Luke 6:27-38
February 18, 2001
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Imagine a person who lives in a large city—say a place like San Francisco—who hears a sermon based on Luke 6 on the words of Jesus and decides to try to put them into practice. “No longer will my life be dominated by resentment, retaliation, and revenge,” he says. “From now on, it will be love of enemies, turning the other cheek, and forgiveness.”
So, Monday morning, this person heads to work intent on being a faithful disciple and has hardly left his Richmond apartment before being approached by a beggar. “Give to anyone who begs,” Jesus said, and so he fished out some money and placed it in the beggar’s hand.
On the MUNI, there are other beggars, and more money is given out. At the entrance to the B of A building sits a homeless man, shivering in the cold. “Do not withhold even your shirt,” Jesus said. So our faithful person sheds his coat and sweater and hands them to the man.
Inside the building, office politics are in full swing, but this person now has a new attitude. Instead of jockeying for power, he had words of affirmation and a spirit of forgiveness. But an office rival, sensing an opportunity in this person’s new way of being, moves in skillfully for the power kill.
At the end of the day, our disciple may well have lived the gospel command, but he may also be broke, cold, and unemployed.
Jesus’ Ethic
Last week we heard how Jesus blesses those whom the world curses and curses those whom the world honors. He reverses our understanding of the kingdom of heaven upside down. He said that God blesses those who are poor, hungry, sorrowful and despised and “Woe” is to those who have so much going for them in this world that they don’t have anymore need for God.
Well, Jesus is doing this again this Sunday. His teachings are making us very nervous.
In our normal situations, if anyone hates us, we would say, “I hate you even more!” If anyone punches you in the stomach, you clinch your fist and punch him right back. If anyone says, “I like that Raiders jacket you have on,” you would snap back saying, “It’s mine, and you can’t have it.” And if anyone ask you for some spare change, you walk by acting that you didn’t hear him. We pretend that we are too busy and we don’t want to see.
Jesus in his Sermon on the Plain is saying the if you want to be followers, you will need to have a reversal of values. Followers of Jesus are to do astonishing things.
We are to love our enemies, do good things to those who hate you. We are to pray and bless those who abuse us. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other cheek to be struck too. We are to give away our coat and even offer our shirt. And don’t ask for them back.
But how in the world will we be able to do this? If we tried, we may become like the man who was broke, cold, and unemployed by the end of the day. Realistically, we have an ideal ethic that appears virtually impossible to put into practice.
This Scripture is most troubling for us to understand. And if we overly interpret this passage literally, we run the risk of condoning domestic violence in families and relationships that is certainly not a part of Jesus’ teachings. Recommending victims of child and spousal abuse to turn their other cheek and love those who are not good to them is absolutely wrong. In other words, to understand these Scriptures as a prescription toward human perfection would be misguided.
The truth of these passages can be found in our understanding of who God is. The reason given for turning the other cheek, giving worldly goods to others instead of just lending them, and providing both your coat and your shirt to a bully or a beggar is that God does this for us.
Now Jesus said, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” The Golden Rule is easy when you love those who already love you. Be kind and caring to those who are already kind and caring to you. Or give your nice clothes to those who you know will eventually give you back some clothes and probably even in a better brand. It’s like when we give a present to someone. We like that person so we give a nice gift—knowing that there will be a time in the future when this person will reciprocate a gift back to you. It’s easy to think of following this principle with people who also are genuinely trying to follow it themselves.
But Jesus says disciples of God’s kingdom should practice love, forgiveness, forbearance, and generosity that we would desire for ourselves among those who do not practice such qualities. We are asked to give love, not to the already loving people, but to our enemies.
Imitators of God
You are still saying that this is impossible. Right? If this is the way of discipleship, we are tempted to cry out like others did when faced with this impossibility. In Luke 18:26, when the people heard the rich ruler wasn’t willing to give up his earthly treasures for the treasures in heaven, they said, “Then who can be saved?”
Jesus responded by saying, “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.” (Luke 18:27)
We may not be able to literally love our enemies especially if they have committed horrible crimes against us. We may not find it easy to pray for those who hate us and hurt us. We may continue to feel violated when somebody stole from us. But Jesus is saying to us that what may be impossible for us, is possible for God.
As disciples, we are called to be models of God’s kingdom. In verses 22-24, Jesus is saying that even sinners give love and generosity to those who are loving and generous to them. But what marks the true disciple of God’s kingdom is the ability to go beyond our self-interest.
God loves your enemies. God is the one who forgives those who curses at him. God turns the other cheek, gave up his coat and hasn’t asked for it back. Since God has done all of these things and is kind and merciful to the ungrateful and the wicked, we are to do the same. We are to imitate God.
This is different than simply following the rules. Jesus’ opponents, the Pharisees did that. It is going beyond rule morality to genuinely love those we are least prone to love. And the more we do this, the closer we imitate God.
The way we begin to imitate God is to understand and practice agape love. Agape is the love that yearns for the fulfillment of the other, not in terms of oneself. Agape confirms the other person unconditionally and accepts that person regardless of whether the person is pleasant or unpleasant, vulgar or attractive, resistant to being loved or willingness to return love. This unconditioned acceptance signals the unbroken bond between God and God’s creation—this person.
