatitudes
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and the Gospels, through our participation in bottom-up grassroots movements of active nonviolence
for the sake of justice and peace. In other words, through nonviolent suffering love for the truth of
justice and peace. In other words, through our sharing in the paschal mystery of the nonviolent
Jesus and the cross and the resurrection. So, he adds a concluding point, and blessed are you when
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they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted
the prophets who were before you. Isn't that fantastic? So, if you're in trouble and you're
getting put down because you're speaking out for justice and peace, or you're getting arrested and
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dragged off and thrown in jail like my friends and I, rejoice and be glad. I hope everybody's
rejoicing and glad. Now we get to share in the blessings of the prophets. Now we get to be like
Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day and all the great saints. So, I'll conclude with a
general invitation to take these Beatitudes to heart and to hear his call personally,
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right now, again, as he says to us personally, arise, get up, get moving, start walking and
walk forth. All you poor in spirit, you who mourn, you who are meek and gentle and nonviolent and one
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with creation, you who are hunger and thirst for justice, you who are merciful, you are pure and
nonviolent of heart, you holy peacemakers, you who are persecuted for justice and peace, rejoice and
be glad. I think these are sentences to memorize and ponder and pursue for the rest of our lives.
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My hope and prayer is that we could rise to the occasion and fulfill our vocations to be Beatitude
people, gospel peacemakers, and become who we already are, the beloved sons and daughters of
the God of peace. Thank you, friends, for listening to the Nonviolent Jesus podcast. You can hear
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many more podcasts and find other upcoming Zoom programs at BeatitudesCenter.org, and you can also
offer there any comments and feedback and make a donation to support this free work. Join me next
week when my guest will be actor and activist Martin Sheen, talking with me about Jesus,
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Gandhi, the Barragans, nonviolence, and Apocalypse Now. May the God of peace bless everyone. Keep on
following the Nonviolent Jesus. See you next time.
Welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast. I'm John, Father John Dear, and this is the first
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podcast, a project of the BeatitudesCenter.org, where you can find other podcasts and Zoom
programs on the nonviolence of Jesus and practicing nonviolence and working for a more just,
more nonviolent world. I thought we could begin our series with a little reflection on the
Beatitudes, and I'd like to begin each episode with a little prayer. So I invite us to just take a
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moment and take a deep breath and relax. Maybe notice how you're feeling and enter into the
presence of the God of peace who loves you personally, unconditionally, infinitely.
And let's welcome the nonviolent Jesus here with us, and ask for the grace to follow him ever more
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faithfully and do God's will. God of peace, thank you for all the blessings of life and love and
peace that you give us. Be with us now as we reflect on the nonviolent Jesus and his Beatitudes, that we
might take his words to heart and put them into nonviolent action and follow him ever more
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faithfully and do our part to help end war, poverty, violence, racism, executions, nuclear weapons,
and environmental destruction, and to welcome your reign of universal love, universal compassion,
and universal peace to become people of gospel nonviolence, gospel peacemakers,
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Beatitude people. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. So the Beatitudes, the beginning of the Sermon on
the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, Gandhi thought these were the greatest teachings on nonviolence
in history. And so, did you know, he read from the Sermon on the Mount every day for the last 45 years
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of his life. It's still shocking to me as I read this. He considered the Sermon on the Mount a
handbook on how to be nonviolent, how to be a human being. So I invite us, dear friends,
to use the Sermon on the Mount as Gandhi did, as our own personal handbook, our textbook,
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a set of directions that we return to over and over again. Much of what I will reflect and share
with you here is from my books, The Beatitudes of Peace, and my most recent book, The Gospel of
Peace, a commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the perspective of nonviolence.
So let me read the Beatitudes first, and then I'll walk through them with you. And as I talk about
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the Beatitudes and as you hear them, I invite you to let the words sink in and to take them to heart
and to ponder them all over again and to choose, like Gandhi, to become a Beatitude, a Sermon on
the Mount person, to make them your daily guideposts and path and direction. So you might
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ask yourself, how can we more fully live out the Beatitudes this year?
As I'm reading them, which ones touch you, inspire you, and challenge you? What is God saying to you
through the Beatitudes? So here goes. This is from Matthew chapter 5, verse 1.
