THE COMPANY OF PROPHETS


Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you, because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.(Matthew 5: 11-12 – NAS)

After telling his followers that they are blessed when they are persecuted for standing in righteousness, he goes on with the cheerful news that they can expect even more persecution because they are His followers. It’s almost as if He is really challenging them, testing how deeply they are committed to following Him on the path He is showing them.

I’ve always thought that was the distracting thing about reading the Beatitudes. All those sentences beginning with “Blessed are” create this calm, serene atmosphere like an empty church sanctuary lit by warm light setting stained glass windows glowing. But then the qualities Jesus speaks of are nitty-gritty, down and dirty, hard-nosed actions. Perhaps that is one of the things that contributes to our not giving these verses close attention.

Everything that has come before this moment has had its pragmatic point. But here Jesus removes the last worldly veil of what He is talking about. Here He tells us that because of Him we are likely to become the targets of persecution. And not just attacks and hostility, but lies and slanders about our characters and actions, all because we follow Jesus. For that is what He means by “falsely saying all kinds of evil.”

Nobody likes to have their character or actions misrepresented. We do take pride in our integrity. It pleases us to shine in our own virtues, as it were. So when someone comes along and throws figurative mud on us, we do not take it well or easily. But Jesus warns us that even though we will be blessed because of those virtues, our commitment to following Him will also bring these unpleasant attacks.

He makes a point of comparing this “fate” to the treatment that the prophets were given in older times. Treated as outcasts, outlaws, disturbing personalities, the prophets of old rarely got soft treatment. Few people wanted to have a prophet in their house. But in the elder days, a prophet was also usually a selected individual, selected by God, and usually alone in his era.

But when Jesus tells His followers that they were likely to be treated the way the prophets had been treated, I think He is also indicating that unlike “those who were before you,” His followers were each blessed as prophets. No longer was the message from God to be brought to people by individual, isolated prophets, but rather every single follower of Jesus. They would be a company of prophets.

Suddenly, the mantle of Elijah falls not just to his chosen heir Elisha, but to every single person sitting there at the feet of this teacher from Galilee – and to all of us who follow Him even now.

Oh, my. Do we even consider that these days? Or do we just look at the part about being persecuted for the sake of Jesus? Ah, martyrdom! Pious images of the committed believer patiently enduring being stoned, as Stephen was. Deep in our commitment, we want to believe we can stand that ground and not give in and grovel for mercy. But let us remember that Stephen wasn’t silent as they killed him. Like one of the prophets of old, he continued getting his message out.

We may be willing to accept the possibility of being persecuted and lied about. But are we willing to be prophets? I don’t mean in the sense of fore-telling the future, but rather as being messengers of God. To really stand up in public and speak of what is important to the Lord?

We generally do not see prophets as being followers. They don’t sit quietly in pews listening to insightful instruction from pastors and then spend the rest of their week with their attention on their mundane job. They aren’t contented with singing praise songs in worship and then returning home to lunch and football games. Prophets stand up in the middle of things and take our attention off worldly things by talking – loudly – about God.

It would seem that Jesus expects us to have that kind of passion about our commitment to Him. But He also tells us to rejoice about this, because our reward in heaven will be great.

Now, that must be something indeed, for we know already that just being part of the kingdom of heaven is a great and marvelous thing to start with. Yet Jesus says that in all that glory, when we are persecuted because we are His followers, we shall be the great among the great, the glorified in the midst of glory.

These beatitudes challenge us about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And He gives us these challenges before He even unfolds the greater details of the way to live a godly life. He makes no pretense that this is going to be easy. He even goes so far as to say explicitly it will be difficult, painful, and possibly even deadly. But if we stick it out, our reward is great.