Although only God can practice agape love fully since we who are human beings have limited freedom, and as such are driven to the need of deciding who are friends and who are our enemies, we are expected to still imitate God.
One begins small: a friendly word to an unfriendly neighbor; a compliment for a critical fellow worker; a refusal to honk at the person who offends us in traffic; a willingness to loan our music CDs even to friends who forget to return what they borrow.
Jesus teaches us to love our enemies because we are to live and love in this world the way God loves us. By loving our enemies we are in the same position to our enemies as God is to us. To pray for our enemies and to love them is to see them for a moment as God sees them.
Living as Disciples
When we understand discipleship this way, our lifestyle is not determined either by the friends we keep or the enemies that we hate. Rather than being people who hate in response to hatred and love in response to love, our Christian behavior and relationships are determined by the God we worship.
When Jesus said, “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God,” he is casting a vision that God will bring in a reign of peace that the world hasn’t seen before. In God’s reign, there will be no violence and former enemies will be joined in love and reconciliation. In God’s reign, words of cursing and condemnations are wiped out by God’s blessing and forgiveness.
Even though we may not be able to truly practice agape love with our enemies, God loves our enemies. And when we commit ourselves to love unconditionally even when we fall short of how God loves us, we are making the impossible a possibility.
Have you ever been to an ice skating rink before? You can watch the skaters at the rink in Rockefeller Center. The music is playing over the loudspeakers and most of the skaters are doing the usual thing—gliding in time to the music, staying in sync with the other skaters as they traced again and again a large oval of ice.
One day, there was, however, this skater who was different. The crowd went round and round, but she skated freely, first this way, then that. She made figure eights and curly-cues; she lifted her hands up over her head, then stretched them gracefully over to her side. She glided forward, then backward, more dancing than merely skating. She was clearly responding not to the crowd or the expected route, not even to the taped music blaring over the speakers, but to another song, another pattern, another source of direction. She was strange, but beautiful…of all the skaters on the ice, she was the one who captivated the eyes of all who watched.
Jesus says, disciples listen to different music, respond to another source of direction, trace a different pattern on the world’s ice. Christians love their enemies, do good to those who hate them, bless those who curse them, pray for those who abuse them. They turn the other cheek, give away their coats and shirts, and give away their things. Christians show mercy because God is merciful to them.
In the end, this Scripture is actually not as difficult to understand and practice as we originally thought. We are to love our enemies because God first loved us as enemies to his will. We are to do good to those who hate us because when we hated God, he still transformed us to be loving. We are to bless those who curse us because God forgave the times when we cursed him. When someone strikes our cheek, we are to turn the other cheek because when we did violence to Christ, he offered the other cheek to us. When a beggar takes our coat, we are to also give him our shirt because when the world took away Jesus’ coat, he also gave away his shirt. And when someone steals our goods, we are to not ask for them back because Jesus gave of himself freely and did not ask for anything in return. This is what God is like, particularly on the cross.
Spare Change
Once there was a seminary student who went home for the Christmas holidays. His father was a minister of a church in the inner city. They lived in the neighborhood of the church and spent every day wrestling with the problems of poverty, unemployment, hunger, and inadequate housing.
One cold afternoon, the student and his father went for a walk. They walked through the sad streets and across the weed-infested local park, which lacked the cultivated care and shiny play equipment of parks in the more upscale areas of town. They were talking about the mission of the church and the challenge of living out one’s faith in such harsh circumstances. As they neared the end of their walk, they realized that they were hungry, and they decided to stop at a pay phone and order a pizza, which would be delivered by the time they returned to the house. As they headed to the phone, a homeless man approached them. “Spare change?” he asked.
The father reached into his pockets and pulled out two handfuls of coins, held them out to the street person, and said, “Here. Take what you need.” The astonished man looked at all those coins and replied, “Well, I’ll take it all.” He raked the money from the father’s hands into his own.
Father and son resumed their journey to the pay phone, but passed only a few steps before the father realized he had given away all his coins. He had no money for the phone call. So turning around, he called to the homeless man, who was walking away, “Pardon me, I need to make a phone call. Can you spare some change?”
The homeless man turned toward the father and held out his hands, now full of coins. “Here,” he said, “Take what you need.”
Just when we may have become hardened and discouraged from loving others and particularly our enemies, God shows us that in the smallest acts of agape love that we do, we begin to make possible what seemed to be impossible. A beggar becomes a part of God’s plan. And we become renewed in our faith.
Jesus first held out his hand to us filled with blessings and ways to live faithfully in God. He transformed us from enemies to his friends. When we love our enemies, as God first loved us, God’s reign is come. Let us hold out our hands filled with God’s love so that all of our enemies are loved by God too.
Let us pray.
Dear Lord, we pray that you change our hearts to love our enemies. We want to change so that we may participate in your kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Lead us to take every small step to imitate agape love in our world. As you have loved us and our enemies, may we do so as well. In the name of Jesus who first loved us, we pray. Amen.