Peacemakers: Living as the children of God

Matthew 5:9

New Revised Standard Version:   Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

The Message: You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.

Peacemakers, it sounds so wonderful to be a peacemaker, so warm and joyful. But peacemaking is hard work. It is hard work, not least because we ourselves do not want to live at peace. The song says it well, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” Peacemakers know how hard peace is to attain, they know in themselves how difficult it is to be people of peace. People of peace give up their right to revenge, give up their right to exact a pound of flesh. Being people of peace is learned not in the classroom, but in the reality of real life. 

To be a peacemaker is to point to a way of living that is different than the world of war, of conflict, of vitriol, of provocation, of revenge in which we live. Peacemakers remind us that God’s way of life, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ, is the way to abundant life, the way to the wholeness and health, not only for ourselves but also for our enemies. At the heart of peacemaking stands mercy, not a cheap mercy, not an easy mercy, but a mercy that struggles to be expressed for it knows that offering mercy to the enemy is not easy. That mercy offered to the stranger comes with the need to put peace above vengeance, and a healed relationship above reminding the other of the wrong they have done.

To live as a peacemaker is to be nothing less than a child of God, living out God’s pattern in the world. No wonder peacemakers are called the children of God. 

PRAYER:

O Lord, you sent your Son, the Prince of Peace, to our world. Through him bring peace to this world. May that peace begin in us, as we seek to walk the hard road of living as peacemakers. In Jesus’ name. Amen.