Hilton Head Island, SC – March 25, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 10:25-27; John 1:43-51
A Sermon by John M. Miller
BLESSED ARE… THE MERCIFUL & THE PURE IN HEART
I started this sermon series on the Beatitudes on the first Sunday in Lent, and it shall end on Easter Sunday. However, there are seven Sundays in Lent, including Easter, but there are eight Beatitudes. In order to keep these sermons all within Lent, I am going to do two Beatitudes today, rather than just one. This technicality probably doesn’t matter to you at all, but it violates my self-imposed sense of how this should all work out. Therefore, here goes….
One of the things I have never liked about many war movies or westerns is that far too often, the bad guys are really bad and the good guys are really good. That doesn’t seem to me to be an accurate depiction of anybody. No one, or at least no one I have ever known, is all bad or all good. We are all a mixture of motives, positive and negative, noble and ignoble.
Thus I am always unhappy in a war movie or a western when the good guys are about to attack the bad guys. Frequently we are told that the evil ones, whoever they are, have shown no mercy to those who represent goodness and truth. Therefore, with a ringing command that echoes across the mountainside or through the jungle, the Good-Guy-Leader declares, “Show them no mercy.” The followers are only too happy to oblige, and major carnage ensues.
Jesus was never like that. He had enemies, and he certainly knew it. He ate meals with the scribes and Pharisees, who were among his most obvious and outspoken adversaries, and he took time in his itinerate ministry to converse with people he knew spoke ill of him. Jesus would often spar with them orally, but he certainly never attacked them physically, nor were his words to them vicious or unkind, even though they could be very pointed. Instead, Jesus presented the truth as he perceived it, but never attempting to minimize the humanity of his enemies. He would never say to his disciples, “Show them no mercy.” Jesus was the epitome of mercy.
Thus he said in the fifth Beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” If we give mercy, we shall be given mercy in return. But if we present a hard edge toward those we dislike, we will receive edginess in return.
However, mercy means more than not being mean or vindictive. It must entail positive actions or feelings toward everyone we meet. We are all in this together. No one is more human or less human than anyone else. Therefore we must show mercy to one another, for we ourselves need mercy for all our failings. If we don’t try to understand how others feel, or why they do what they do, how can we expect them to feel what we feel or know why we do what we do?
In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a priest and a Levite from Jerusalem deliberately avoided an injured traveler on the road to Jericho. But a Samaritan stopped and bound up the man’s wounds and took him to an inn. There he made provisions for the innkeeper to care for him until he returned. There is much more to this story than the mercy shown the traveler by the Samaritan, but that is certainly a part of the story. The parable was prompted by an expert in the religious law asking Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. After he told the story, Jesus asked the lawyer who proved to be the neighbor to the injured traveler: the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan. The Torah expert said, “The one, I suppose, who showed him mercy.” “Go, and do likewise,” said Jesus. But he said that not just to the religious lawyer; he says it to all of us as well. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Perhaps because Queen Victoria spent her summers at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, she became friends with Principal Tulloch of St. Andrews University and his wife. They spent many happy hours together through the years. The principal of a Scottish University is what in our terminology would be the president of the university. St. Andrews, you may remember, is the university from which Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton graduated.
Very shortly after Prince Albert died, Principal Tulloch also died. Mrs. Tulloch had not tried to see the queen after the death of the prince because she knew that she would have many people who were wanting to see her. Nonetheless one afternoon Queen Victoria came unannounced to see her newly widowed friend. When the queen came into the room, Mrs. Tulloch struggled to stand and curtsy before her monarch, but the queen said, “Please don’t rise. I am not coming to you today as a queen to her subject, but as one woman who has just lost her husband to another.”
To show mercy to anyone is to put ourselves in that person’s shoes, to feel their pain and sorrow. It is to seek to share their burdens. And that is what Queen Victoria did for her friend.
