Ecclesiasticus 2:(1-6) 7-11 | Psalm 149 | Ephesians 1:(11-14) 15-23 | Luke 6:20-26(27-36)
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Earlier in the week, as I was studying for the sermon today and looking at the Gospel text, I put the Gospel citation into a search of some archives that I look at regularly — it pulls up old articles and old commentaries. And one popped up with today’s Gospel. It was from The Living Church magazine — the magazine we have out in the narthex — and it was from the 1940s. It was an article in which they discussed proposed revisions to the Daily Office lectionary, that’s the list of readings for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. And this passage from today’s Gospel, from the Gospel of Luke, was included in that lectionary, and it was included for a specific circumstance: it was for the eve of a martyr, for the observance of a martyrdom.
Now, well, that’s fitting, because think about what Jesus says: “Love your enemies, bless those who persecute you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.” As I was thinking about it — following Jesus’ principles as laid out in the Gospel text, at least by the lights of the world, seems like a very good way to wind up a martyr. It doesn’t fit our notions of what it means to be safe. It doesn’t fit our notions of what it means to be rational. It is a distinct challenge to the way we usually think about our lives, about protecting our lives and our safety.
Jesus tells us throughout his ministry, as recorded in the New Testament, to love our neighbors. He tells his disciples in the new commandment to love one another as he has loved us — which is a difficult thing. But as he says later in this Gospel text, what benefit is it to you if you love someone who loves you? What is the benefit to you, or how can it be counted toward you, if you loan or give to someone with the expectation of return? Jesus is laying out a difficult path for his disciples to follow: “Love your enemies, bless those who persecute you, pray for those who abuse you.”
Now, all of us, I’m sure, have people in our lives that we might consider enemies of some sort. Maybe we wouldn’t use that term, but there may be people we know — at work, at school, in our neighborhood — that we would rather not see. Folks who make our days more trying and difficult, people who challenge us and challenge our good spirits. That’s tough. But consider what Jesus says. He says, “Love your enemies and bless those who persecute you.” Jesus was teaching in his earthly ministry in a day and age where persecution of a very violent sort was common. How many of us have had to deal with persecution on that scale? So when Jesus says, “Bless those who persecute you,” that covers a wide array of behaviors that I hope we have not endured — although some may have. And yet loving our enemies means blessing those who persecute us and praying for those who abuse us.
So Jesus says, “Love them.” I take a little comfort in the fact that he doesn’t say, “Like them.” You ever heard — sometimes parents will say this — “I love you, but right now I don’t think I like you”? I’ve heard people say that. But the word that Jesus uses in this passage is a specific type of love. It means overflowing, self-sacrificing love. It’s the same sort of love that, when Scripture says “God is love,” this is the type of love it’s talking about. When Jesus says, “Love your neighbor,” this is the type of love it’s talking about. When Paul writes in First Corinthians, that whole reflection on faith, hope, and love — this is the type of love Paul’s talking about.
And just for the record, I sometimes wish we could put a moratorium on using that passage at weddings, because that shapes the entire way we see it, and we really should see it in a much broader context. The last funeral I did, it was a reading at the funeral — and I thought that was a wonderful thing, to have a passage on faith, hope, and love. “Now abide these three, and the greatest of these is love.” Self-sacrificing, overflowing love.
It’s a love that means letting go of what we want, of what our nature says we would like to do. And so loving your enemy doesn’t mean that you suddenly like them. It doesn’t mean that you suddenly want to spend time with them, go hang out, go to a dinner party with them. Loving your enemy falls in line with this idea of self-sacrificing, overflowing love.
And what do we sacrifice when we love our enemies? We sacrifice the feeling that we can judge them, that we’re better than them, that we somehow have it over on them. It doesn’t mean we countenance what they do. It doesn’t mean we like the way they behave. It means that we let go of the idea that we deserve revenge, or that we deserve to be the one to sit in judgment.
And the wonderful thing about this command is that it actually empowers Jesus’ disciples — it empowers us, if we live into it. Because, you see, if we don’t love our enemies, if we can’t learn to bless those who persecute us, if we can’t learn to pray for those who abuse us — to pray that God would turn their hearts, to pray that they would recognize the evil that they have done — then we will simply go forward in our lives reacting to what others have done to us. We will not have the freedom of agency and taking initiative for ourselves, because we’ll be tangled up reacting to what another person has done.
But when we choose to take Jesus as our example, and to love our enemies — to sacrifice the claim that we are better, that we can judge, that we can exact retribution or vengeance — then we can focus on other things. Like living our lives, moving forward, doing good, and not letting them control who and what we are and what we become. So this difficult task that Jesus sets before us is a task that leads to freedom — which makes sense, as he’s describing the kingdom of God.
