April 13, 2003
The Cost of Discipleship
The Rev. Dr. Riley E. Jensen

It seemed like a good idea at the time!  When I first framed out this Lenten sermon series on the Beatitudes, I knew that I couldn’t include all of them.  I also had sense enough to know that this one on persecution isn’t a likely fit in a world where sacrifice is defined as driving without power steering.  Persecution sounds more like one of those psychological complexes of a person wallowing in self-pity.

But I maintain that it seemed a good idea at the time to link this unstable and explosive beatitude with Palm Sunday which is the most misunderstood day on the Christian calendar.  But I have to admit that the more I got into it the tougher I found this idea of “righteous persecution” to be.  “Happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The backdrop for everything that is said this morning is Palm Sunday.  Palm Sunday begins a week which like this beatitude has two edges.  There is the bad news and the good news.   There is the dark matter of persecution and the hopeful one of gaining the kingdom of heaven.  Palm Sunday, the occasion of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, was the beginning of an awful week.  It was a week in which he was not only to know persecution, but also torture and death.

There is a fact of church life that people invariably joke about or apologize for, and it has to do with the “C & E Crowd”.  These are supposedly those people who show up only on Christmas and Easter.  But I need to tell you it is no joke, for those who think they are only coming for the good parts (for the frosting) are not in a position to know what the good part is all about.  Why?  Because they miss Holy Week.

They miss the truth that the kingdom of heaven is only to be realized after one has been persecuted for righteousness sake.  They miss the fact that before Easter comes Good Friday; that before resurrection and new life, one must learn to deal with the painful parts of experience.

The truth is I don’t blame them -- these so-called C & E people -- whoever they are!  Given my druthers I would join their ranks in a minute.  I’m the kind of guy who would rather see a feel-good movie that lifts my spirits than a challenging one that tests my spirits.  I know Julie Andrews sang, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”  But I want the sugar without the medicine, and I suspect I’m not alone.

The very simple message of Palm Sunday is that discipleship costs but that is not the message we have been taught.  We have been given a Palm Sunday message with more sugar than medicine.  This is one of those times when that little adage, “perception is reality” (that we have accepted as truth for so long) is wrong.  For in this case perception is not reality.

So what’s the perception?  Well, you know it and have reenacted it this morning as we began our service with the waving of palms, and a parade, and an up-beat hymn of praise.  There is nothing wrong with that because after all that is part of the story.  The Bible tells us that just before Jesus entered Jerusalem, he gathered his disciples in Bethany which is just over the hill of the Mount of Olives, and he gave some very specific directions.

Interestingly enough the reports that we have in Matthew and Luke are somewhat different in this respect.  In Matthew the disciples are told to go and secure a donkey and her foal while in Luke the singular is used and they are told to go after one colt.  I don’t know that this teaches us anything more than that we are dealing with human beings here and their memories are selective.

But the larger meaning is that Jesus was conscious of his entrance.  Jesus had been in and out of Jerusalem a multitude of times in his life, but on this occasion there seemed to be a consciousness that this time would be his last.  Did he have an exact knowledge of what was to come?  I think not.  His prayer in the Garden, “If it be your will, let this cup pass from me” seems to belie that notion.  Nevertheless, he had a sense that his entrance into the city that day would be a symbolic occasion.

By this time in his ministry his reputation preceded him, and we can imagine the word spreading like wildfire that the miracle worker of Galilee was on his way.  Remember Israel was occupied territory in that day, and there was great yearning that one would come in fulfillment of ancient prophecy to lead a revolution.

Yes, this day began on a high note – there were palm branches waved, hosannas shouted, and children lifted upon the shoulders of parents to catch a glimpse of this one upon whom their hopes were placed.  But in this case perception was not reality as Jesus took great pains not to play upon the emotions of the crowd emphasizing the humility of his office rather than the power of it.

That, my friends, is the sugar of the story, and it fits with our triumphfulist desires which are to have the victory without the suffering, the recognition without the persecution.  But this is the one whose life and teaching ran much deeper, who said, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Ralph Sockman, who was the preacher on the National Radio Pulpit for countless years, used to remind people that instead of giving adequate attention to all of Jesus’ words, we tend to pick and choose among them, and trim them down in order to fit our presuppositions.  He would go on to say, “It is impossible to do this forever.  Those who try to take parts of what Jesus said and ignore other parts are avoiders of the unavoidable.”

