Blessed Are the Peacemakers

In the Talmud, there is a story about a rabbi who met the prophet Elijah in a crowded market. The rabbi seized the opportunity to ask him a question: "Who here, among all who are present, is most likely to experience eternal life?" Elijah pointed toward two humble, unremarkable-looking men.

The rabbi approached them and asked, "What makes you worthy of such merit?"

They answered, "We are not. Unless you want to take into consideration that whenever people are having trouble we try to comfort them, and when people quarrel we try to make them friends again."

That story reminds me of Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." (Matthew 5:9)

In his book The Word, Noah Ben Shea quotes the rabbi Joel ben Abraham Shemaria, whose words bring this home for me:

"Your primary purpose in life on this earth is to be at peace with all people. Do not be contentious with anyone. Make your home a place of quiet and happiness, absent of hard language, and filled with love, friendship, modesty, and a continual air of the gentle and reverent."

He goes on to say that this attitude should not be limited to the home.

I understand the instinct behind that line — peace ought to ripple outward from the people closest to us into the wider world. But I also know that for many of you, home is not where peace comes easily. Some of the hardest, most exhausting peacemaking any of us will ever do happens at our own kitchen tables — with a spouse, a sibling, a parent, a child. The people we love the most are often the people with whom peace is hardest to keep.

And yet I keep coming back to this: if we cannot practice peace in our own homes, I'm not sure we are equipped to practice it anywhere else. The patience, the willingness to forgive rather than retaliate, the discipline of trying to reconcile rather than win — those are skills we learn, painstakingly, in the smallest and most personal arenas of our lives. The conflicts of the wider world are often just larger versions of the same conflicts we are wrestling with at home.

So perhaps the home is not the easy starting point. It may be the hardest training ground there is — and also, for that very reason, the most important one.

Let us pray: Gracious God, when we look at the division, the violence, and the heartache of the world around us, we long for your peace. Grant us open hearts that we would be filled with your mercy and grace. And then, O God, use us as instruments of that peace for which we long. Amen.

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