The surprising power of blessing

He was a man who held a lot of power over me, and when he hurt me badly, he didn’t even seem to notice. When I tried to talk with him about it, he did not want to hear me. My spiritual director suggested that, among other necessary responses, I’d have to consider forgiving him. That much I expected. But her next words were a revelation: “Bless him,” she said. “Bless him every day for five minutes.”

“Bless those who curse you”, Jesus says in Luke 6:28. In Romans 12:14, Paul demands that we bless those who persecute us. Peter also gets in on the act: “Do not repay evil with evil”, he declares in 1 Peter 3:9, but “on the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called”.

It’s an uncompromising expectation, isn’t it? For it is not easy to desire and declare the good of those who have wronged us. But that is what blessing is. When we bless someone, we affirm the good that is already in them, notwithstanding the pain they may have caused us, and we speak out the good that we desire God would work for and in them.  

Radical resistance 

When our immediate reaction to the one who sins against us might be cursing, blaming or speaking ill of them, the act of blessing that Jesus and His apostles invite us into is a deliberate act of resistance.  

It’s resistance because it does not pretend we are not hurt or weren’t sinned against. Instead, it stands in opposition to the evil of that act. Blessing is not mere ‘Christian niceness’. It counters evil, standing toe-to-toe with it. Like the radical act of forgiveness, the act of blessing does not excuse the sin against us or restore trust where it has been broken. Rather, it takes the power of that evil seriously and submits it to a higher power still.

Indeed, biblically speaking, to bless someone is to put God’s name on them. In Numbers 6:22-27, God told Aaron and his sons to bless God’s people using a specific form of words. By doing so, God said Aaron, and the priests who would come after him, would “put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them” (v27). Perhaps quite surprisingly, God would work divine blessing through human words of blessing.  

Unlike other prayers in scripture which are addressed to God, the priest would speak divine blessing and protection to the people in the sight of God. And God said that each time they did this, He would honour their words with the actions those words declared. God would bless and protect, turning His shining face towards them, pouring out grace and peace without measure.

Theologians call these ‘speech-acts’ – words that, in being uttered, do something. In the case of the blessing contained in Numbers 6, verse 27 leads us to understand that these specific priestly words were the means by which God would enact exactly what He had promised for Israel.  

The power of words

The New Testament references are less explicit as to how human words of blessing might participate in God’s work of blessing His people. Yet the early Church did recognise the power of our speech, whether to curse others (James 3:9) or corrupt the speaker (James 3:5-6). And Paul certainly thought there was value in declaring blessing on the churches to whom he wrote: he blessed the Corinthians with “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” (2 Corinthians 13:14).  

The act of blessing that Jesus invites us into is a deliberate act of resistance

Furthermore, Jesus Himself expected that when His disciples blessed a house with peace, God’s peace would rest upon anyone there who was open to receiving it (Luke 10:5-6). That is, Jesus fully expected that human words of blessing might somehow share in God’s own acts of blessing.

It becomes easier to see now why my spiritual director called me to bless the one who had hurt me. She was reminding me that God, in His freedom, chooses to work through the words of His people. And so I began, for a period, to bless this person as often as I remembered.  

I knew that I was speaking God’s own words after Him, thanking Him for what was good in that person and declaring yet more blessings over them in line with scripture. For I am confident that God sees what is good and desires yet more good things for all of us. 

Because circumstances made it complicated to go directly to this man and bless him to his face, I spoke blessing over him in the presence of God. I blessed his spiritual life and his physical life: health and relationships, resources and work, past, present and future. I declared these things in my prayer chair and in my car, in the gaps between meetings and in the ordinariness of daily life.

And it did make a difference. It brought me a level of freedom: my thoughts returned less often to how he had wronged me. And when they did, I knew how to respond. Though the facts of what had happened remained, their emotional weight slowly lessened and forgiveness became easier. And while reconciliation did eventually occur, the real change was what happened in me.