Last night, my wife and I watched Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston in the 1958 Western movie, Big Country. We haven’t finished it. It got to be late. We’ll try to do it this afternoon as we relax, and also remember those who gave their lives to protect the freedoms we all enjoy. While we were watching, my bride checked Wikipedia on the life of Gregory Peck. This is a habit of hers, and I enjoy it.
This morning, as our pastor was preaching on the beatitudes in Luke 6:20-26, I thought about that Wikipedia article on Gregory Peck. Most of us will never have a Wikipedia article written about us. I sometimes do some editing in wikipedia articles when I have discrepancies, old information, or address changes. One year I took a stab at writing an article to encourage one of my four brothers. I thought his achievements were worthy of note. They stayed up for a day before more senior editors decided that I had overstepped and took it down.
Sometimes, when I read Wikipedia articles (often), there is a section in the bio called “CONTROVERSIES.” Often, this is a dumpsite for all manner of personal, financial, moral, and religious scandals, proven and unproven. Usually, the supporting material is speculative and slanted by whoever was the primary editor of the original article. That’s just one of the reasons you need to be very careful about what you read in Wikipedia.
I’ve often thought that if I ever did have a Wikipedia article, I would want it to have an empty CONTROVERSIES section. But if what my pastor was preaching about this morning is true, that would be impossible if I am faithful to Jesus.
Let me just look at two verses, 22 and 26, to make my point.
“Blessed are you when men hate you and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man.”
“Woe to you when men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.”
Both verses above are from the NASB95 translation.
Here’s how those two verses became clear to me today.
Any ambition to have a “clean of controversy” bio as a Christian is an ambition inconsistent with Jesus’s teaching in the beatitudes. If we are friends with Jesus, we can’t be friends with the world. Moreover, if we are friends with Jesus, we will, eventually, be enemies of the world. It will hate us, ostracize us, insult us, and scorn our names as evil when we take our stand for Jesus. That’s the truth. And we have to learn to live with it.
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