This Week: Epiphany 7C
Gospel: Luke 6:27-38
Jesus continues the Sermon on the Plains from last week, which dealt with wealth and blessing, revealing a relational order to the world and inviting the disciples to more fundamentally engage in the project as participants. This vision shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, given that the the first chapter of Luke includes the Magnificat and Zechariah’s song.
Turning from blessing, wealth, and woe all being relational concepts that are based in our conviction toward living in a more just and humane world, it should be no surprise to have Jesus turn toward a command to love. Love family, yes, and friends, sure yes, and neighbors and enemies. And just in case we didn’t get the hint [Think: the “Did I stutter?” meme], Jesus pushes it further, saying what is the point of love if it’s easy?
Let’s not sugarcoat the point here, either. He’s essentially saying real love is hard. Or something more akin to love can be real and easy, but also yeah, it can be hard. And guess what? If you wimp out on it, maybe you’re not cut out for this. Maybe you don’t actually understand love at all if you can’t love your enemies.
We can probably make too much out of this, I suspect. Or more precisely, make too little of the ultimate challenge at the heart of it. Making it a badge of honor that we “love everyone” but ultimately don’t act all that different when push comes to shove. We treat our family and friends well and the homeless person next to us like dirt.
The same goes for the other concepts presented by Jesus: mercy, judgement, condemnation, and forgiveness: words which we treat with overlapping redundancy and yet, in ways that may be ultimately disconnected from a command to love, even our enemies. It is all connected, regardless of our apprehension or belief.
Cheap grace
Love of enemies still feels to me like a concept we recite as a value more than a practice. In this way, it often feels like the All Lives Matter retort to Black Lives Matter: a way to sound pious in speech and intention but without being tied to proving it in our behavior.
So what does loving enemies actually mean? Well, I think we start by looking at what happens when we qualify it and pretend there are loopholes — such as for “the real world.” We have to confront the fact that we don’t want to love our enemies at all, let alone those people that much.
Years ago, I heard Amy-Jill Levine speak about the parables and she had us think about the parable of the Good Samaritan. And it is worth noting that this comes later in this same gospel, so if someone reads that parable, they will already know the command to love one’s enemies. Dr. Levine invited us to think about the parable and she described it like peeling an onion with the first layer as being a reminder about ritual purity and the grace of God. She said the second layer invites us to think about the outsider, the other, as being a surprising supporter of the injured man. And then, the deeper we go, the more challenging it becomes (and, like an onion, it might make us want to cry), until we get to realize that the Samaritan is an enemy. And not just any enemy, a justified enemy. From a people that your people have been at war with for two hundred years. And Jesus makes that guy into the hero of the story, the one who counts as your neighbor.
So then Dr. Levine invited us to think of a justified enemy. Someone we have reason to hate and cast them in the story. When Jesus is talking about love of enemies, he really is saying what we think he’s saying.
This is unwelcome news for the military-industrial complex and those whose identity comes from nationalism and hatred, erasing from the public record those people they intend to call evil, those who they long to call enemies so they might reject them. Jesus says, not even them. Just don’t do that.
Resist the extreme scenario
What I find most often when discussing something Jesus says that people don’t want to do is that they try to think of the most extreme scenario they can think of and say, well, Mr. Smart Guy, what about this, huh? Does Jesus expect us to _____? Which is both a frustrating rhetorical strategy and a useful way of getting out of doing what Jesus says 99% of the time because there’s that 1% that doesn’t make sense so we might as well never do it.
There is one place people love to offer the extreme scenario: violence. So when you say that Jesus says to not be violent, well, that becomes a challenge to develop the extreme scenario of self-defense killing of a guy coming to gruesomely murder/maim one’s family and also nuke the US and play drums on people’s skulls. It is the most ridiculous response to a command that 95% of people can follow, quite literally, 100% of their lives. People go their whole lives without throwing a punch, let alone shooting someone, let alone stopping the murderer/maimer nuking the US and skulldrumming.
My point is that this is dumb. It makes no sense at all. But this rhetorical strategy is so very common. And we must resist playing that game because it doesn’t actually serve us.
People want to catastrophize because it justifies the desire to keep things the way they are. To justify having an aggressive military, a militarized police force, broad gun ownership, and a commitment to the thought that there are circumstances by which we would take another person’s life. And we do this knowing precisely that Jesus has a problem with that. The extreme scenario helps us sleep at night.
The golden rule
In the midst of all of this is the proverbial golden rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you.
It isn’t do to others what you believe they would do to you — that’s how the Hatfields and McCoys kept their rivalry going. It is also predicated on a false assumption of risk because there is little risk in thinking that your good deed could come back to bite you so you better not rather than the more useful truth that your good deed could actually lead to movement on their end. Your trusting them may lead to their trusting you. And fundamentally, they have no reason to trust a person who doesn’t trust, but are incentivized to trust someone who trusts them.
I feel like this should be elementary, right? But even if we do learn it in elementary school, it clearly isn’t. And those who live off of the extreme scenario will always find reasons to distrust because any hypothetical can be a justification in the end. Much like the War on Terror quickly turned to distrust of arabs, the conviction to estrange rather than befriend one another names what seems, at its root, to be the fundamental rejection of Jesus and the centerpiece of his faith.
The hard truth
I know this material is really hard because it messes with identities pretty deeply. And I want to make it abundantly clear that there are certain gaps that I won’t fill in for you because I don’t think it works that way, especially with regard to the naming of national enemies, service in the military, or the general participation in the state. I think these things are far stickier emotionally and politically than they are theologically, however. And that is a hard truth for a lot of people to hear.
What I will say is that, over the first three centuries of the Common Era, very few followers of Jesus served in the Roman military. Precisely because it was seen as antithetical to following Jesus, both for the expectation of killing and for supporting the empire’s oppression of others.
The affirmative vs. the negative
So, in the end, the questions still need to be dealt with. How then do we love our enemies? How do we show mercy?
And if you haven’t gotten the point by now, I hope you will here.
Jesus offers an affirmative response. He says to love them. Treat them like you’d like to be treated. Show mercy. Forgive. There’s really a lot there.
Guess what isn’t there? Skull-drumming. Not there at all. None of the nightmare scenarios with ticking time bombs and mushroom clouds. And why might you think that is? Oh, because those things convince us not to love our enemies or show mercy but to instead kill them and torture them and do heinous things to them? Yes.
This is how it gets portrayed in conversation, however. That the negative, the non-existent extreme scenarios are used to offer more weight to our faith convictions than the actual teachings of Jesus. And that is something few of us are comfortable even considering. Why? Because that seems “political.” But, as is so often the case, some of us are just going along with what Jesus is affirmatively teaching.