The Bible says that the meek will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). I love this promise. When I am anxious, the mountains around this valley stabilize me with their huge imperturbability. The earth has sustained all our harrowed lives since time began; and it never stops bursting into blossom from bare twigs, or turning extravagant colors over our heads. A field of dry oat grass has to be the most beautiful form of gold. It’s almost a fairy tale inheritance. But occasionally, the promise feels like a piece of grim irony, because I see how in this world, the meek get ground into the dirt.
I wrote in my journal a few years ago that no good deed goes unpunished, and the meek get kicked in the gut. Not even because anyone is aiming at them, particularly – just because they are standing where somebody else wants more legroom. I try to be careful about what I write in my journal, because cynicism is a dangerous thing to crystallize words around. But I can’t say I have found this observation to be inaccurate. It’s been rather underlined. I’d only add a footnote now, that even on a small scale, it gets wearying to feel like the ashtray in which other people stub out the stray ends of their aggression or selfishness. And I know that my experience is very tempered by living in a relatively safe, free, first-world country. In other parts of the world, the meek are very literally getting ground into the dirt. Sometimes (as in the persecution of Christians during the Soviet era), they are literally used as ashtrays.
What is meekness? It’s easy to mistake “agreeableness” for grace. But Jesus was not always agreeable. He set his face like a flint and opposed his disciples, to do what he needed to do. He took a scourge to people trying to make a profit out of prayer. He bore witness against the entire religious and state order. But he invites us to come to him for his meekness: “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle [meek] and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).
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One of my favorite poems is one of the oldest: Genesis 8 has a poem composed by God. After he destroyed the old world in the flood, God made a promise about the earth. He said he would never again curse it for man’s sake, but that:
“While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Winter and summer,
And day and night
Shall not cease.”
(Gen. 8:22)
People did not really learn their lesson, emerging from the ark into that new world. Noah shortly got drunk, and there’s a repeat of the whole drama of forbidden fruit, nakedness, shame, curse. It all unravels from there. But the earth isn’t involved in this “same-song, second-verse” curse. Despite all our shameful crimes and bombings and broken families, and all the disintegrating bodies of these events, the earth keeps turning through seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.
That’s because God blessed the earth. He blessed it with something of his own blessedness, the quiet generosity of his own enduring. It was God who promised not to send another flood, no matter how much we all deserve it. It is God who takes all of us in, through all of history – the criminals, their victims, the lives we can scarcely bear to read about and can make no sense of. God carries us all to the grave, and gives back, Easter morning, masses of almond blossoms.
This is what we see in Jesus, bearing the cross – the crushing end of our yoke. We see a blessedness that can bear whatever cursed weight is loaded on and keep pulling through its own faithful seasons.
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Another one of my favorite poems is by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(“God’s Grandeur”)
For all this, the earth is still full of the goodness of the Lord.
“In this world, as a rule, it is not the meek who appear to get the victory; they are trodden on, and trodden down, and a meek-spirited man is often much despised among his fellowmen.”
-C. H. Spurgeon, in the “‘Beautiful for Ever,’” on Psalm 149:4
When I was recently feeling a bit grim about meekness and wanted to add that footnote to my earlier journal entry, it occurred to me to think of all the ways in which I might have used God as a sort of ashtray. How many ways had I stubbed out the stray ends of my ego, my mixed-up priorities, my blind and foolish haste, my outright sin – in a single week? And while all those ways crowded in on me, and made me sick of myself, I realized that for all this, the meekness of Jesus is not spent. He still invites me to come and learn. I understood that the Holy Spirit’s meekness is the dearest freshness deep down my failures. The Father is not weary of being meek with me. The meekness of the Trinity is new every morning.
So I can take up the light end of Jesus’ yoke, and learn to be unspent too. And maybe, I can come a little closer to that blessed quality which can inherit the blessed earth.
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Earlier that morning, I read Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in my Disciples Literal New Testament, which I use for study: “He made from one man every nation of mankind, that they should dwell upon all the face of the earth, having determined the times having been appointed for them and the boundaries of their dwelling places … Because he set a day on which he is going to judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he designated, having granted a proof to everyone – having raised him up from the dead” (Acts 17:26,31). It’s a quick panorama of history: a confused mass of nations between two sharply outlined figures. Around those two figures at either end, there is coherence and unity. One is the original head of the family, and we’re being gathered into the other. But the rest is seething turmoil, in which no individual life gathers much coherence.
This must be why our lives so often don’t make much sense. Our best efforts, the ones we wanted to do for God and others, seem so often to peter out to nothing. Our best qualities get misinterpreted and taken advantage of, or we realize that our desire to help only added a burden. If we could understand the reason for our trials, we could bear them better; but an aspect of almost every trial is that it seems so needless and meaningless. We feel like our faith ought to provide clarity and purpose about what is happening to us, and what we are doing here – are supposed to be doing – but every time we seem to find a clue, it vanishes in further developments. And all these fits and starts don’t seem to have an organizing principle, even in our faith.
But isn’t this exactly what you’d expect, when the story is so much bigger than any of our individual lives? We can’t find the unity and the coherence in our little span of time because unity and coherence are around those two figures at the beginning and the end. God made the dust cohere into Adam. And around Adam, he made the whole human family. But Adam sinned and died, and we all straggled off our separate ways. The other man waits for us at the end of time, saying, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden.”
But we have to disintegrate all the way back to dust to cohere around him. Adam fell, and the family fractured, not just into different language groups, but into divorces and gangs and culture wars. Right now, we are living out the shattered and confounded part of Paul’s panorama. And this part won’t be complete until we are literally decomposing.
Until we rise again into Christ, we can’t turn and see how all the snapped off and scattered storylines were drawn back to Him. We won’t be able to grasp the logic of our own lives, or the lives of the people in Nigeria and Myanmar and China, or the lives of our children.
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In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius contrasts a spring and a well: “If a man should stand by a limpid pure spring, and curse it, the spring never ceases sending up potable water; and if he should cast clay into it or filth, it will speedily disperse them and wash them out, and will not be at all polluted. How then shalt thou possess a perpetual fountain and not a mere well?” (Meditations 8.51.1). If meekness were just a soft personality trait that comes easier than assertion, it would be a well; and a well can be poisoned by what is thrown into it. Meekness is a spring – a power of goodness and freshness drawn from an unpollutable source. You can’t even contain it in a broken bit of experience, let alone poison it. Meekness takes faith.
It’s quite true that meekness (unlike cheating) doesn’t prosper. People have been observing that for centuries, and further observation will only underline how often meek people are kicked in the gut – or crucified. But that isn’t the end of the story. It isn’t even enough of the story to begin to understand.
Paul’s panorama of history encouraged me not to feel cynical about meekness, because it encouraged me to keep walking by faith. Not that everything about the way is cleared up: it’s mostly a muddle. But I can take the next tottery step toward the man in whom it will make sense.
Mrs. Heidi Zartman
Ebenezer Reformed Church
Shafter, CA