Therefore, I want to suggest that we cannot avoid the unavoidable; there is something in this beatitude that holds the key not only to our understanding of Holy Week, but also the nature of the Christian life.  Certainly there is a reason why this is the last beatitude rather than the first.  No recruiter is going to be very successful who stresses suffering before glory.

First, we need to be sure that we have heard the beatitude correctly because given the world in which we live it is easy for it to get overlayed with the victim mentality of our age.  We sue at the drop of the hat.  It’s MacDonald’s responsibility not to give us such fatty foods not ours to make sure we know what we put into our bodies.

For the most part we have lost sight of the biblical understanding of persecution, for (in the absence of dramatic acts of martyrdom) we tend to trivialize the word.  It’s easy for a teenager who is feeling unpopular to suddenly develop a persecution complex.  Those of us who would love to avoid conflict suddenly see such occasions as arenas of persecution.

It is the nature of the victim to feel persecuted and abused.  Lord knows, that there are real victims out there – those who have been abused, who have known violence both physical and psychological.  So we can’t say that persecution (the kind that creates real victims) doesn’t happen in our world because it does.

But Jesus is not talking about all victims here and certainly not those who live with a victim mentality.  Therefore, in seeking to understand this beatitude we may be putting the emphasis in the wrong place.  The emphasis is not on persecution whatever form that might take.  The emphasis is rather on that other word, “righteousness”.

While there are certainly those of us who would avoid what we think of as persecution at almost any cost, there are others who seem to take an almost unholy delight in being numbered among the persecuted.  We certainly saw this phenomenon in ministerial circles in the 1960s.  Whenever ministers would gather, the topic would be “Who’s getting it in the neck this week for standing up for the truth -- the truth about race relations or the truth about Viet Nam.”  Who’s being persecuted for righteousness sake this week in the world you ask.  It went the other way too; there were patient parishioners who felt they were being persecuted by persistent preachers.

Certainly any minister worth his or her salt will try to proclaim God’s truth in light of the great issues of the day, but we also know that truth does not come pure and unadulterated from God’s mind to my lips.  It is filtered through human experience, bias, and prejudice.  It is clearly a divine, human transaction that we have going on here from pulpit to pew.  I will do my best to proclaim God’s word and you need to do your best to hear it under the guidance of the spirit, in spite of the frailties of the message.

You see, the emphasis is not on persecution.  The emphasis is on righteousness.  For the main emphasis is not on a kind of in your face self-righteousness that is worn like a badge that says, “Here I am hit me again because that’s just another proof I’m right.”  This is the second time that word “righteousness” is used in the beatitudes.  The first had to do with “hungering and thirsting after righteousness”.  The object of that hungering and thirsting was a right relationship with God.  But here when placed in conjunction with persecution, it means practicing the justice of God.

It is interesting that immediately after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem the writer of Luke chooses to tell us about Jesus bursting into the Temple and tossing out the money changers in anger.  This is one of those images it is hard for us to comprehend in the mind’s eye for anger is not an emotion with which any of us deal very well.  For this man, it doesn’t fit our image of the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, very well.

Therefore, it is well for us to be reminded that much of the fabled wrath of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is directed against those who preserve their own wealth and power at the expense of the lowly; someone who won’t pay a fair wage, or who mistreats a laborer.  Righteousness is consistently defined by the prophets as a willingness to care for the most vulnerable people in a culture, characterized in ancient Israel as orphans, widows, resident aliens, and the poor.

So let us not forget at the beginning of this Holy Week, as we have hailed Jesus as our Messiah and Savior with palms and praise, that the discipleship to which we are called if we are to follow him is to give voice to the voiceless, to stand with the powerless, to identify with the weak, to pray for the enemy, and to support the persecuted for righteousness sake.

You see, there is a walk that each of us begins this day and if we walk it with Christ, we will learn the cost of discipleship.  The German pastor and poet, Martin Niemoller, described our call well on that day in 1936 when he was arrested by Hitler and sent off to Dachau:

“First they came for the Communists and I wasn’t a Communist

so I didn’t speak up.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I wasn’t a Trade Unionist

so I didn’t speak up.

Then they came for Jews and I wasn’t a Jew so I didn’t speak up.

Then they came for the Catholics and I wasn’t a Catholic so I didn’t speak up.

And finally they came for me and there was no one left to speak up.”

As we make our way through Holy Week, the palms will make the path to persecution, and persecution for righteousness sake will lead us into a whole new dimension of life.