We began our final Beatitudes session with an insight from the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa in his brilliant book The Uncontrollability of the World:
The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and the desire, that we can make the modern world controllable.
Rosa says that we are compelled to make the world visible, reachable, manageable and useful — all in the service of making it controllable. Modern people cannot bear the uncontrollable. We are addicted to safety.
This is where the final two Beatitudes challenge us.
Flourishing are the peacemakers
The words flourishing and peace sound good together. Most modern people would say that a flourishing life is a peaceful life. But Jesus says “Flourishing are the peacemakers” — and that’s a different story. Elizabeth Rundle Charles puts it remarkably well:
Peacemaking, as all must know who have tried it in any instance, or in any measure, in real earnest, is about the least peaceful and the most perilous calling any of us can choose.
It means not standing securely or superciliously by and seeing the belligerents fight it out, in the duel of the streets, or in the strife of classes and nations; but stepping in between the combatants, holding back the hands that are buffeting and tearing each other, and thereby encountering the certainty of displeasing one combatant, with the possibility of turning both against yourself.
For in order to make peace, you must lay aside your ease and quiet, and enter on a world of jar and strife and misunderstanding; you must breathe the air of slander and bitterness, and some of the mud liberally thrown about is sure to stick to you.
Peacemaking isn’t safe. But Jesus declares that if you want to live a fully human, flourishing life, you must step out of safety and into peacemaking. Because right there, in the midst of all the “jar and strife and misunderstanding”, is the Good Life. Every time we stride into the uncontrollable for the sake of making peace, we are flourishing.
Why? Because it is there that we most truly show the family likeness. God our Father is a peacemaker. The work of the peacemakers, to quote Mrs. Charles again,
is nothing less than the carrying on and carrying out of the perpetual work of God Himself; of the Father Who was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself—of the Son Who made peace through the blood of His Cross,—of the reconciling Spirit of peace, and power, and love.
We flourish when people look at our lives and see the family likeness. Like Father, like sons.
Flourishing are the persecuted?
Let’s be clear: Jesus is not saying that persecution is a flourishing state, full stop. Jesus is speaking about people who are persecuted “on account of righteousness.” (We looked at this important biblical word in our previous session.) The Good News Bible hits all the right notes in its translation of this Beatitude: “Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires.”
If while doing what God requires you find yourself disliked, opposed, in danger at the hands of other people, of human systems, of nations — don’t just grin and bear it; don’t just keep calm and carry on; and don’t even kick against it. Know that you are flourishing.
This is a hard word. No one wants to be exposed to this kind of pain, especially in our current algophobic moment (literally “fear of pain”). The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that even though modern people experience pain,
Today, pain cannot be expressed. It is condemned to be mute. The palliative society does not permit pain to be enlivened into a passion, to be given a language.
Pain could speak to us if we let it, Han says. But we silence it before it ever gets the chance.
What might the pain of our discipleship say if we didn’t silence it, but allowed it to speak? What words would we hear if the pain of the cross we are called to bear were given a language?
We might hear the voice of Jesus saying, “I do not call you to do this alone. Come with me. When you are joined to me, everything that feels like death is but the birth pangs of real life. Die with me and you will rise.”
Hartmut Rosa diagnoses our compulsion to make the world controllable. But listen to what he says next:
Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.
The Beatitudes are Jesus’ invitation to flourish in a world alive with his presence. It’s not the kind of flourishing we expect. He will whisk us into the uncontrollable and bring us to the end of ourselves. But he will accompany us, ushering us into the life that is truly life.
Flourishing for the Safe and Comfortable — Three Things Beatitudes Course Audio