Blessed Are You
When Men Shall Revile You and Persecute You and Say All Manner of Evil Against
You Falsely, For My Sake. Rejoice and Be Exceeding Glad, For Great is Your
Reward in Heaven
March 30, 2014
Our Lord’s words are “powerful and sharper than any two-edged
sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the
joints and marrow,” for the Word and Son of God is “a discerner of the thoughts
and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). He knows that listeners to His voice
desire more than to marvel at the blessed poor in spirit, meek, merciful, and
peacemakers. They want to become what they admire and the Lord already begins
to accomplish that transformation by shifting from speaking about them in the
third person to speaking to you in the second and to the blessedness that is
yours if you follow Him, swimming upstream in rapids cascading down in the
direction of vice, and in the process you find that others revile you, others
persecute you, and others slander you for the Lord’s sake, and yet you rejoice
and are exceedingly glad!
Feeling persecuted, reviled, and slandered in a dark and
dangerous world where no one can be trusted is not a healthy state when
considered apart from Christ. In fact, it could serve as an apt description of
a paranoid personality disorder. Those suffering with such a disorder fear that
they are not capable of handling threatening situations on their own and
believe that trust cannot be given to anyone. They have very little
self-efficacy and ill-boding over many things. Not so, for the Christian Christ
calls us to become. Christians who face reviling and persecution for His sake
also are able, like Saint Paul, to confess: “I can do all things through Christ
which strengtheneth me” (Phillipians 4:13), for “in all these things we are
more than conquerors through Him that loved us” (Romans 8:37). They trust in
the Lord with all their heart and become “like Mount Zion, which cannot be
removed but abideth forever” (Psalm 125:1). And if a limited range of choices
and narrowed freedom of inner movement characterize those who suffer from
psychopathology, those who are persecuted for righteousness on the contrary
feel more freedom, as Saint Athanasius observes when he writes, “the more the
enemies hem us in, let us be all the more at liberty; although they revile us,
let us come together” ( Letter 11).
No stranger to persecution and revilement himself, Saint
Nikolai of Zicha wrote these words to a suffering woman, “According to Christ’s
teaching—blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and say
all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake—those who are put to shame
and slandered for Christ’s sake will rejoice and be glad in the homeland of
angels, along with these people, happy are those who trust their Savior for
they shall be saved, those who burn with love toward the Creator and His
creatures, for they will be crowned with unfading glory, those who sacrifice
their earthly life, for they shall obtain life in heaven. This is the true and
unceasing happiness which our Lord has revealed and declared to mankind. For
this kind of happiness, kings have sacrificed their crowns, the rich men their
riches, martyrs their lives—as easily as the trees cast away their leaves in
the fall” (Letter 89 “To An Unfortunate Woman Who Asks, ‘Why Does the Gospel
Not Talk About Happiness?”).
How do Christians manage such heroic and free acts with
the ease of trees shedding their leaves? How can they rejoice and be glad in
situations that would leave most people, even the most psychologically healthy,
with only the most negative options from among which to choose, such as
shuddering at such situations, being afraid, becoming angry, or becoming
despondent? The answer is that they have become like Christ, the sole purpose
of the Beatitudes and incarnation of God the Word. They “have the mind of
Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16) and look at the world in a radically different way
through the Light of God that illumines and warms all of creation. Saint John
Chrysostom in his second Eutropian homily— delivered after Eutropius had fled
authorities and left the sanctuary offered by the Church—said to the Christians
present, “I saw the swords and I meditated on Heaven; I expected death, and I
thought about the resurrection; I beheld the sufferings of this lower world,
and I took account of the heavenly prizes; I observed the devices of the enemy,
and I meditated on the heavenly crown: for the occasion of the contest was
sufficient for encouragement and consolation. True, I was being forcibly dragged
away, but I suffered no insult from the act; for there is only one real insult,
namely sin: and should the whole world insult you, yet if you do not insult
yourself you are not insulted. The only real betrayal is the betrayal of the
conscience: do not betray your own conscience, and no one can betray you.”
Christians always have an additional option. They can
always rejoice and be exceedingly glad, because they can always turn their
minds from earth to heaven, from death to life, from man to God. This is the
secret of the martyrs and of all Christians truly worthy of that most honorable
and majestic name. Again, Saint Nicholai of Zycha in his Prayers by the Lake,
once wrote, “When your mortal brothers hear about your sufferings they consider
them unbelievable and unbearable, for they can really imagine themselves only
in your suffering and not in your love, in the meaning of your sufferings. Oh,
if they could only imagine themselves in your love also! All your sufferings
would seem like nothing to them, just as they seemed to you. Just as the cold
rain and the howling of the wind seem like nothing to a mother as she hurries
home to her child. To one who has a goal greater than the world, the world can
do nothing. One who hurries to a home wider than space, space cannot contain.
One who has a love more precious than temporal creations, can neither be
impeded nor trampled by time. Across all rugged terrain and through all stormy
tempests Love leads His beloved ones and draws them to Himself.” And so, it should
come as no surprise at all that “they rejoice and are exceedingly glad, for
great is their reward in heaven,” a reward they already experience in the
depths of their humble, meek, merciful, pure, and peaceful hearts that have
become living tabernacles of the Son of God.
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