Hilton Head Island, SC – March 11, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 9:33-37; Mark 12:41-44
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” – Matthew 5:5
For Americans living in the early years of the 21st century, the third Beatitude is very difficult to understand, let alone to emulate. Meekness, as ordinarily understood, is not an admired American attribute. If anything, it is a personal quality most of us have been taught never to attempt to adopt. We are like the National Football League players we heard about last week. We want to win the pooled money everyone contributes when we injure opposing players. Strength, yes, we say; meekness, no.
Throughout these sermons on the Beatitudes, I shall be relying on the comments of William Barclay. Willie Barclay is one of the most memorable and admirable men I ever met, despite having once been a serious alcoholic, and being almost totally deaf in his last years. He taught New Testament at Trinity College of Glasgow University when I was there in the early Sixties. Like many other faculty members in those days, he was in many ways essentially a self-educated minister of the Church of Scotland. As I recall, he had a master of arts degree, which in Scottish universities was the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in our system, plus a bachelor’s of divinity degree, but that was all. He studied Greek and the New Testament on his own for years, and eventually he was named a professor at Trinity College because he had acquired so much knowledge of the New Testament language. He wrote an extensive multi-volume commentary on the Greek scriptures which was a mainstay for mainline preachers for two generations.
On the bulletin cover is a quote from Dr. Barclay. (He had a doctor of divinity, an honorary degree, not a doctor of philosophy, a properly earned higher degree). He well characterizes how most of us perceive the word “meek.” In Barclay’s commentary on Matthew, however, he explained what Aristotle thought meekness was. The great Greek philosopher described the Greek word praus as the golden mean between excessive anger and excessive apathy or passivity in the face of ethical unacceptability.
We don’t need any illustrations of people who are too angry too much of the time; all of us have known many such folks. Some of us may be among those folks ourselves. But it is hard to think of anyone who seldom or never gets angry. Curiously, even inexplicably, Barack Obama may have cultivated that type of behavior as President, whether or not he normally was like that in his personal behavior before moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It seems like he pulls his punches too much. Very seldom does he exhibit gloriously high dudgeon over anything.
There is a famous character in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov who personifies the type of person who refuses to get angry. Miss Holstein, my English teacher for high school seniors, said that The Brothers K. is the greatest novel ever written. Because it was she who said it, and because I had such immense respect for her, I assume she had to have been correct, because it was she who said it.
Anyway, Alexei Karamazov was the third of the three legitimate Karamazov brothers. Smerdykov, the oldest, was a half-brother, and was the result of an illicit union between their father and a peasant girl. Alyosha, as Alexei was called, became a Russian Orthodox monk, and lived in a monastery. It was to Alyosha that the agnostic or atheistic middle brother, Ivan, told the famous Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, which is the only part of the great novel most people know now, if they even know that. Alyosha would fit well into the sixth Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” But he would be too meek for either Aristotle or William Barclay. He wouldn’t allow himself to become angry about anything, even the atrocious antics of the oldest brother Dimitri or the unorthodoxies of Ivan or the deviousness of their father and their half-brother Smerdykov. Alyosha was too phlegmatic for his own good.
Dr. Barclay wrote that one acceptable translation of Matthew 5:5 would be to say, “Blessed are those who are angry at the right time and never angry at the wrong time.” It is appropriate to be angry at pedophile priests who continue for years to abuse children in the congregations to which they are assigned, and also at the bishops who simply moved them from one parish to another with callous disregard for the children who would become new victims there. Anyone who is not angry does not understand the gravity of both the sins and the crimes.
On the other hand, some people choose to overlook such behavior for what they assume is the greater good of the Church, and they never get angry. Aristotle and Barclay are right; true meekness is the golden mean between excessive anger and excessive passivity in the face of serious moral wrongs. When we are confronted by utterly unacceptable acts, we must speak out against it, lest we appear to give tacit approval to antisocial behavior. That kind of excessive meekness no one needs.
Thus to be meek in the sense in which Jesus used that word is to exhibit the proper measure of concern between unacceptable outrage and unacceptable apathy. Parents who blow up at their children for every minor infraction do them no favors, nor do parents who allow their children to do anything their youthful, often self-centered hearts desire. Those who are truly blessed by God are those who know where to land in their conduct between uncontrolled anger and complete apathy in the face of injustice or self-serving lawlessness and moral anomie.
And that leads into the second definition of how William Barclay describes meekness. The Greek word praus, “meek,” also means “controlled,” in the sense that a domesticated animal becomes controlled by its master. A horse or mule or ox or dog that is properly meek is one which follows commands. It isn’t one that seeks constant attention and affection from the master, but rather which realizes that it has an important position in the way the home or farm operates. So too we need to understand the proper meekness of our position in the economy of God. He is our Master, and we are His servants. When we do what we ought to do, and we accept our place in the great scheme of things without complaining that we are not The Master ourselves, then we are blessed by the meekness of which Jesus spoke. Further, we shall, in a very real sense, inherit the earth. That is, we find we fit in well in the great scheme of things.
