Luke 6:27-38
Over the last couple of weeks the readings have filled us with the glorious truth that when we are blessed by God, flowing in his full current and allowing our souls to magnify the Lord, all we do for the Lord will also be blessed and bear fruit for the world to eat.
In order that they may taste and see that the Lord is good.
Today we are looking at the second half of Luke’s record of Jesus’ ‘sermon on the mount’. (except in Luke, Jesus has led the people to a level place, so in Luke it is the ‘sermon on the plain.’)
There is so much in it, we are only looking at the opening two verses today, vv.27-28.
In this wonderful passage, Jesus himself describes how to live this blessed life and bear fruit. He is speaking directly to believers and those who would become believers, as he begins this passage with, “But I say to you that listen” (v.27).
That’s us; we listen to the Lord - Lord gives us ears to hear!
Now the easiest things in the bible to understand are often the hardest to do and most alien to our human nature.
So it is with today’s gospel. There is nothing theologically difficult at all in what Jesus is saying, but the doing of it is what sets Christians apart as a holy people; especially the loving of our enemies, or those who trouble us.
Firstly, Jesus starts off in v.27 with “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” Let the radical nature of what Jesus is saying to us who listen, and let it rest in our minds and hearts.
When Jesus spoke those words, they would have been completely outrageous to hear then, as much then as they are today. The history of human society, even in religious society, is that we love our neighbour, and we hate our enemies.
We hate what they do, we hate what they stand for, we hate their ideas, and that then inevitably becomes embodied in hatred for the people themselves.
We are pretty good at doing that because that’s how fallen human nature thinks and behaves. And so, in increasingly polarised societies across the world, we are seeing an increase in hate everywhere, it seems.
And so in the midst of these interesting times, Jesus offers us this radical teaching, this completely out-of-this-world teaching, that challenges us all on such a deep and profound and uncomfortable level, particularly when we take it from the global to the personal.
“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you”. How hard is that! I am not to seek revenge or try to hurt them back, but do whatever I can for their good.
Here is the thing; God is only good. So everything the Lord asks of us, does good for us and in us.
The truth is that revenge is not sweet. When we hold anger and hatred in our hearts towards others, it eats us up physically by increasing blood pressure and anxiety and stress.
It eats us up emotionally by wearing us out and leading us into bad decision making.
And it eats us up spiritually by disconnecting us from God and disconnecting us from love.
We cannot control how people feel about us. If I respond through acts of love and kindness, then it may or may not alter how the other person feels. But what it will do is free me from the weight of hate or hurt in my own life.
Jesus then goes on to say, “bless those who curse you.” Words can be said over us and about us and to us when we are young that act a bit like a curse on a life.
People get utterly destroyed by words spoken against them.
This why our parish is a community of kindness in which people are not judged, gossip not tolerated, and we stick up for each other always and in all ways. Like a family.
This is the way Christ Jesus will overcome the ever-rising hate in the world; through the authentic love of our enemies by his body, the Church.
The world is not a place where healing words are spoken very often. So even with those who trouble us we let our words be filled with Grace and seasoned with salt.
Watchman Nee, the Chinese evangelist from the 1930s whom I commend to you, tells the story of a Chinese woman who kept chickens and two of them escaped and ran into her next-door neighbour’s garden.
And he was really grumpy about it, so he grabbed the chickens, wrung their necks, and threw them back over the fence. So the woman could have gone round and had an argument with the man.
But instead, she took the two dead chickens, and made two chicken pies, and then took one round to the man and apologised for not having better control over her animals.
The kindness of the woman’s words and actions took him so much by surprise that he apologized for over-reacting, and they became reconciled.
Jesus says, “Bless those who curse you”. It’s not easy, of course. But we know that Jesus is right.
So we do good to those who hate us and bless those who curse us. Jesus completes v.28 with “pray for those who abuse you.” This is not the hatred of you for what you represent, but a form of hatred of you for who you are as a person, resulting in their abuse of some kind.
When someone has really hurt us and talked about us badly to other people, even markedly changed the direction of our lives for the worse, we dwell on it on order to try and comprehend it!
However, it can consume our thinking and take on exaggerated proportions and really start to mess us up. Jesus says, “listen. There is a better way, try and pray for them instead!”
Now this can be really hard because we may feel so bitter and angry about that person that we don’t even want an image of them in our head let alone name them before God. And that’s OK, as much as it’s a cliché, it truly is a journey.
But we can pray that the person concerned and their actions towards us will not have such a hold in our minds, and that we can be freed from the negative narrative that we are conjuring up in our thought processes.
To bring the situation before God, to bring before God what it is doing to us, and eventually, when we feel able, to bring that other person before God too is a process of deep psychological and emotional healing.
We can bring all of that to God and begin to leave it with him.
Prayer is what we do to prevent us from being inwardly destroyed by the unkind actions of others towards us. God knows how we feel, he knows what is going on inside of us, and yearns for us to bring it to him so he an begin to heal us.
Jesus simply says: “Do good to those who hate you”. “Bless those who curse you”. “Pray for those who abuse you”. Hate. Curse. Abuse. These are horrible words, and we are in a world full of them.
This demands a new perspective on life. Yet we are equipped by the Holy Spirt for this very thing. How rich and luscious will the blooming of the body of Christ be to this pain-filled world!
To do good to, to bless, and to pray for those who trouble us, is how we demonstrate to the world an alternative way. A new way of living, a life fully reconciled to God in, by, and through Jesus Christ and enabled by the Holy Spirit to live it.
A life fuelled by the love that powers the sun and raised our Lord from the dead.
The same Holy Spirit confirms in us that Jesus is right. Let me pray ...