A Thought For The Week Of August 24, 2015

"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account." (Matthew 5:11) Jesus never made any promise to his disciples that the life he was calling them to would be an easy life full of worldly ease and success, and yet sometimes that's the image that gets presented. The so-called "Prosperity Gospel" (now called by many of its proponents the "Word-Faith movement," I suppose because that sounds holier) tries to put forth the idea that God's will is for all followers of Jesus to be healthy and wealthy - which, of course, leads to all sorts of abuses, not the least of which is that the idea gets put forward that if you're not healthy and wealthy it must be your fault; you must have done something to get God angry with you to the point at which God chose to pull his blessings from you. That's nonsense, of course. Jesus never promised us that things would be easy and comfortable. The Bible is full of examples of those who were NOT blessed in any material or worldly way because of their faith. Here's a classic example of Jesus' thinking from the Beatitudes. Those who follow Jesus - far from being blessed - should expect hardship in the form of insult, persecution and slander. And I suppose that the proponents of the Prosperity Gospel would say that they're experiencing such things for being denounced! But that would be an abuse of Jesus' words. I'm quite certain that Jesus did not expect or intend that his words would be used to defend televangelists who use their pulpits to bilk folks out of money. Jesus was saying that we - his followers - should not expect a life of ease, wealth or prosperity. Are there blessings? Of course there are - but the blessings are spiritual, not material. They are the blessings of knowing that we belong to one another; that we belong to Christ; that we belong to God. In the face of that knowledge, all the material blessings in the world are meaningless.