“Are We Supposed to Take Jesus’ Words Seriously?”
Luke 6:27-38
Somebody hurt you—and you can’t forget about it.
Maybe it was yesterday; maybe last month.
Maybe it was years ago, and the memory of that injury still lurks in unguarded corners of your mind.
It’s a monster, that irrepressible hate—a dreadful monster.
You aren’t alone.
Everyone else has felt it, too.
Every human person knows what it’s like to feel injured, maybe even by someone we once loved or respected.
And the resentment builds into an overwhelming flood, until one day it bursts open in the form of rage.
Or it becomes anxiety, eroding our souls.
Jesus has some hardcore Words on the subject of resentment, and how to deal with it: “If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other one as well.
If someone takes your coat, don’t withhold your shirt either.”
And the real kicker is: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.”
These are hard, hard Words.
One pastor writes, “Congregations respond to this text in the same way my children respond to seeing cooked spinach on their plate at dinner.
No matter how much I explain the nutritional value, no one around the table really wants to dig in.”
And perhaps Jesus would have had an easier time of it if He would have left this item off the menu.
I mean, “who wants to love an enemy?”
Congregations fill stadiums to hear sermons on “Three Easy Steps to Love” and “Five paths to a Better Life.”
If Jesus had preached either of those sermons on the mount, it’s been said: “Constantine would have been born into a Christian home and baptized as a child.”
But, like the difference between eating our spinach and only eating candy…
…there is a vast difference between what we want and what we need.
At this point in the Gospel, Jesus is teaching His closest followers.
It’s possible that if anyone else had heard these words, they would have laughed out loud and with good reason.
I mean, talk about a call to swim upstream!!!
But wow!!!
The Kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity!!!
It’s like, “Think of the best thing you can do for the worst person, and go ahead and do it.”
“Think of what you’d really like someone to do for you, and do it for them.”
“Think of the people to whom you are tempted to be nasty, and lavish generosity on them instead.”
These Words have a fresh, spring-like quality to them.
They are all about new life bursting out energetically, like flowers growing through concrete and shocking everyone with their color and strength!!!
But are they possible?
Do they make sense?
Are we really supposed to take these Words of Jesus Seriously?
“Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you.”
Today, scientists tend to agree that holding grudges can cause us serious stress, which has a toxic effect on our bodies.
Thinking about an injustice we’ve suffered through a lens of vengeance, hostility, bitterness, resentment, anger, sadness, or all of the above—can raise our blood pressure and our risk of having a stroke and heart attack.
It can also impair the functioning of our immune system.
Holding grudges and seeking vengeance also appears to exacerbate mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
So, in seeking to “get back at” others we are really hurting ourselves.
But how can we do anything different?
And if we don’t “seek revenge” aren’t we just “enabling evil”?
The Gospel of Jesus Christ seems to tell us that the only way to overcome evil is to let it burn out…
…or come to a standstill because it doesn’t find the resistance it’s looking for.
Fighting evil just creates more evil and adds fuel to the fire.
But when evil meets no opposition, but only patient endurance, it at last meets an opponent which is more than its match.
And the Cross of Jesus Christ is the Only Power in the world which proves that suffering love can and does defeat evil!!!
There is no doubt that this teaching of Jesus is hard, as is much of what Jesus teaches.
It’s not just some recipe for self-help, although it does help us.
But it runs against our thinking, our inclinations, our desires, our will.
Therefore, it might be tempting to read this passage of Scripture, and say we do this (forgiving stuff) because if we do we “will have a great reward.”
I mean, who doesn’t want to hear something like: “If you love that rascal down the street, then Jesus will love you all the more, and your reward will be great”?
But reading this passage in that way erases grace because it infers that the claim of the Bible that God “loved us while we were yet sinners” (or better yet, that God “loved us while we were enemies of God”) is a lie.
We must remember that we love only because Jesus first loved us.
And as followers of Jesus Christ we are to respond to others in the same way God has responded to us.
“Be merciful,” Jesus says, “just as the Father is merciful.”
How can we, God’s forgiven children, be any less forgiving?
(pause)
A flash of silver.
That’s all Nettie, a mental-health counselor, remembers about driving to work on the morning of August 10, 2011, when another car swerved into her lane, hitting Nettie’s sedan head-on.
With her right leg pinned between the dashboard and the front seat, Nettie drifted in and out of consciousness for almost an hour before firefighters rescued her.
In the emergency room, convinced that she was going to die, Nettie asked a nurse to write down a good-bye letter to her 13 year-old son, Dominic.
“I told him how proud I was of him,” she says, “and how sad I was to leave him.”
Her injuries were nearly unbelievable, and she was in surgery for 10 hours.
“For days it hurt to breathe,” she says, “and even feel the hospital gown against my skin.”
It wasn’t until weeks later, when Nettie started to recover, that her lawyer broke the awful news to her: The 63-year-old woman who had caused her accident had a blood-alcohol level well over the legal limit.
“Before that I hadn’t been angry,” says Nettie.
Her distress only increased upon learning that the driver had minimal auto insurance and that Nettie, who was separated from her husband, would be saddled with hefty medical bills.
The last straw came the day before Thanksgiving, when her boss announced that Nettie was being let go.
All that devastation took a toll.
The following spring, Nettie started taking antidepressants and seeing a therapist.
In August 2012, Nettie was in the courtroom when the woman who had caused the accident was sentenced to 8 to 16 months in jail.
“The woman looked so scared,” she remembers.
“I couldn’t imagine what was going through her head.”
Afterward Nettie approached the public defender.
“I said, ‘Please let your client know that I forgive her.”
This gave Nettie a huge sense of relief.
“I wasn’t in control of her actions that morning,” she says.
“But I am in control of how I respond from here on out, and I decided to choose forgiveness over hate and animosity.”
Forgiving in Christ is not a matter of trivializing what has happened.
Forgiving in Christ means confronting our hurt head-on, and grappling with it.
It means acknowledging the pain we’ve experienced, yet not allowing that pain to master us.
It’s been said that “evil propagates by contagion. It can be contained and defeated only when hatred, insult and injury are absorbed and neutralized by love.”
Jesus said, “love your enemies, do good, and lend expecting nothing in return.
If you do, you will have a great reward.
You will be acting the way the children of the Most High act, for he is kind to ungrateful and wicked people. Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate.”
The “great reward” Jesus talks about has nothing to do with full pockets, big houses or even self-esteem.
It does have to do with who we become, for there is much grace and transformation needed for us to live out the radical faith Jesus demands.
And there is no greater reward than to be living and acting the way Jesus does.
Jesus knows full well that we will never love our enemies without the amazing grace that transforms us and makes us different than we are.
What changes us and allows us to love is God’s grace; a grace that is much, much greater than our sin.
Therefore, in loving our enemies, we are taking the way of the Cross and are brought into fellowship with Jesus Christ.
And when we do this, we find ourselves being transformed…
…and we begin to see other people the way God sees people…
…and we begin to love others the way God loves others.
“While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Only when we discover that this is the kind of God we have, will we have any chance of making Luke Chapter 6:27-38 the way we live our lives.
Amen.
