Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
(Matthew 5:9)
There is a certain aura of distant horizons, of heaven and dreams and poetry about these words of Jesus, in spite of their familiarity. We would do better to read the word "blessed" as "happy" or "deeply contented"; but since these first 12 verses of the fifth chapter of Matthew's gospel account have always had the somewhat foreign name of "beatitudes," and probably always will, we have tended to spread a kind of halo over all of Jesus' preaching and proclamation.
When I was a boy, and later during World War I, the Sermon on the Mount was seen as suspended for the duration of our earthly existence. Theologians spoke quite openly of a "moratorium on the Sermon on the Mount," not realizing that by doing so they were giving Hitler and his brand of fascism a green light. By saying, "How can you love your enemy in this world?!", the kind of love Jesus preached was postponed to another world after this life.
It was a moment of great significance when, from my bunker cell in the Dachau concentration camp, I saw a fellow prisoner being hanged outside my window. I instinctively thought, "The poor fellow!"--and, "This damned gang of murderers!" And then suddenly a question bolted through my whole being: "What if Jesus had thought and expressed such a revengeful thought as he was hanging on the cross?" Then there would be no redemption, no wholeness, no peace, no shalom.
Jesus meant what he preached, in all seriousness, in all honesty, and knew full well who we are in our mortal existence when he said, "Happy are the peacemakers, for people will call them sons of God just as they have called me Son of God."
Back then in Dachau, I learned to pray for "enemies." I could just as well call it a conversion, but it was not I who "converted." Rather, inadvertently being a witness to the way human beings can treat fellow human beings, seeing what people can become capable of and dedicated to when a so-called duty becomes their higher authority literally turned me around, or converted me.
This event in 1944, when I was 52 years old, turned me completely inside out. Now I understand that the theologians (called scribes in the books of the New Testament) and the fundamentalists (the strict biblical literalists and the law-bound pharisees) had to become special opponents of Jesus, and eventually became stubborn, hate-filled enemies to the death. Jesus' message could not possibly be "good news," gospel, to them. For the Sermon on the Mount is precisely the kind of teaching that pious and learned folk find hard to swallow.
Pious people tend to feed on the idea that there are those less pious than they are. Learned people depend for their very identity on the notion that there are less knowledgeable and ignorant people. But Jesus calls everyone, calls each person regardless of piety or knowledge, with the news that God is our Father who loves us, who loves even the henchman and the murderer, the scribe and the Pharisee, the theologian and the fundamentalist. God claims us all without exception as his children, and at the same time wants to have us all as his brothers and sisters, who not only live out of his love, but who live together in his love.
That is the peace that is "higher than all reason," the peace that we as believers in Christ and in the gospel of Jesus are here to live, to practice, and to assert in the world. Only this way can we realize the happiness or "beatitude" (blessedness) of being called sons and daughters of God!
If we call ourselves Christians, then we at least have to renounce everything that gets in the way of our living together as brothers and sisters, and instead support and encourage everything that can serve and build up the peace that we owe to each other as God's children.
It is common knowledge--or at least it should be--that as long as Christendom has existed we have paid little attention to keeping peace among God's human family. We have left it up to politics, and hence to governments, whether they wanted to pursue their policies peacefully or with other means. For thousands of years, belligerent conflict was seen as the last resort, but as a thoroughly justified means of asserting one's political ends.
Theoretically--but only theoretically--those days are over. Wars have not ceased, and Christendom has been a devoted participant--not only by military advisers and support, not only by weapons sales and worldwide propaganda, but by much deceitful reporting and indirect participation in wars as well. No nation and no political party platform has asked those who must carry the weight of these wars by the sacrifice of their property and their lives what their will was and is, much less asking what God's will might be.
So-called Christendom--and I mean precisely the large, mainline, established churches as well--keeps its ears, eyes, and mouth closed, composes brilliant memoranda and position papers, puts experts to work. And yet the Word that God gave to human beings through Jesus of Nazareth, the Word that judges and redeems and liberates us, is muffled into silence.
In the years of the Cold War, or even earlier in the era immediately after World War II, anyone who presumed to talk about peace was soon made to look suspicious. The suspicion was often expressed publicly, without protest or contradiction, that such "peacemakers" must be agents of the godless, atheistic enemy. Indeed, it was on a charge of blasphemy that the Council of High Priests condemned and outlawed Jesus. It seems we have just about reached this point again today. For Christendom has long since abandoned listening to, much less obeying, the one they unthinkingly call Lord, Jesus Christ.