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When he saw the crowds, Jesus went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples
came to him, and he began to teach them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
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Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness, for justice, they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they
will be shown mercy. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the
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peacemakers, for they will be called the sons and daughters of God. And blessed are those who are
persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they
insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who
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were before you.
Recently, scholars have translated that opening phrase, blessed are, which begins each line
of each Beatitude, from the original Greek, which it was written in, back to Jesus,
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original language, which no longer exists, the Aramaic. So they're now saying each Beatitude
could really begin with the phrase, this would be the authentic translation,
arise, get up, get moving, start walking, and walk forth. Doesn't that sound like the nonviolent
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Jesus? So imagine 2000 years ago, he's speaking to poor oppressed people,
in Galilee, in the outback of the horrible, brutal Roman Empire, and he's empowering them
to get up, get moving, and join his grassroots movement, his campaign of nonviolence,
they're going to march to Jerusalem, like Gandhi or Dr. King. So I want to invite us to hear them
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that way too, and let Jesus encourage us to rise and walk forward.
To rise and walk forth, that's what the scholar said. If you need a short phrase
instead of blessed are, it would be arise and walk forth. So to hear Jesus say to each one of us today,
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arise, get up, get moving, start walking, walk forth and do something. You who are poor,
mournful, meek, gentle, nonviolent, you who hunger and thirst for justice, and are merciful,
clean of heart, peacemaking and persecuted, and join my global grassroots campaign of nonviolence
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for justice, disarmament, and peace. So he begins, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. So the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount is all about the poor
and the economics of God's reign. Luke's version comes out bluntly and says, blessed are the poor,
woe to the rich. But in either case, Jesus insists that the poor, the powerless, those who have
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nothing, who are empty of spirit, have one thing the rich do not have, the kingdom of God, the reign
of God. So with these opening words, Jesus takes sides. He sides with the poor, the powerless,
those at the bottom of the society and over the world. And he empowers them to live in God's reign
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in total trust and to go forth. In doing so, he's calling all of us to let go, I think to let go of
everything, power, prestige, privilege, possessions, money, to share our hearts and lives with those in
need to practice downward mobility, not upward mobility, downward mobility and total surrender
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to God. So he's saying the poor already have the reign of God. So stand with the poor, side with
the poor, become one with the poor in spirit. As you live in solidarity with the poor and let go
of everything and focus solely on God from now on, like the poorest of the world, we enter a new
peace and nonviolence, not of this world. We move out of the culture of violence and greed and
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domination and empire and into God's reign of peace. Let me put it this way. I find this helpful.
If we're rich or rich in spirit, we don't need God. We've got our money and our possessions.
We're all set. If we've got guns, if we've got weapons and armies, if we have nuclear weapons,
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we don't need God. We've completely rejected God and placed our trust and security in these idols.
So we're first class citizens of the kingdoms of this world, the culture of violence and justice
and war. On the other hand, if we're poor and poor in spirit, we need God. We don't have anything
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else. We got no money, no guns, no weapons, no armies to protect us. All we've got is God.
So we place all our chips, all our hope and security and trust in God and rely totally on
God from now on. That's what Jesus is calling for here in the first sentence. I think total
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dependence and reliance upon God, not on wealth or power or weapons or anything else. So for me,
this comes down to the daily practice of surrender. And that's how I invite folks to consider it.
I surrender today, my will, my life, everything to God. You see this in the Gospels, first in
Mary of Nazareth, who says to the angel, behold, hey, I'm the servant of the God of peace. God's
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will be done. That's what you do if you're poor in spirit. Then I see Jesus doing this over and
over again, and finally praying this in the Garden of Gethsemane, not my will, your will be done.
And that's the one main prayer he'll go on and teach in the Sermon on the Mount, your kingdom
come, your will be done. So the first step of the Beatitudes, one way to look at it, is total
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surrender to God over and over, every hour, every day for the rest of our lives. We're on a journey
of downward mobility toward poverty of spirit. We let go of everything, including in the end,
our willpower and our lives. And we say, do with me what you will, God, your will be done. I'm
yours. And that's what Jesus does until his last breath on the cross in total poverty of spirit.
