Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God.

Simon

I’m not very good at New Testament Greek, but I did look up what it means to be a peacemaker. So we know that Jesus spoke Aramaic* and he would have been using the word shalom which, to repeat something that hopefully everyone who has ever heard a sermon about peace might remember, shalom is a lot more than the absence of conflict. It’s the presence of justice, righteousness and harmony between people, and within and between communities. So this rich word for peace represents everything that Jesus is talking about when he speaks of the Kingdom of God and all we see Jesus teaching in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. 

Then the word ‘making’ is a doing word. It’s doing peace. It’s making peace. It’s establishing peace. It’s an activist word. So I have a friend who calls himself a Shalom activist, which is probably a good way to translate this term. So Shalom activists are leading the good life. They are flourishing people.

Roy

So to be a peacemaker is creating, initiating, and actively working towards peace. It’s not the flower-power, hippie generation letting it all hang out kind of peace. It’s actually a very costly thing.

Julie

Yeah, and I was thinking of the podcast we did when we interviewed Jo Williams from the Blackley Centre and her stories about Jimmy Carter at Camp David and her examples from the Northern Ireland peace process. This is hard. Going back to the headline question: is Jesus naive? This is not naivety at all. It’s not being a doormat. So I love that phrase Shalom activist. I’m going to tell Jo next time I see her: she’s a Shalom activist. And it’s much needed in the world as we see it today.

Roy

It is.

Simon

My favourite comedian is a guy called Stewart Lee who sets things up at the start of a two-hour show that he doesn’t cash in until right at the end. Remember how, at Jesus’ crucifixion, the centurion says: ‘truly this man was the son of God’. That’s the promise given to these shalom activists, that people will look at what we do and recognise ‘this is a child of God’. So Jesus walks the talk and in that moment of making peace between God and creation, that’s when his true nature becomes clear. So, there’s no way that Jesus is promising that being a shalom activist is going to be easy, but even someone who was completely outside the Jewish religious world was able to see from the way Jesus lived and died what it means to be a child of God.

Craig

I wonder, Simon, whether there is something significant that this was a centurion? Because centurions are strong men who are prepared for war. Here is a strong man recognising that the Prince of Peace came from God.

I’ve been asking myself a question over the past few weeks: why do we allow bullies like Trump to believe they’re strong? A bully only feels strong because the person he dominates feels forced to acknowledge him as strong. So the attribute of strength is gifted to the strong man as a reward for a convincing performance, which is what we’re seeing all around us. But, because it’s a performance, we’re accepting that we’re weaker than them by agreeing with the narrative the strong man spins us when he’s bragging about himself. And in doing this we’re also scripting our future behaviour. So in any confrontation with the strong man, we’re being forced to be weak and to accept humiliation in order to serve the bully who can continue to believe himself to be strong. 

But the Beatitudes are something entirely different. They don’t accept the performance of strength by the strongman because they don’t believe it proves anything. A person who needs to be seen as strong is actually weak. Strength displayed as resilience is much stronger than strength exhibited as a performance. So it’s strength of character, and it’s those values that have been tested by experience that we know to be true. We gain the power to survive the bluster of a bully as long as we’re not convinced by the pretence. And I think that’s what Jesus is doing here in the Sermon on the Mount.

Helen

I completely agree with your assessment of strength and weakness and people’s characters, Craig. And that’s what I was thinking about when I was reflecting on the idea of being a peacemaker. I’ve been wondering what it is like to be a negotiator in the current circumstances we’re facing in the world. There’s a lot of negotiating going on, isn’t there, to try and uphold peace deals and to bring peace to areas of war. And my thought was: who would be a peacemaker? Who would be a negotiator? Who would be the person in the middle between two weak men who think they are strong? The person in the middle has to be unpopular with both of them. In order to bring both sides together they are going to be misunderstood and misrepresented by both sides. What a costly role to play in world affairs.

Roy

It’s so costly. I think of Yitzhak Rabin, the first Israeli prime minister to have been born in Palestine who was murdered for peacemaking. He dared to extend his hand across the breach between his embattled Israelis and the oppressed Palestinians. And he was killed for it by one of his own countrymen. Being a peacemaker is really, really tough.

But, Simon, when you spoke the words ‘surely this was the son of God’, I have to confess that the image of John Wayne came to mind. Westerns and cowboys, and how often the sheriff would have a six shooter which was called the Peacemaker. The gun was called the Peacemaker! 

So somehow the word is subverted. Likewise, the idea of Donald Trump seeking to end hostilities by allowing one side to subjugate their enemy, then stirring up popularism and gaining popularity among people for looking like a strong man. He is actually campaigning for a peace prize whilst dominating and bullying people! 

I was talking to a guy the other day on my five-a-side football team who is about to travel to Assisi. He’s not religious at all, but I suggested he should go to the Basilica there and told him a bit about St. Francis. And it triggered in my mind the story about Francis as an envoy to the Muslim world. It was during the Crusades in 1219 when he crossed battle lines to meet Sultan Malik al-Kamil.  Francis sought out the Sultan to bring a message of peace and, whilst obviously desiring to convert him, he did so with respect, never insulting the Prophet or Islam. The Sultan received Francis respectfully, thus breaking the cycle of dehumanising “the enemy”. They met daily for a month. Neither converted the other, but the Sultan received him with warmth and gave Francis a passport to allow him to visit and pray in Christian holy places that were under Muslim control. And then the Sultan presented him with this beautifully carved ivory horn, which is now among the relics that you’ll find in the Basilica in Assisi. And the two became friends.

Francis then met with his cardinal, but he was unable to convince him. The cardinal insisted that the only thing Muslims understood was weapons, and that the one useful thing a Christian could do was to kill them. This was the language of the Crusades. 

Craig

I think the story is really significant at the very moment we have a US Secretary of War who has on his body both a tattoo of a cross with a sword, which he connects to the phrase “not peace, but a sword” and the phrase “Deus Vult”, meaning God wills it, which represents the same warrior-Christian identity we associate with the Crusades.

But returning to Jesus, he must have had in mind those stories from his own tradition, and preeminent amongst those was the figure of Aaron, who in later Jewish tradition became known as the pursuer of peace. He became known as the bringer together of divided families.

To be continued…

* Whilst Aramaic was a Semitic language used by common people in daily conversation, Greek was an Indo-European language that was used primarily in public administration and trade. Both languages interacted in a multilingual society, with Greek influencing Aramaic vocabulary, and Aramaic influencing which regional dialect of Greek predominated in each area.