In 1933 the same thing had happened, at least in Germany, when Hitler was acknowledged as the highest--and then even as absolute--authority over church and state. Whoever was outlawed by Hitler was outlawed by humanity. Whomever Hitler and his bureaucracy threw into concentration camps was promptly removed from all church offices as well.
Today, of course, the idol Hitler is dead. Many pharisees and theologians felt a need to interpret Hitler as the biblical Antichrist in the flesh. I prefer to see him as a later version of Herod the "Great," who, possessed and driven to insanity by his mania for power, had a whole generation of innocent infants murdered.
Be that as it may, Jesus spoke with unmistakable clarity about the ultimate enemy of his Father and his Father's children. This word, in Matthew's account, is one of the central directives Jesus gives his disciples. The Father is the one who provides and cares for all his children. So we need not, and should not, be concerned with would-be "security" for our lives. That, Jesus says, would be a heathen way of life, for it distracts us from trusting in God and leads to idolatry. The ultimate idol is called Mammon, and Jesus' warning is clear and resolute: "No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and Mammon!"
It seems as if today Mammon has assumed unrestricted and unquestioned power over Christianity and Christendom. I can remember once in the late '40s or early '50s in one of the big U.S. newspapers when there was a front-page article about a hotel fire in Chicago or Detroit, with the huge headline, "Over a Hundred Million Dollars Damage," and then in fine print below, "240 Dead." I was shocked--not so much by the fire disaster as such, but by the fact that obviously the material loss was valued higher than the loss of life.
Only 30 years later, people today don't bat an eyelash at such things. We have long since come to accept the fact that money rules the world, and that the god Mammon does not let anyone, not even the supposed or real "financial experts," inspect his books.
We also know by now that Mammon considers human beings cheap, dispensable, and almost worthless articles of mass production whose stockmarket value can only fall. The more we human beings serve this god, the more we have nothing to do with one another, except perhaps the fact that we can be used, with the help of more complete instruments like computers and robots, for Mammon's purposes. In this situation, war could be--no, it has to be--a very convenient means of waste disposal to this lord and idol Mammon. Has it come to that already?
Mammon depends for its very existence on the fact that people want to derive advantages over each other. If we were really fellow human beings, brothers and sisters to each other, Mammon would shrivel and dry up.
An ancient Greek philosopher once hypothesized that "war is the father of all things." And what we call progress, technical progress, is certainly largely--if not exclusively--a result of weapons technology throughout history, up to the technical feat of nuclear energy production.
There is much talk today in many places about survival, and about our need for an order of values to survive. But what should the criterion be for such an ordering of values? Where the idolatry of Mammon is in charge, the criterion is clear-cut: Whatever is useful to its growth and consolidation of power is of value, and whatever hinders that process is worthless. Where God, the Father of Jesus, is the authority we recognize, the highest value is placed, unquestionably, on human beings as his children. The decisive thing here is the battle between good and evil, and our personal relationship to God and to our brothers and sisters. As the prophet Micah pointed out: "What is good has been explained to you...this is what the Lord asks of you, only this: to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God."
The Christian world has found ingenious ways to get by with compromises--as if it were possible to serve the two lords, God and Mammon, at the same time. But this is as impossible today as it was in Jesus' time.
On the issue of peace, too, and precisely here, we cannot possibly serve two masters; and yet we have been trying to do so since the fourth century, when Christianity was introduced to the whole Roman Empire as state religion. The citizen is expected to live as a Christian. The state remains heathen, secular, even if the politicians are Christians. How does this work?
It does not and cannot work. Many clever and wise people have pondered the problem over and over, and none of them has solved the riddle. I cannot solve it either. But I can and I must witness to the fact that Jesus is right on target when he calls the peacemakers happy. For what else is discipleship and service to our Lord, if serving peace among human beings and among nations is not?
This article is excerpted from a sermon delivered on January 25, 1980, in Kircheimbolandan, West Germany. It was translated by Nancy Lukens and is reprinted with permission from Neue Stimme, March, 1980.
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