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Poverty of spirit, when he surrenders to God saying, into your hands, I commend my spirit.
That's the Beatitude life. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.
Billions of sisters and brothers around the world spend their lives mourning because their
loved ones have been killed by war, starvation, releivable illness, or systemic injustice.
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But here in the rich world, we're encouraged not to mourn or grieve. If anything, if you look
carefully, the media and their war machine, this is what my take, is saying, be angry, be afraid,
be depressed, be despairing because you're powerless. There's nothing you can do.
In this second teaching, Jesus instructs us about the emotional life of nonviolence.
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He'll go on later and say very specifically, do not cultivate anger or fear or worry
or anxiety. But here he's advising us to cultivate two emotions, mourn, grief for your brothers and
sisters, and later at the end, he'll call us to joy. So nonviolence begins with the basic truth
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that we're all equal, all children of God, all sisters and brothers, all one with all eight
billion people around the world, and all one with the creatures in Mother Earth. And what does that
mean? It means we're grieving because so many sisters and brothers are suffering and dying
unjustly from violence, injustice, and war. So we have to mourn for them and for the creatures
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and Mother Earth and let this grief be our new spiritual practice. And let our hearts break
and then open up to compassion and lead us to nonviolent action so that we're going to work to
stop the violence and injustice. So nonviolence begins with grief. If we mourn Jesus' promises,
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we will be comforted. I wonder if the opposite is also true. If we don't mourn, we will not be
comforted. If we do not grieve or mourn, we lose ourselves to the culture of violence and injustice
and refuse to enter God's realm of comfort and compassion. So I encourage everyone to take time
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regularly from now on to grieve and mourn for suffering humanity and creation.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Well, we now know that meekness
is the biblical word for active creative nonviolence. It's not like we've all thought
as if Jesus' blessing be passive and do nothing. He's talking about Martin Luther King Jr.
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and Dorothy Day, those who practice active creative daring nonviolence. But what's so weird is,
notice that Jesus connects the life of active creative nonviolence with oneness with creation.
They'll inherit the earth. He says, if we're actively nonviolent, we will be one with all
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of creation. Well, I got to think, and that means the flip side is also true. If we're actively
violent and war making and support the culture of violence, greed, and war, we will not be one
with creation. And because we have so thoroughly rejected Jesus' way of nonviolence, we have
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disconnected with creation and created a culture of permanent warfare, including war on Mother Earth.
And now we have catastrophic climate change. A measure of our nonviolence, according to the
nonviolent Jesus, is our oneness with creation. The more we side with all of humanity, especially
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the suffering and dying, but as well with all the creatures in Mother Earth, the more nonviolent,
loving, and compassionate we will become like Gandhi, Dr. King, and Dorothy Day.
So what's happened over the past century? We've dug up fossil fuels, filled the atmosphere with
carbon, which has raised the earth's temperature, caused the ice caps to melt, and raised the sea
(15:00):
level. And now we have the hottest years on record and hurricanes, droughts, blizzards, tornadoes,
fires, and floods. And over the next century, everyone says, the scientists, there'll be
hundreds of millions who have to flee coastal areas and many more wars over land and water.
So the solution is to stop removing fossil fuels from the ground and create renewable energy
(15:23):
through solar and wind power, as well as to end warfare. So I wrote a whole book on just this one
sentence, this beatitude, it's called, They Will Inherit the Earth, where I suggest the only way
that this can happen, I think, is not from the top down doing it, but a bottom up, through a global
grassroots bottom up people power movement of active nonviolence, the likes of which the world
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has never seen, to help end environmental destruction and permanent warfare and start the healing
of humanity and Mother Earth. Notice we're only three sentences into the sermon on the mount,
and he's already pointing to a very specific path. Oh, I love this. I think this is wonderful.
The life of nonviolence leads to oneness with creation. And we can reflect on, as we want to
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deepen into nonviolence, we want to deepen into our unity with all of creation. And that means,
according to Jesus, apparently, we have to take up the nonviolent struggle for justice.
