The Divine Demand for Perfection: Luke 6:27-38
Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
“But to you who are listening I say: Love your
enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless
those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If
someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes
your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give
to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not
demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have
them do to you.
32 “If you love those
who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love
them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good
to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And
if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to
you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But
love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to
get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be
children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and
wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your
Father is merciful.
37 “Do not judge, and
you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.
Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it
will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running
over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will
be measured to you.” (NIV)
There was a friend of mine in
graduate school named Shannon, a spiky and fun and passionately atheistic woman
who was in the year ahead of me in our master’s-level program. I was still quite sure I was going to become
a professor of medieval drama, but everyone knew I spent quite a lot of time at
my church and took our studies of church history as heritage rather than dry
recitation. Shannon delighted in pulling
me aside at parties or late-night study sessions when we were both a couple of
drinks in for some long theological discussions, talking to me about how
frustrating it was that so many Christians thought she was a bad person because
she was an atheist. “I’m a moral atheist,”
she said. “I think we shouldn’t be jerks
to each other. In fact, I think I’m less
of a jerk than a lot of Christians I know.”
She wasn’t
wrong. I, too, think she was less of a
jerk than a lot of Christians I knew, or at least people who claimed
Christianity when asked. As I have
become decidedly not a professor of medieval drama, I’ve remembered those
late-night conversations with what I can see now was her grief at being judged
so often and so quickly. “Do unto others”
seemed to have a hard stop for some folks when they encountered her, their vision
of all non-Christians being in some way morally defunct blocking their ability
to see that she, like them, was figuring out how to live in the world. So many of her interactions with people of
faith left with her thinking that a god who was okay with her getting called
names and thought of as less wasn’t a god she wanted to hang out with, anyway.
“But to you
who are listening”—today’s text plonks us down in the middle of Jesus’ sermon
on the plain, which is Luke’s answer to Matthew’s sermon on the mount. There are similar pieces, but the two sermons
aren’t exactly the same. Luke’s has
rather more of an edge, including the section of woes that Brenda read last
week along with the section of blessings.
In the thick
of His ministry, Jesus walked up a mountain to have some prayer time
alone. When he came back down, he called
together the twelve disciples and made them official before finding Himself
with a large audience wanting to hear Him teach and to be healed by Him. “The
whole crowd wanted to touch him,” says verse 19, which sounds terrible and
exhausting to me but prompted a whole sermon from Jesus. The “you who are listening” is this crowd and
these disciples, this group who saw Jesus as the shiny and new thing and wanted
desperately to be part of something good, something healing, something hopeful.
“Love your
enemies,” says Jesus to that group, which had to be a less-than-fun return on auditory
investment. I came to be healed, not
given an impossible assignment that seems to go against every self-preservation
habit I have. I would rather stay far
away from my enemies since they are, clearly, enemies. Loving them gets me nothing but pain.
But this is
what this whole chunk of text is: Jesus comes down the mountain to talk to the
people looking for healing and says it’s not about what you are doing
but why. Do you love people
because it makes you more easily lovable?
Not enough. Love the people who
will never thank you for it. Do you lend
to those who are safe bets who will never cause you grief for having done
so? Not enough. Lend to the those who will forget completely
that they owe you anything. Do you judge
others because you have led a righteous life and feel like you have the
standard by which to measure them? Not
enough. Keep your judgment to yourself
because that is not your job.
This is not
Jesus’ sermon to the doormats and we need to be careful not to think that this
is an instruction toward passivity. This
isn’t encouragement to go out and dump all your money in the hands of someone
you don’t know so that you can’t afford to meet your own needs; it isn’t encouragement
to go to the people who have caused you pain and say that any kind of
relationship they want is fine by you.
Don’t do that, not least because one of the great commandments is to
love others as you love yourself and it is not loving of one’s self to negate
our own sense of self-preservation for someone else’s power trip.