On the bulletin cover today is yet another quote from the great New Testament scholar William Barclay. He says that the Greek word eleemon is the equivalent of the Hebrew word chesed. In the Latin Mass the words “Kyrie eleison” are used: “Lord, have mercy.” Dr. Barclay says there is no adequate linguistic way of translating chesed. In the King James Version of the Bible they said “loving-kindness.” It is that, but it is ever so much more. In seminary, my professor of Hebrew, George Knight, probably spent more time trying to explain to us what chesed means than any other single word in the entire Hebrew Bible.
Psalm 103:17&18 says, in the King James Version, “The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting, and his righteousness unto children’s children, to those who keep his covenant and remember his commandments to do them.” It implies, as does the fifth Beatitude, that there is a quid-pro-quo quality to mercy. If we are merciful to others, others will be merciful to us. God will be merciful to us if we show mercy to others. If we don’t know what mercy is, we are unlikely to show it. Mercy is chesed; it is eleemon; it is loving-kindness. And if it is to be mercy, it must never end. We must always be merciful, even when it is not our inclination.
Can we merciful to the prisoners in Guantanamo? Should we be merciful to the Taliban in Afghanistan, or Al Qaeda in Pakistan or Yemen or Iraq? There is an important difference between personal mercy and political or judicial mercy. In the Beatitudes Jesus was speaking primarily, and sometimes exclusively, about personal behavior. Only political or governmental figures, such as the President of the United States or federal judges, are in a position to show mercy to political prisoners, if they have the inclination or even the ability to do so.
You or I, on the other hand, can and should show mercy toward people we encounter and for whom we may naturally feel little or no mercy at all. Christian people, Jesus never suggested that following God’s laws would be easy. It is hard. It requires thoughts and actions which are counter to what we truly feel. But as in other matters, Jesus encourages us to stretch beyond ourselves, to turn the other cheek, to walk the extra mile.
And then came the sixth Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Have you ever known anyone whom you would describe as being completely “pure in heart?” What would it mean to be pure in heart?
When I was a child, our family lived for three years in Fort Scott, Kansas. We lived in a corner house on Main Street, and behind us was a corner house on National Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. Jeffers lived there. The Jeffers had no children. They seemed ancient to me, which probably means they were maybe in their late sixties or early seventies. Mr. Jeffers had a shock of white hair with a white mustache, and Mrs. Jeffers had dark hair flecked with grey and pulled back into a bun. To the degree a nine year old boy can gauge such things, I would say the Jeffers unquestionably were pure in heart. They were unfailingly kind and thoughtful to everyone, including everyone in our family and our dog Butch. They were gentle, and they were the very salt of the earth. In 21st century terminology, neither of them “had an agenda.” They were splendid, God-fearing, admirable people, who regularly gave us boys large portions of both affection and cookies. We were only too happy to receive both.
Jesus had at least one disciple who may also have been pure in heart. However, he is identified as a disciple only in the Gospel of John, and not in any of the first three Gospels. His name was Nathanael, which means, “Sent by God.” Furthermore, Nathanael appears only in the first and last chapters of the Fourth Gospel, and nowhere in between. In the last chapter we are told that he was from Cana in Galilee, which is the town where Jesus turned the water into wine in an incident also recorded only in the fourth Gospel.
But in the first chapter we learn a little more. There we are told that Jesus chose Philip as one of his disciples. (Philip managed to make it into the list of the Twelve in all three Synpotic Gospels as well.) In all four of the Gospels, far more details are left out than are told, so we have to fill in between the lines ourselves in most instances. After Jesus called Philip to become a disciple, Philip went to his friend Nathanael, and he said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Instantly Nathanael responded, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
That is one of the biblical verses I like the most. In my mind’s eye, I see the two men standing somewhere on the north side of the Sea of Galilee, and in my mind’s ear, Nathanael sounds like someone who had arrived recently in Judea from the shtetl in western Russia. Knowing that Nazareth was then a new village in the region of the Galilee, and that its reputation apparently was not Quadruple-A, Nathanael said, with a Yiddish accent, “Can anything good come out of Na-zar-ate?” Nathanael didn’t know Jesus, but he knew Nazareth, and he wasn’t impressed. “Come and see,” Philip told Nathanael, and so they went.