And so we get the next one. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice,
for they will be satisfied. So justice is a much better translation than the Hebrew word,
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which is usually used, righteousness. So here he's speaking, actually, as I understand it,
from studying this for decades, he's calling this to social and economic justice. And he's empowering
and encouraging these poor oppressed people to be passionate for social and economic justice,
work for justice, work for social, racial, economic, and even environmental justice,
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hunger and thirst for justice. That means work to end systemic institutionalized injustice
and bring justice to the poor, the oppressed, the creatures, and Mother Earth.
But what, again, is so mysterious and interesting, Jesus says, if you do these things,
you will be satisfied. I've thought about this my whole life. I decided, I think,
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he means you will find meaning and purpose in your life. In the Viktor Frankl sense of his great book
Man's Search for Meaning, you may remember he was the Holocaust survivor who said, that's the key.
In other words, the most meaningful thing we can do with the gift of life
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is to enter the struggle for justice. I love that. I hear this beatitude as a call to join
all local, national, and global groups working for justice. In other words, to pitch in,
do our part, even take to the streets in a nonviolent demand for justice. And to see this
as part of the spiritual life. This is what life with God looks like. This is what it looks like
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if you want to do God's will in an unjust world. But then the next beatitude,
blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. So, on the one hand, we're struggling for
justice, and on the other, Jesus says, we offer mercy, especially toward those who have heard us
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and seek our forgiveness. Even better yet, toward those whom the culture says do not deserve mercy.
Jesus says, as the scriptures teach, that mercy is the very heart of God. And later in the sermon
on the mat, he'll call us to be as compassionate, as merciful as God. In other words, universal
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mercy, universal compassion. Well, I looked it up in the dictionary, and there mercy is defined as,
refraining from harming or punishing offenders, enemies, or persons in one power.
Also, kindness exceeding what may be expected. That's beautiful. Or demanded by fairness.
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Or forbearance and compassion. Or imprisonment rather than the death penalty imposed on those
found guilty of capital crimes. A disposition to forgive, pity, or be kind. The power to forgive,
or be kind. Clemency. So, mercy is all of that. It means feeling empathy for others,
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showing compassion to them, practicing unconditional love for those who are unloved,
poor, or marginalized, disenfranchised. In other words, like mercy means letting people off the
hook, granting clemency to those who are deemed unforgivable, being kind to forgive, and being
kind to those who are taught don't deserve our forgiveness. It means we don't retaliate
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or seek revenge ever again. Here's the catch. It's right there in the Sermon on the Mount,
over and over again. We forgive everyone who ever hurt us from now on. We offer compassion to
everyone. We grant everyone a second chance. So, we show mercy and compassion as Jesus did to those
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who don't receive it from society. Who are they? The poor, the sick, the weak, the elderly, the
immigrant, the marginalized, the disenfranchised. Of course, the enemy who we try to kill. And
further, we pursue the politics of mercy. We pursue the
politics of mercy. We want to institutionalize mercy. That's where Dr. King was going,
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and create a new culture of mercy, a culture of nonviolence. So, we work under this beatitude to
abolish the death penalty and racism, poverty, and war, and for restorative justice and a culture of
reconciliation. And here's the promise. As we show mercy, we sow seeds of mercy, and mercy will be
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shown to us. You know, if we want God to show mercy to us, we have to show mercy to everybody
else too. It's not brain surgery. Maybe it's harder. And along the way, of course, you begin
to notice just how God shows infinite tender mercy to each one of us when we don't deserve it.
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Blessed are the clean of heart, Jesus says, for they will see God. So, this is about Jesus'
public stand against the cleanliness laws, which he violated and broke over and over again. Jesus
committed nonviolent civil disobedience every single day and was being punished or should have
been punished for it. He's breaking the law. He challenged the hypocrisy of institutional religion,
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which sets up rituals, rules, and traditions from which the religious authorities, the religious
elite profit, and which they collaborate with the empire and all the systems of injustice.
