An offering for April 4

From my book Salt and Light: The Commandments, the Beatitudes and a Joyful Life:

Blessed Are Those Persecuted for Righteousness’ Sake

When I was in fourth grade, a rerun of The Twilight Zone was interrupted by a news bulletin announcing that somebody named Martin Luther King had been shot. I had not the foggiest idea who that might be, but I could tell from my mom’s worried face that he must be somebody important.

The next day, at the beginning of school, Mr. Vaughn asked us how many people had heard that Martin Luther King had been killed the night before. More than half the kids in the class cheered. I still had no clue who the man was, but my Mom and Dad had raised me to think that it was wrong to cheer when somebody gets shot and killed. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

It was my first experience with martyrdom for righteousness’ sake. And as with many an onlooker, my response was at the most basic level a simple perception of injustice. Looking at the circumstances of King’s death, I concluded, “Surely this was an innocent man.” As a fourth-grader, I had no grand theory of race relations in the United States, no knowledge of our tortured history, and not the slightest idea of who King was, what he stood for, who killed him, or why. I just knew that he was, by all accounts, a decent sort who was gunned down while taking the evening air on a motel balcony.

I mention this incident because it seems to me that this beatitude appeals to the human conscience at such primal roots. Jesus pronounces a blessing on those who are persecuted not for the Gospel’s sake but merely for righteousness’ sake—for being decent sorts; for sticking up for the kid being bullied; for being not St. Lawrence or St. Maximilian Kolbe but any Jack or Jill outgunned by city hall, any fighter in a noble but lost cause, anybody who ever went down swinging for the right side—even if that right side was just your little brother, wrongly accused of raiding the cookie jar.

The point of the beatitude is that such people are still connected to heaven, even when they don’t realize it. Such folk bear witness to ultimate things like truth, justice, and love, even when they are fighting for what many an onlooker may regard as light years from such “religious” stuff as the “kingdom of heaven.” Jesus himself is taken by many onlookers not as a spiritual figure but as a decent bloke who got the short end of the stick. Long before all the details are worked out, the full biographical details learned, the background filled in, and the gigantic implications seen in full, there is, in the persecution of Christ, the simple, elemental awareness that a great wrong has been done, a recognition that “certainly this man was innocent!” (Luke 23:47).

It was the inescapable conclusion not just of the pagan Roman tasked with carrying out the crucifixion but of swelling numbers of converts in ancient Rome. They were driven to the conviction that, whatever else might be going on, the followers of Jesus were innocent and did not deserve the insane cruelties being meted out to them by the mob. Indeed, the stark contrast of the martyrs’ noble courage and the bizarre hatred of their persecutors filled onlookers with shame, repentance, and faith, first in the goodness of their victims and then in the goodness of the Christ for whom they gave their lives.

We see this juxtaposition in a sort of chemical purity in some of the moments of the Passion. The sheer gratuitous cruelty of the crowning with thorns, for instance, has always struck me in the way it evokes both pity for Jesus and a sort of embarrassed disgust, not just with the thugs who conceive and execute such a satanic parody of human creativity and whimsy but with our whole race.

I sometimes fancy that at the end of the world, there will be a vast tribunal composed of all the angels and archangels, as well as all the unfallen races that may dot the planets orbiting the stars of the night sky: the hrossa, ETs, Oyarsa, and sundry other creatures whom God, in his wisdom, may have made and quarantined from us by the immense distances of space. When we all meet up at the inauguration of the new heaven and the new earth, they will be excited to meet at last the inhabitants of the Silent Planet called Earth, the one it is rumored was favored by a visit from God himself long ago. The excitement will be palpable. Who, they will ask, are these blessed creatures of Earth, and what beautiful tale will they tell of the festal celebration they gave the Beautiful One when he descended to be among them?

“What did you do to welcome him?” they will ask in expectant wonder. And we, God help us, will have to tell them the whole appalling story, that in addition to running him through a kangaroo court, subjecting him to horsewhipping and jeers from a mob of boobs and morons, and the typical dull-meat-cleaver justice of a bureaucracy, we paused before spiking him naked to a cross—just for one exquisite moment—to focus our hatred into a sharp, crystalline needle of special attentiveness: a sadistic little crown of thorns to press down on the head of a man already trembling with shock and blood loss. Imagine the burning shame of having to tell that story to perfect childlike innocence.

It’s the special vindictiveness, the attention to detail, the diabolical perversion of playfulness, the pure malice of the thing that removes from our race forever the ability to say, “I just never realized. Had I but known. Just following orders….” We shall have to look the choirs of heaven in the eye and say, “We come of the species that does that—and does it to perfect innocence.”

The crucifixion, in short, is itself the demonstration of why God had to make recourse to such a desperate sacrifice to save us. It shows us what our species is capable of—and the mercy of God that is even greater.

Of course, we try to muffle this awful reality by shrouding it in time. We assure ourselves that people did this because they were barbarians living a long time ago. Those of us with small imaginations genuinely believe that, unlike our ancestors, we would not hate, persecute, and kill saints. We imagine we are two thousand years smarter and better than the people who put Jesus to death, just as Jesus’s hearers imagined that they would not have killed the prophets (see Matthew 23:29–30). We think ourselves wiser than the people who despised Paul, Perpetua, Felicity, and Joan of Arc.

The reality is that saying, “But this is the third millennium!” is exactly the same as saying, “But this is Tuesday, July 7!” It’s nonsense, and it completely overlooks the fact that we have done it again and again and again and again to Christ’s followers and to the weakest and most vulnerable among us, in spite of his identification with “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40, 45). We did it to the black man, we did it to the red man, we did it to the Jew, we do it in unimaginable numbers to unborn babies, and we’ll do it to a saint in a heartbeat. That’s because saints still come to us in very repulsive forms, challenging our deepest and most cherished loves—and bigotries. They are antidotes to the popular lies of the age. And as Chesterton noted, because they are antidotes they are often mistaken for poison.

Jesus endured just such hatred. He and his followers were assured by all the leading authorities that his lot was with the wicked and that anyone who followed him would share his fate among the “accursed” who hung from the tree of the cross (see Deuteronomy 21:23). But God has an altogether different opinion—and he always has the last word. He called Jesus his beloved Son and gave him kingship, not only over heaven but over the whole universe as well.

The promise of the beatitude is that anybody who attempts righteousness and sticks with it while the whole world calls him a fool, blasphemer, coward, nigger lover, fetus fetishist, homophobe, friend of faggots, peacenik, self-righteous snob—or any of the other names pride assigns to attempted virtue—shall share in God’s kingdom. And the paradoxical sign of our share in that kingship will be our share in his sufferings and the hatred of the enemies we are called to love and forgive (see Luke 6:27).

In the end, even such hate cannot touch our union with Jesus. We are called and graced to pray for those who despitefully use us—as he did. That is true union with him, and it is toward union with him that all the beatitudes are ordered. That’s why the beatitude of those persecuted for righteousness is inextricably linked to the beatitude of those persecuted for Christ.