One notion of our understanding of meekness is undeniably correct. The meek by definition cannot be proud or haughty. Those who are genuinely meek accept the fact that their lives depend on far more than their own efforts and self-reliance. Too often we delude ourselves into thinking that no one but we ourselves can determine the course of our lives. In truth we all have been blessed by actions and circumstances in which we did not participate at all. There are times when it is solely good fortune and not good management which leads to our benefit. We were in the right place at the right time, or someone helped us when we did nothing to deserve the assistance. Ultimately, as St. Augustine said, all good comes from God, and the blessings of God are showered on us all, as the Beatitudes proclaim.
Our two scripture passages for today describe two different examples of meekness Jesus was extolling in the third Beatitude. In the first example, from Mark 9 (33-37), the disciples were discussing among themselves who among them was the greatest. (We might note parenthetically none of them at that moment was displaying notable meekness [praus] but rather pride [hubris in Greek].) Jesus asked them what they were talking about. They were like children who had all been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and at first they refused to tell Jesus. When he pried it out of them, Jesus asked them to sit down. Then he called a young child to himself. Without explaining why he did it, Jesus said, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” Then, further to explain why Jesus called the child, he said, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.” In the same incident as recorded in Matthew, Jesus said, “Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (18:4).
Little children, those who are two or three or four, are naturally meek in the best sense of that word. They put on no pretenses. Put them in school all day, and things start to change. Then they are ushered into the child-centered world of modern America. But when they are very young, toddlers and post-toddlers are the essence of humility and meekness.
The second passage is only four small verses, but they describe a very large concept (Mark 12:41-44). Jesus and the Twelve were in the temple, near where people came to put their offerings into a receptacle for that purpose. Wealthy people brought their tithes, and put them in with much public display of religiosity. They did so like Little Jack Horner, who sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie. As you will recall, he stuck in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, and said, “What a good boy am I!” Shortly, Jesus and the disciples saw a poor widow who came up and quietly put in two copper coins, which the text says equaled a penny. No doubt a penny then was worth much more than a penny now, but still, it was worth only a penny. Of all those they had observed doing their religious duty, Jesus told the disciples, “For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living.”
To be meek does not mean that we must be patsies or pushovers or easy marks. Rather it means we cannot stand on pride; we cannot lord our lives over others; we must not assume our position gives us a higher station than other people.
When I was in seminary, I remember one of our professors preaching on the third Beatitude in a Friday chapel service. He said that an alternative meaning for the word meek is “debonair.” I distinctly recall Lew Briner saying that, but I didn’t remember why he said it. So, as I was working on this sermon, I took out my beloved Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, which was printed on the basis of Webster’s Third, which was first published in 1961, which means it isn’t exactly new anymore, and I looked up the word “debonair.” It said the word derives from Middle English, which derived from the Old French, de bonne aire, which literally means “of good air.” Later, however, that came to mean “of good family” or “of good nature.” But the No. 2 definition, which Webster says is archaic, means “gentle, or courteous.”
Do you want to be debonair in an admirably old-fashioned way? Then be gentle, be courteous, be meek. That’s what Professor Briner was telling us, because that’s what Jesus is telling us.
But remember this: Jesus himself was not meek in the way we usually think of that word. He wasn’t a doormat or a pushover. He became angry at injustice. He was fiercely opposed to the rich taking advantage of the poor. He spoke against abuse and the overreach of power. He was never apathetic about anything. But Jesus was controlled in his words and his actions, and he felt controlled not by himself but by God. He was not proud or haughty; he was dependent on God. He was, in all the best possible meanings of the word, debonair.
Because Jesus was genuinely meek, he inherited the earth. During his lifetime he actually inherited the earth. On Good Friday it didn’t look like it; not even on Easter did it look like it. But, as the hymn declares, “Christ for the world we sing; the world to Christ we bring.” Those who are meek in the way Jesus presented meekness find their place in the world in such a manner that they cannot be dislodged from the world, no matter what life hurls into their paths.
Therefore, as the soprano soloist declares in the Christmas section of Handel’s Messiah, just before the choir sings the final chorus, “Come unto Him, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and He will give you rest. Take His yoke upon you, and learn of Him, for He is meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” That kind of lowliness of heart implies strength in humility, power in a low-key lifestyle, might in modesty.
If you feel you are not meek, and you want to become meek, don’t pray that God will turn you into a doormat. That isn’t what Jesus meant at all. Pray for courage to express anger over obvious wrongs. Pray to become controlled, not by yourself and your own thoughts or passions, but by God, who is your ultimate Master.
Theresa of Avila was a 16th century Spanish woman who reformed the Carmelite Order of Sisters. She was not what anyone in 21st century America would call meek in our sense of the term. She was a strong woman with strong convictions who always stood up for those things in which she believed strongly. It was Theresa of Avila who said, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”
Don’t pray to become meek in our current namby-pamby sense of that word. Pray to become meek in the sense that Jesus intended when he used the word “meek.” The truly meek are the properly meek, the acceptably meek, the correctly meek. When any of us is like that, we shall inherit the earth. We have the promise of Jesus, the greatest of God’s meek ones.