And Jesus comes along and said, hey, instead of cleansing their dishes and washing your hands for
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God as the first law of God, clean your hearts. Give your hearts to God. So, I prefer the
translation Gandhi used, blessed are the pure of heart. When Jesus calls us to purity of heart,
he's calling us to the inner journey of nonviolence, to have a nonviolent heart,
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to the ongoing daily journey of prayer, where we come before God, give God all our inner violence
and let God disarm our hearts and give us new nonviolent hearts that work and grow in compassion
and universal love, as wide as the world. So, I hear this beatitude, which Gandhi thought was the
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most difficult and the most important. Isn't that interesting? I hear Jesus inviting us to the daily
practice of disarming the violence within us, cultivating inner nonviolence, being nonviolent
to ourselves. Go ahead, let God break open our hard violent hearts and develop new soft nonviolent
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hearts that we might become what? Tenderhearted people who struggle for justice for the poor
and peace for the human race. I think Jesus could teach this because he did it. He had a pure heart,
a clean heart, a nonviolent heart, which the church calls a sacred heart. At one point in Matthew
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chapter 12, I think, he confides to his friends that he is doing the right thing. He says,
he confides to his friends that he is gentle and humble of heart. Wow, whoever says that? What a
thing to aspire to. Jesus didn't have a drop of violence in him. Jesus was saying that all violence
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comes from within, so he wants us to have sacred disarmed hearts too, so that we can join his peace
movement, but come from a deep authentic place of interior peace. And that's going to require daily
meditation. So when we go and sit with God, what we want to do is try to give God all our inner
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violence, which means all our anger, hatred, resentment, bitterness, fears, worry, anxieties,
all of it. Let it all go and let God disarm our hearts into nonviolent hearts that we might have
pure, clean, peaceful hearts. But what's so weird, notice how Jesus connects our hearts with our eyes.
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So he's saying, as only he could, that as we cultivate inner nonviolence and allow God to
purify and disarm us deep down within, we're going to begin to see God everywhere. Isn't that
beautiful? Inner nonviolence helps us to see with the eyes of universal love, compassion, and peace,
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to get beyond our narrow nationalism and recognize every human being as our sister and brother,
and see God in everyone. In other words, to have a universal vision. And this leads to the climax
of the Beatitudes. Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be called the sons and daughters of the
God of peace. I think this is the core of the gospel, the great mission of discipleship to the
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nonviolent Jesus. We are all called to become peacemakers. It's a beautiful way to look at
our lives. We can ask ourselves, how have I been a peacemaker during my life? What does it mean to
be a peacemaker? How can I consciously live from now on as a peacemaker? Wouldn't that be a beautiful
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way to see the rest of our lives? Well, I think that means, first of all, that we can no longer
be war makers. I mean, it's kind of obvious to me. We cannot support war or participate in war
or pay for war or promote war or bless war or send our kids off to war. Peacemakers work to end war
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and create peace. So, I think with this Beatitude, every follower of Jesus, every Christian in the
world is banned from participating in warfare ever again and called to spend our lives in peace,
welcoming God's reign of peace, making peace, and working for peace. So, peacemakers are people of
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nonviolence. We are peaceful toward ourselves, peaceful toward all people everywhere, all creatures,
and all creation, and we do our part actively publicly to create a more peaceful world.
We make peace by loving and reconciling with everyone, especially those who are divided
(27:35):
and at war with each other. We teach peace and nonviolence. We support the grassroots movements
of peace and disarmament. We promote nonviolent alternatives and global nonviolent conflict
resolution and work to abolish war itself. And that means weapons of mass destruction and nuclear
weapons and the causes of war. And we do that through various movements and campaigns. So,
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we try to stop the building of weapons and the funding for war preparations and spend those
billions of dollars instead on providing food and clean water and housing and healthcare,
education, employment, and dignity toward every human being on the planet. That's the vision.
We work to educate every human being at every age, in every class, in every school on the planet,
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in the methodology of nonviolent conflict resolution so that nonviolence can someday
become the new normal. So, everyone is trained to be a peacemaker and live in peace. All of this is
achievable. The United Nations says all of this is doable. This is not idealism. This is not
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impractical. This is not a dream. In fact, this is the only practical solution. It just needs our
total spiritual and political will together to work toward it. But what's so shocking here
is what Jesus says. He announces that God is a peacemaker. What? Jesus describes the nature of
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God as nonviolent and peaceful. And with that, he throws out thousands of years of belief in a
violent God, a God of war. And he does away with any spiritual justification for warfare and the
great lie that God might bless our wars or our armies or the troops or our weapons. He says,
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the living God is the God of peace, and you are the children of the God of peace.
