Blessed are the Peacemakers

The next beatitude is found in Matthew 5:9 --

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. (NRSV)

You're blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That's when you discover who you really are, and your place in God's family. (The Message)
I think the first question that we need to ask ourselves as we look at this verse is ‘what is peace?’ or perhaps more correctly, ‘what was Jesus’ concept of peace?’

I think we limit it. I think we have taken the concept of peace and made it small. We have squeezed it into a box that we call “absence of war,” when it really means something much, much larger.

I did some reading about the word shalom. I thought it was important to look at the Hebrew definition because Matthew is speaking to the Jews, and Jesus himself was Jewish. The etymology of shalom includes words like completeness, fulfillment and wellbeing. Frederick Buechner says that “shalom means fullness, means having everything you need to be wholly and happily yourself.”

Being a “peacemaker” doesn’t mean being merely peaceable. It doesn’t mean just “getting along with each other.” According to old red (my RSV Oxford Annotated study Bible), being a peacemaker means “those who work earnestly to make peace.” If we insert the shalom definition, then we are left with “those who work earnestly to bring wholeness or fullness.”

Another Buechner quote – Peacemakers are those who, because they know that they have not necessarily found peace in its fullness, “try to bring it about wherever and however they can – peace with their neighbors and God, peace with themselves.” I keep coming back to this idea in all the beatitude posts – it isn’t the achievement that brings us the blessing – it the attempt. God will bring grace to those who turn to him and say, “There is no possible way that I can do this." It is in the recognition that God is a necessary ingredient that we receive the blessing.

So how do we become peacemakers, and what does that really mean? I was thinking about this on the way to work this morning, and I think it has something to do with being the Body of Christ. If we are the Body, then we need to be reaching out to others – not just feeding them, but finding out why they don’t have food. Not just housing them, but finding out why they don’t have the means to house themselves. Not just visiting them in prison, but striving with them to make life changes. I think it has something to do with bringing both mercy and justice to the Body. I think we need to be pulling people into the Body of Christ, so that the Body can become whole. So that all of us can be made complete. Perfected in grace. Each of us, all of us, the Body of Christ, made whole. Shalom.

And what is the blessing? We will be called “children of God.” We will all find “our place in God’s family.” We will find our place in the Body of Christ -- we will recognize whose we are. We will know what it means to be completely convinced that we are each a child of God.

One more Buechner quote – “…for Jesus, peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love.”

Image: Shalom