A Matthean detour: "Blessed are those who are persecuted"

Recently someone broke a window at a local Baptist church, entered the building and spray-painted on the walls. According to the insurance company, the “damage done by the spray paint was severe and extensive throughout the church.” When confronted by such apparently senseless acts, our responses seem almost preprogrammed. We church people feel persecuted and misunderstood. We disdain and despise the acts. We almost always think the vandals are young people. Odds are good that they are.

These particular perpetrators left a note, written in poem-like lines: “hey, your probably wondering why we did this. / We weren’t on drugs. / Only one of us is gay…. / We don’t worship Satan…. / We don’t even hate you. / We did it to give you a SMALL taste of / what religion has done to the world. / Stop lying to your kids. / STOP! Hating people because a 2000+ year old book told you. / Stop fighting science and praising ignorance. / —GIG  KL”

(One beautiful irony: the note was written on the margin of a copy of the lyrics to “Amazing Grace.” That’s so good it almost had to be intentional.)

The insurance company concluded, “Incidents like this are always discouraging…but as a community of believers, I know we will hold on—together—to the promise of Matthew 5:10.” 

And this is what I want us to think about.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” We church insiders read this to mean that we are the blessed and the kingdom of heaven is ours because the world persecutes us for our righteousness. That is also the insurance company’s interpretation of the text and of the vandalism. But what if Jesus spoke this beatitude, and the seven preceding it, not to synagogue insiders (the church), but to those outside the bounds of religious righteousness? What if these beatitudes were preached to outsiders who were excluded by self-righteous, synagogue insiders? What if Jesus spoke the blessing to sinners who were persecuted for the sake of preserving some human tradition of righteousness? What if "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake" means not us, but those we persecute for the sake of our understanding of righteousness, our knowledge of good and evil. What if theirs is the kingdom of heaven and not ours?

If this reading is true (and I think it is), the damage to the church is not the spray paint of the vandals; the damage to the church is self-inflicted by a hypocritical self-righteousness which condemns and excludes the ‘unrighteous.’

Did the spray-painters, however ineffectively, speak a prophetic word to the church? Will we be discouraged and tighten our security as the insurance company suggests? Will we persecute—or prosecute—the vandals? Or will we be courageous, and welcome those unlike us so that they will invite us along when they inherit the kingdom?