This is who you are. This is from now on our basic fundamental identity. We're not Americans
or children of some other nation. We, from now on, claim our true identity as the beloved
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sons and daughters of the God of peace. And so, it's just natural we rise and walk forth
into the culture of war and make peace. That's just our normal. But of course,
if you stand up publicly for peace in a world of permanent warfare, you're going to get in trouble,
and so we reach the last beatitude. Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice.
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Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So, in a world of total violence, war, and injustice,
if you stand up for justice and disarmament and peace and try to change things nonviolently,
people are not going to like it. They're not going to thank you or honor you. They're going
to get mad at you and tell you to stop rocking the boat. But that's when we get to practice
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nonviolence. That's when you get to see really how nonviolent you are, how seriously you're
following the nonviolent Jesus. If we keep at this public work for justice and peace,
we're going to get in trouble, good trouble, as my friend John Lewis said, and we're going to be
persecuted and maybe even arrested and jailed, as I've discovered. The nonviolent Jesus spoke out
(31:03):
every single day for justice and peace. And so, he nonviolently resisted the Roman Empire
every single day and proclaimed the coming of God's reign of nonviolence. And so, he was
constantly harassed and threatened and persecuted and eventually arrested and killed. This is the
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job description. This is the path of active, creative, daring, prophetic, revolutionary
nonviolence, the path of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount that Gandhi and Dr. King and
Dorothy Day and Archbishop Romero and all the saints walked. And it's the greatest blessing of
all because it means the reign of God is already ours. As we said at the beginning, we let go of
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everything and we're already living right now in God's reign of universal love and peace.
So, I think Jesus wants us to rock the boat and disrupt the culture of violence and war
and to be nonviolent troublemakers who work for an end to all injustice, poverty, war, racism,
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executions, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction, to take nonviolent risks for justice,
disarmament, and creation. And when we get in trouble, we maintain our nonviolence,
and we forgive those who hurt us and trust in God, but we go forward and speak truth to power with
all the love in our hearts. This is how positive social change works according to the Beatitudes
(32:35):
and the Gospels, through our participation in bottom-up grassroots movements of active nonviolence
for the sake of justice and peace. In other words, through nonviolent suffering love for the truth of
justice and peace. In other words, through our sharing in the paschal mystery of the nonviolent
Jesus and the cross and the resurrection. So, he adds a concluding point, and blessed are you when
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they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted
the prophets who were before you. Isn't that fantastic? So, if you're in trouble and you're
getting put down because you're speaking out for justice and peace, or you're getting arrested and
(33:25):
dragged off and thrown in jail like my friends and I, rejoice and be glad. I hope everybody's
rejoicing and glad. Now we get to share in the blessings of the prophets. Now we get to be like
Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day and all the great saints. So, I'll conclude with a
general invitation to take these Beatitudes to heart and to hear his call personally,
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right now, again, as he says to us personally, arise, get up, get moving, start walking and
walk forth. All you poor in spirit, you who mourn, you who are meek and gentle and nonviolent and one
(34:12):
with creation, you who are hunger and thirst for justice, you who are merciful, you are pure and
nonviolent of heart, you holy peacemakers, you who are persecuted for justice and peace, rejoice and
be glad. I think these are sentences to memorize and ponder and pursue for the rest of our lives.
(34:34):
My hope and prayer is that we could rise to the occasion and fulfill our vocations to be Beatitude
people, gospel peacemakers, and become who we already are, the beloved sons and daughters of
the God of peace. Thank you, friends, for listening to the Nonviolent Jesus podcast. You can hear
(34:56):
many more podcasts and find other upcoming Zoom programs at BeatitudesCenter.org, and you can also
offer there any comments and feedback and make a donation to support this free work. Join me next
week when my guest will be actor and activist Martin Sheen, talking with me about Jesus,
(35:17):
Gandhi, the Barragans, nonviolence, and Apocalypse Now. May the God of peace bless everyone. Keep on
following the Nonviolent Jesus. See you next time.
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