Today I saw this passage in a way that I have never seen it before:
Mat 5:11-15 NASB
(11) “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.
(12) “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
(13) “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.
(14) “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden;
(15) nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.
Most Christians are pretty familiar with this passage. Jesus was preaching His most famous sermon ever–the Sermon on the Mount. He goes through the Beatitudes, and then He says these words: “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you…Rejoice and be glad.” Now that’s hard enough for us humans to swallow, but what I realized today put this passage in a whole new light.
You see, right after Jesus gets done saying to be glad when people persecute you, he says, “You are the salt of the earth…You are the light of the world…A city set on a hill cannot be hidden…nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.”
Think about this for a minute. We think of those two passages as being separate. When we’re sitting around in our small study groups we’ll talk about how we need to be glad when people give us a hard time because we’re a Christian. Then in another conversation we’ll talk about how we’re the light of the world, so we need to be a good witness and evangelize.
But Jesus says that our response to persecution is the evangelism.
Look at it again:
Mat 5:11-15 NASB
(11) “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.
(12) “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
(13) “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.
(14) “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden;
(15) nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.
See? There’s no separation. Jesus tells his followers to be glad when they’re persecuted, because they’re the salt of the earth. When I was thinking about this earlier today I remembered a quote I had heard somewhere. I was able to find it after a little digging. This is what it says:
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
The man who wrote that wasn’t some modern philosopher / theologian who just got done drinking his morning coffee as he drove his $80,000 luxury-mobile to his comfy office. No, the guy who wrote that was a man named Tertullian, and he knew about martyrdom firsthand. Most people know his name–he was one of the early church fathers. He wrote his famous statement in about 198 A.D. Here’s a couple of other things that he said in the same book:
You say we are just another spin-off of philosophy, then. Well why don’t you persecute your philosophers, then, when they say the gods are fake, or bark against the emperors. Perhaps it is because the name of ‘philosopher’ does not drive out demons like ‘Christian’ does.
We are not a new philosophy but a divine revelation. That’s why you can’t just exterminate us; the more you kill the more we are. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. You praise those who endured pain and death - so long as they aren’t Christians! Your cruelties merely prove our innocence of the crimes you charge against us. When you chose recently to hand a Christian girl over to a brothel-keeper rather than to the lions, you showed you knew we counted chastity dearer than life.
And you frustrate your purpose. Because those who see us die, wonder why we do, for we die like the men you revere, not like slaves or criminals. And when they find out, they join us. [1]
Can anything be added to that?
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
I have never lived in persecution. I was raised in the United States, and the only countries I’ve been to are countries where Christianity is allowed. But sometimes I think that the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was its acceptance. The more that we’re accepted the less that we realize that Christianity is about living–and dying–for One greater than ourselves. I do not feel worthy to make that statement, but it needs to be made…even though I don’t know that I would have the courage to die like a Blandina or a Polycarp.
But maybe I can live like one.
Maybe I can live in such a way that my life becomes the seed of the Church. Maybe I can live my life in such a way that people see me and want to know the God that I serve.
And maybe, just maybe, if I am persecuted before I die, and the executioners demand that I deny Christ, I will have the courage to quote Polycarp and say:
“Fourscore and six years have I
served Him, and he has done me no harm.
How then can I curse my King that saved me”
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Category: Scriptural Musings |
Tags: scriptural musings