He starts out this passage with a list of people who are blessed: the poor, those who are persecuted for his sake. They’re blessed because theirs is the kingdom of God. He’s describing people who are already in the kingdom. And then, in Luke’s account, there’s this list of woes: “Woe to the rich, for you have received your reward. Woe to those who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will weep.” And so it’s the counterbalance to those who are experiencing the negatives of life now but who are promised the kingdom.
But then there’s this key phrase that Jesus says that lets you know he’s transitioning to something we should pay attention to: “But I say to you.” If you ever want to know when Jesus is getting ready to tell you a different way to go about things, a different route to take, these are the key words: “But I say to you.” So he’s described this contrast between those who are blessed and those who have woes to come — and then he says, “But I say to you.” In other words, this dichotomy doesn’t have to continue. The kingdom can belong to all of you, to any of you, if you learn to do these things by God’s grace: love your enemies, bless those who persecute you, pray for those who abuse you.
Now, I think we can all sort of consider the kinds of reconciliation, and the kinds of love of enemy — or maybe “frenemy”; that new term people throw out, “frenemies,” you’ve heard that. We can imagine a sort of reconciliation that would be uncomfortable, but would not really be the same as offering a blessing to someone who persecutes us. And we should do those things. The walk of discipleship is often about discomfort, and growing, and pushing through to be more like Jesus. But the really difficult task of loving our enemies can be seen in more extreme circumstances.
I’ve told the story before about the Protestant French couple in a little village in France during World War II. They had taken in and hidden many of their Jewish neighbors, and the Nazis came to their house repeatedly, looking for the Jews of that village. The couple would never give them up — but they were committed to truth-telling. So this is the amazing part. When the Nazi soldiers would come and say, “Do you know where the Jews are?” they’d say, “Yes.” “Are you hiding them?” “Yes.” “Will you tell us where they are?” “No.”
I love this account. But the most amazing thing is the fact that the pastor’s wife would invite the soldiers to eat when they came. They came around dinnertime, and she invited them to eat. And after the war, people said, “How could you do that? How could you invite them to eat? You knew what they were doing — they could have killed you. They were searching for your neighbors, and you were trying to protect them. How could you invite them to sit at your table and eat?” And her response was, “It was dinnertime.” So shaped had she been by the assumption of treating people well — not because they deserve it, not because their actions require it, but because they’re human beings created in the image of God, even if they besmirch and reject the very image of God in themselves. It’s a powerful story.
Not that long ago, after the attack in Boston, the Boston Marathon — you know, the primary attacker was killed, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. And did you know that they had a hard time finding a place for him to be buried? Because no cemetery wanted to take him — they were afraid it would become a pilgrimage site, a place for people who wanted to make a shrine of him. And there was a Methodist woman in Virginia who read this story, that they couldn’t find a place to bury this man, and so she took it upon herself to contact cemeteries — Islamic cemeteries and others — and she found a place that would take him. And she was interviewed about it, and she said, “Everybody deserves a burial.” She’s Christian. This is a terrorist who killed so many people. And he was buried.
Now, it’s not about forgetting the evils that he perpetrated. It’s not about becoming an apologist for people who do things that are wrong. It’s not about giving a free pass to people who deserve justice from the legal system. It’s about treating people with dignity — not because of what they’ve done, not because they deserve it, but because they belong to God, whether they know it and live like it or not.
That is the difficult thing that loving one’s enemy can lead to: showing respect, letting go of the idea that we deserve to stand in judgment, and instead doing what is right, following the example of Jesus, who during his own execution — you may recall — prayed for those who were carrying out the orders: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
So this is a difficult command, but it is one that leads to freedom, because it means that we can truly respond to people’s actions and not respond out of our own sinfulness. It means that we can let go of retribution and revenge, and instead leave justice to God ultimately — and to a system that recognizes people’s equality in its best days. We can let go of pursuing it on our own and be free to live our lives fully. As Jesus said, those who seek their life will lose it, and those who lose their lives for my sake will find it.
So if we follow the human path of trying to hold on to things, and not take the risk of loving our neighbor — and even loving our enemies — then we will find, I believe, that our lives are smaller and less vital. But if we are able to follow the example of Jesus, then I believe we will find that we are truly living, and we’ll see true differences made. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” This is the sort of love I believe he was referring to — the same sort of love that Jesus commands us to have, even toward those who are our enemies, who hate us. Let us not return it in kind, but instead offer back the love that God has revealed to us.
So yes, this is a daunting task. And yes, it does seem a bit crazy at times. It could lead us to be martyrs. But that name — martyr — means more than someone who has given up their life in a literal way for Jesus. Martyr simply means witness. And I would hope and pray that we can all bear witness to the love that we’ve received in Christ, and offer it to others. As the old song says, “I am blessed, I am blessed, I am blessed to be a witness.”
Amen.