Nor is this
encouragement to just let corruption run rampant because anything goes under
the banner of love. Jaime L. Waters
writes, “We should notice that Jesus’ command is not to love injustice and
ignore corruption. Jesus does not want us to accept abuse, tolerate racism or
overlook the root causes of suffering in society. Rather, he wants us to be
actively, creatively and mercifully engaged in preventing and solving the
problems of the world.”[1]
This is being
merciful as the Father is merciful, perfect as the Father is perfect, living up
to the Divine understanding of love: to face that which is terrible head-on and
flip it over on its back because we are building the world anew in the image of
God’s holy Kingdom. Bless those who
curse you—Proverbs 25:22, for in so doing you will heap coals on their heads by
not sinking to their level of petty cruelty.
Turn the other cheek because now they have to hit you like they mean it,
like they’re willing to go for this a second time and engage you in a true
fight. If someone takes your coat, give
your shirt and make them see you standing in the absurdity of toplessness when
you one-up their greed.
Jesus is not
laying out a rulebook of what, exactly, to do; He is weaving a tapestry of
hyperbole that Rev. Kathryn Turner notes offers “a way of life in which the
poor and powerless can act from a position of strength - to take an initiative
which confronts their opponent and which leaves the wrong where it belongs.
Their dignity does not depend on how others treat them.”[2]
This audience
is not the strapping officials of Rome who can afford to get into a fistfight
with someone. These are the people who
are bent over in pain, who have been forgotten by polite society, who have time
and desperation enough to hang out at the bottom of a mountain for this week’s
famous rabbi to maybe change their lives, even a little. And Jesus responds not with platitudes but
with proclamations, with pronouncements of the seemingly impossible that give
power through love. He does not tell
them to continue groveling but to take the ways in which the world tries to
break them and yank so hard on the assumptions that the aggressor falls over into
the reality of compassion.
That is
the perfect love that, as is written in 1 John 4, casts out fear—not love in
the sense of there being absolutely no flaws but love in the sense of there
being absolutely no limits, of there being no edge to it that people can hit
where they become unlovable, unmanageable, inhuman. Love your enemies because they are people
and because it weirds them out; love the ones who cheat you because they are
people and because it makes them suspicious; love because you are a
person and not because it nets you anything at all. Love from a place of compassion for you and
for them, for the recognition that being human is hard but giving into evil
makes it harder, for the hope that showing someone a different way to engage might
change you both. Love because God loves,
and we are of God, we who were crafted from the earth and breathed into with
the Spirit, we whose tongues are flame-loosened.
When my friend
Shannon grieved at being told she was terrible because she was an atheist, she
was letting me know that she had met a lot of Christians who hadn’t listened to
this sermon on the plain. It’s not that
she’s the enemy I have to love but that she’s a person and I’m a person and
we’re both people on the planet and neither I nor any other being, Christian or
no, ever gets to treat her like she is inherently less. Even if she were an amoral atheist, I
do not get to dehumanize her. I do not
get to condemn her. Challenge her, yes;
spar with her, push her, dare her to live with love in a world that so very
rarely rewards it, invite her to meet a God I think is so incredibly worth
knowing that I left far more than a professorship in medieval drama to follow
where He led. But never condemn her,
because that is not mine to do. I am not
God, for which we can all be extraordinarily grateful, but I am called to be
merciful as God is merciful, perfect in the boundlessness of compassion as God
is perfect.
Who are you
being asked to love, Church? Who are you
being asked to engage with in such a way that the power differentials are laid
bare and you, not through violence but through the sort of kindness that burns,
call out the relationship as unsustainable?
Who are you being asked to leave off of condemning because that is God’s
and you are not God? It may well be
yourself, you who have taken even the shirt off your own back, you who know
exactly how many curses have come from your mouth. It may be someone else—a coworker, a family
member, a friend, your archnemesis at the mechanic’s shop, that one Facebook
friend who always says stupid things, the atheist you still know. What would it look like to love them—not necessarily
to like them, but to love them, to see their humanity and say that, that is the
important part? What would it be like to
love to do unto others as you would have them do unto you?
May we have
the strength to love ourselves, the compassion to love others, and the faith to
love the God Who calls us to the work of mercy.
Amen.
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