Abstract
Commentaries call it the Sermon on the Plain. You may prefer to think of it as “the sermon I don’t want to preach.” Leveling with his audience, Jesus tells them plainly, pointedly, repeatedly: “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.” Knowing they may not warm to the idea (he has seen their flummoxed expressions before), Jesus addresses “you that listen.” Considering that every word of his message is cockeyed, how can we help people listen and not head for the closest loophole?
Unlike Jesus’ original audience, whose enemies were real and numerous and very close at hand, many in our congregations will not admit to having enemies. In my thirty-seven years of ministry, I have never been approached by anyone asking for help in dealing with an enemy. To the contrary, a Sunday school teacher recently praised Nelson Mandela’s graciousness toward his enemies, and then made the disclaimer, “Most of us don’t have enemies in that sense, but we can still be inspired by his example.” I wonder what stories have shaped such attitudes and assumptions about enemies.
I grew up in the 1950s, when the campaign to inoculate Americans against the threat of communism loomed large. Thanks to the likes of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who used the power of his media machine to deepen the distrust between “us” and “them,” the danger posed by our common enemy was painted in stark black and white. With the help of a young evangelist named Billy Graham, the newly baptized President Eisenhower galvanized the nation with the notions that “we” were a chosen people, and that “they” had drifted far beyond the reach of God’s redemptive hand.
This early schooling in the art of naming and profiling enemies prompted my announcement that the boy who sat behind me in third grade was my enemy. Having bowed my head through countless public prayers that called on God to give the communists their comeuppance, I did not hesitate to ask God to give my next-desk neighbor his just deserts. “Don’t be silly,” my mother insisted. “Garland’s mother is in my book club.”
Recalling this history helps me understand why I can justify having a hit list of faceless public enemies, but when it comes to personal enemies, the very idea seems sub-Christian. Like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18:9–14), I want to look askance at the mudslinging on the television show Judge Judy and say, “Thank you, God, I’m not like those people.” Faithful preaching of this text must first help us muster the honesty to admit that we have enemies—that there are people in the world whom we do not wish well, people we would gladly “weed out” (contrary to Matt 13:24–30). This re-positioning may put us within hearing range of Jesus.
If we find it hard to admit that we have enemies, it is harder still to acknowledge that we are the enemy. I think it was the comic-strip character Pogo who said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” One of the rawest realities Americans had to face in the aftermath of 9/11/2001 was the fact that people hated us so much that they were willing to die in order to bring us to our knees. Although we cling to the notion that we are a gracious, generous, neighborly nation, the mask has slipped. We can label the perpetrators “terrorists,” and we can condemn what they did. But if we want to pass the Jesus litmus test, we cannot turn a deaf ear to their complaints. Loving our enemies means learning to inhabit the gray areas, which more than anything else requires a willingness to hear the allegations against us and ask if there could be some truth in them. When we recognize that whatever evil our enemy has unleashed not only affects us but also finds some of its source in us, one more wall that stands in the way of listening comes tumbling down.
Another pot for the preacher to stir is the murkiness around what we mean by “love.” The love Jesus asks disciples to enact is not a feeling of fondness or affinity. It is a way of living and being in relationship that acknowledges what Paul reminded the Romans: Once we were all God’s enemies (see Rom 5:10). At the same time, it recognizes what all of Jesus’ teaching presumes: God is present in every last one of us. Holding these two things together, can we conceive of a way of loving enemies that does not excuse, condone, or justify the wrong that has been done, but turns away from taking matters into our own hands? Some of our best teachers in this regard are those much-neglected skeletons in the closet of the Psalter—the cursing psalms. These psalms can teach us that the deep healing we need in our relationship with our enemies will not happen as long as we lie about the damage or insist through clenched teeth that “it’s all right.”
They also teach us that, rather than being a sign of weakness, the cheek-turning love of Jesus is an exercise of our power to break the cycle of reciprocal action by laying down our weapons. Writing about the vengeful psalms, Ellen Davis points out:
No personal vendetta is authorized, no pouring sugar in the gas tank, no picking up a gun or hiring one. On the contrary, the validity of any punishing action that may occur depends entirely on its being God’s action, not ours . . . we demand that our enemies be driven into God’s hands. But who can say what will happen to them there? (Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved With God, Cowley, 2001, 27)
Through our honest naming of the pain and heartbreak of enmity, we hold both our enemies and ourselves accountable, and we come a few steps closer to the level place where we can hear Jesus.
Looking at the text through a wider lens, two big ideas undergird this passage and lay the foundation for getting Jesus’ point. First is the fact of God’s mindboggling generosity, pictured vividly at the beginning of the Sermon on the Plain, where power is flowing out of Jesus, indiscriminately healing everything in its path (6:19). As a thread throughout Scripture, generosity is a defining mark of God’s nature and of our vocation to enact the future that is God’s realm. According to Jesus, absolutely everything in creation turns on this bottomless generosity, which forms the basis of God’s economy—an economy driven by uproarious abundance. In contrast to the eye-for-an-eye exchange normative in the marketplace, the economy grounded in God’s generosity mandates that the only good currency is love—love that, by abandoning itself to God, lets go of the need to have things under control. Such a willingness to bear the cost flies in the face of human logic and common wisdom. It upsets the sense of equilibrium that comes with keeping tabs. How in the world are we to reconcile the books when debtors are let off the hook? How will our embracing of this ethic serve to correct or rebuke what has gone horribly wrong in the world? Will it not reward the very people who are messing everything up?
There are no simple answers to these questions. So, while we can preach with conviction that loving our enemies is the hinge that allows history to move in a different direction, we cannot promise that obeying Jesus will give us the satisfaction of seeing the outcome we want. For those who put themselves on the way of the cross, the reward lies in knowing that it is the only way to overcome evil without creating new evil in its place. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus mends the severed ear of a soldier who has come to arrest him (22:51). It is his last miracle and, for me, the most compelling. Before being led away, Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “No more of this” (v. 51). If we think those words were not meant for us, we will never come within earshot of Jesus.
The other scriptural thread Jesus pulls through this passage is the idea that we are not only kingdom-bound, we are also bound together in a kin-dom. “In the kindom, all of life is interrelated. Effectiveness and fulfillment are experienced by individuals only to the extent that they are experienced by the total family, and vice versa” (Mary K. Sellon and Daniel P. Smith, Practicing Right Relationships, Rowan & Littlefield, 2004, 8). When we think of God’s intention in creation as “kindom,” we remember that our very survival depends on our choice to honor the relational web that connects us as sisters and brothers and that, whether or not it sits well with us, all of us are “children of the Most High” (v. 35).
Augustine said, “We shall have no enemies in heaven” (Sermon 256). Until we attain the happiness of that heavenly Alleluia, we preachers will have to keep laying down the dislocating challenge of Luke 6, in the hope that disciples (including those of us who preach) will listen. And though we will be tempted to doctor it up or water it down, our words are most likely to find their mark if we do what Jesus did. Level with them. And then love them—even unto death.