Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
Measure for Measure
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 6:17-26/NRSVUE)
I’ve been taking guitar lessons for a couple of years now and my teacher Nick is a phenomenal musician, a great instructor and a super-cool dude, but I also think that he grossly overestimates my ability.
I’ll ask him about a song that I’m interested in learning and, after listening to a recording of it once, he can just launch right into playing it (I myself cannot). We’ll work on the song together for a while, I’ll record him on my phone as he plays it (really slowly) and tells me what to focus one, and then I’ll go off on my merry way to spend the next week trying to replicate what he did (even more slowly — and, I’m not gonna lie, with a bit of swearing).
It’s really difficult, and I often fail miserably, but deep down inside I know that it’s the only way to get better. And as frustrating as this process can be, I’m also inspired by the idea that Nick actually seems to think I might be able to get it right at some point — it makes me want to do better. That’s kind of what’s going on in today’s text from Luke’s Gospel.
“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful,” is what Jesus tells his disciples near the end of the story. Now, I know that it is always good to have goals to work towards, but this one is pretty challenging: Don’t just be merciful, be as merciful as God is merciful. Sure. No problem. That’ll be easy.
Indeed, all of the things that Jesus asks people to do in furtherance of this lofty goal seem pretty difficult. Love your enemies? Do good to those who hate you? Bless those who curse you? Pray for those who abuse you? Lend expecting nothing in return? This all seems so ridiculous, in fact, that we might just throw our hands up in the air and give up before we even get started. And yet why would Jesus ask this of us if he didn’t think we could actually pull it off? Besides, we’re told that this is what being the children of the Most High (the children of God) actually requires of us, so we should probably at least give it a try, right?
But giving it a try means being willing to see and do things way differently than we have before; being merciful as God is merciful means no more business as usual for us. You see, God is kind even to the ungrateful and the wicked; God’s love and mercy extends to absolutely everyone.
“Do to others as you would have them do to you,” says Jesus here. Do to others — not just the people you like or the people who like you or the people who are like you. By “others”Jesus really does mean everybody, folks.
Loving one’s friends has never been all that hard of a thing to do but loving one’s enemies was a revolutionary idea way back then and it remains one today. But we’ve all heard this phrase — “love your enemies” — so many times in the course of our lives that I think we’ve become desensitized to what it actually requires of us. So let’s stop and think about it for a second, let’s allow it to sink in: Our love for others should not depend, in any way, upon their actions — towards us or towards others. And if this sounds really difficult that’s because it’s really difficult. It’s also incredibly disruptive because it undermines all of our ideas about the way the world works.
You see, with Jesus, the entire system of “eye for an eye” justice as we know it is over; revenge and retribution and beating your opponents into the ground as a guiding principles of life in society are over; doing nice things only for people who have something to offer in return is over; our understandings of who is worthy and unworthy of love are over; the idea of love as something that is earned is over.
But we also need to be mindful about what Jesus is doing and not doing in this text. I say this because many of his words here (and elsewhere in the Gospels) have been manipulated and twisted throughout history in order to justify all sorts of really bad behavior. And it’s often hard to figure out exactly what Jesus is saying because he tends to speak in both literal and direct terms, on the one hand, as well as in figurative and indirect terms, on the other hand; heck, he can even sometimes do this within the very same passage; and he appears to be doing that here.
When Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to pray for those who abuse us in today’s reading, I think that he really means it. And Jesus knows just how challenging this can be. It is pretty easy, after all, to love those who are easy for us to love — those who agree with us, or those who love us back. And we all know how difficult it is to love those with whom we disagree, or to love those who treat us (and others) badly.
Love your enemies? How relevant and real has this idea become in our present political environment? Think about how you felt after having listened to that insufferable friend or family member go on and on about politics at the holiday table, or having read that latest rant online. But loving our enemies is precisely what Jesus calls us to do here. And this is where it gets kind of tricky.
Because loving our enemies doesn’t mean tolerating mistreatment or injustice. And this is exactly where this particular text often gets dangerously misused. When Jesus tells us to offer up the other cheek, he is not advocating that we stay in abusive relationships or put up with situations of any kind in which we or others are treated badly. Jesus doesn’t ever tolerate injustice. Turning the other cheek doesn’t mean giving the one who’s just hit you the chance to hit you again, it simply enables you to look the one who’s wronged you in the eye and say “enough is enough.”
The point Jesus is making here, to put it simply, is this: we should not be so quick to repay wrong with wrong, to respond to violence with violence, to judge others as being unworthy of our love and God’s love — and this last one is especially important for us to understand. You see, there’s a big difference between seeking justice and levying judgement: God has always called us to do the former, not the latter.
Jesus is telling us that, in God’s kingdom, we are called to play an entirely different game with an entirely different set of rules. It is no longer about revenge or protecting me and what is mine; it’s about something bigger than any notion of me and mine; it’s about a greater good, a common good.
This is not a call to be a complete doormat, as countless oppressors have used this text to argue. Sure, Jesus wants us to be charitable — to give to everyone who begs from us and not to refuse anyone who wishes to borrow from us — but we are the ones who decide to do that; it is not taken from us, but given by us. And this is an incredibly important distinction.
You take my coat? I’ll decide to give you my shirt as well. You take my goods? Fine, but it is I who will choose to let you keep them. There is, if we look just below the surface, a certain defiant strength in this. And Jesus takes this defiant strength, and the willingness both to give and forgive that are born of it, as far as it can possibly go — all the way to the cross, in fact.
The question for us here is just how far are we willing to take it? The question is relevant because we are neither God nor Jesus; we are flawed and imperfect human beings; we all have our limits. Perhaps Jesus’s point here is to make us consider just what those limits might be for us. What is our own capacity for forgiveness and for love, and how might it be expanded?
I think that I could forgive a lot of things. But I honestly cannot stand here and tell you for sure that I could forgive someone who hurt my family. I certainly give of what I have, but I really do wonder if I would give away my very last dollar to help someone else. I haven’t been discriminated against for much of anything in my life, but I know that it would be hard for me to love a person or people that had done me harm simply because of who I was.
And yet there are actually people who manage do it every single day, even if I don’t quite understand how they are able to do it. But their example — and Jesus’s example — really make me think about just how far I could or would be willing to go to be merciful, just as God is merciful.
And maybe that’s really the point in what Jesus has to say here. God’s perfect mercy is a lofty goal for us to aspire to, and one that, let’s face it, we are pretty unlikely to attain. But the fact that Jesus would even put that out there as a possibility for us testifies to the faith he has in us, the faith that God has in us.
Think about that for a second. We spend so much time talking about our faith in God and in Jesus, but it goes both ways — and this is pretty incredible. God has faith in us.
Put into no end of horrible situations, many of our siblings in this world are able to draw upon God’s strength, and upon God’s unwavering faith in what God has created, in order to forgive and to love their oppressors (which, again, doesn’t mean that people who do bad things shouldn’t be held accountable for them). So why can’t I? Why can’t we all?
Jesus’s life here among us, and his willingness to give of himself for us, provides a glimpse into what the infinite love and compassion of heaven actually looks like. And his example should inspire us to do better by one another — by our friends and by our enemies. Because striving to do better is the only appropriate response to God’s gift of grace to us and God’s faith in us.
And so with our eyes focused on God’s perfect mercy, we are constantly being called to examine where we stand in relation to it, and to expand the boundaries of our present capacity to forgive and to love into places that we may have thought we could never, ever go.
Because even if we can’t be perfect, we all know deep down inside that we can be a whole lot better than we are. And God knows it too.