When Jesus saw the two men approaching, he said to Nathanael, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!” Nathanael was astonished. He asked Jesus how he knew him. Jesus said that when he was under a fig tree, he had seen him. For reasons left frustratingly unexplained, Nathanael exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, the king of Israel!”
John would have us believe Jesus said these things because he had divine knowledge. It is certainly acceptable to believe that. I prefer to think rather that among all the people who ever lived, Jesus had a unique sense of intuitional assessment. He could size up anyone in an instant. Some people have that gift. And in Nathanael of Cana, Jesus perceived a man who called a spade a spade, who never gilded the lily, who had a remarkably pure heart. Such a man would be an ideal disciple, especially considering some of the other chaps who signed on among the Twelve.
Those who truly are pure in heart do see God. They see God daily, hourly, minute by minute. They know that God is with them in every circumstance of their lives, and that no matter what obstacles might be placed in their path, they will get through or over or around them.
Purity of heart is really quite rare. N one can learn it or acquire it; it is a given. And it is a given which can be given only by God. Purity of heart was Billy Budd in Herman Melville’s novel of the same name. Purity of heart is what suddenly swept over Sydney Carton at the end of Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities. It began with, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and it ended with, “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done.” With that Sidney Carton went to the guillotine in place Charles Darney, a man who looked like him, saving Darney’s life while giving up his own. Sydney Carton never could have known purity of heart had it not been infused in him from outside himself. It was indeed a far, far better thing he did than he ever done, and it was a far, far better rest that he went to, than he had ever known.
There is a man named Monroe Beachy. He is Amish, and he lived among the Amish and Mennonites of eastern Ohio. He created a Ponzi scheme which bilked $16 million in hard-earned savings from his fellow religionists, just as Bernie Madoff bilked billions from his fellow religionists in another, far larger Ponzi scheme. The incredible thing about Monroe Beachy’s victims, however, is that they want to forgive him for his avaricious crime. They didn’t want him to go to trial in a civil court, but in their own Amish ecclesiastical court, where they would commute a sentence. But federal officials will not allow that, and Mr. Beachy is now on trial for mail fraud charges which could land him in federal prison for up to twenty years.
Only people who are genuinely pure in heart could forgive being defrauded of many thousands of dollars, especially by one of their own. But that is the Amish way. They are part of the Anabaptist tradition of Christianity, the Peace People. Remember the incident a year or two ago when an armed man came into an Amish school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, killing several children, and the parents openly forgave him? Only purity of heart could allow anyone under those horrendous conditions, especially grieving parents, to do that! It was a far, far better thing they did than they had ever done!
A few days ago I saw Driving Miss Daisy at the Arts Center. Originally it was a play, and then it became a movie. In the play there are only three characters: Miss Daisy, her son Boolie, and the black chauffeur Hoke. It was outstanding in every way, and I was happy to learn the movie is a very faithful adaptation of the play. Miss Daisy is a strong-willed, acerbic Atlanta matron who did not want anyone to become her driver. But over the course of twenty-five years, she slowly came to perceive that Hoke was an indispensable factor in her life. In one of the last scenes, when the elderly and retired Hoke comes to check on Miss Daisy and she has a momentary episode of dementia, she realizes how caring he has always been toward her. Miss Daisy says to Hoke, “Hoke, you’re my best friend.” That is as close to being pure of heart as Miss Daisy could ever come. It is a line I shall always treasure from both the stage and screen.
The Beatitudes hold out such powerful and beautiful hopes for all of us if we will just seek to become the kind of people God and Jesus know we can become. Blessings abound to those who seek to live as God wants us to live. Mercy shall be shown them, and they shall see God. The Beatitudes give us a warning, telling us that if we do not live as we should, we shall not be blessed as God desires for all of us. But they also lift up a victor’s gold medal; if we do live as we should, we shall be blessed, and beyond question we shall experience those blessings.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.