The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Let us pray.
“Forgiving Lord, I do not want my enemies forgiven. I want you to kill them (as sometimes prays the psalmist!).
Actually, I would prefer to pray that you punish them rather than kill them, since I would like to watch them suffer. Also, I fear losing my enemies, since my hates are more precious to me than my loves. If I lost my hates, my enemies, how would I know who I am?”[i]
The crowd is still pressing against Jesus as he delivers his Sermon on the Plain. The sermon that started after the crowd was healed, then shifted to the blessing of those on the margins and a warning to those who insist those margins exist, has now moved toward the day-to-day practices of those listening to Jesus speak.
“Love your enemies…do good to do those who hate you…bless those who curse you and pray for those who mistreat you…turn the other cheek…if your coat is stolen, give them your shirt too…”[ii]
There are times when following Jesus is not too hard. Worship on Christmas Eve and Easter, while being more of a logistical lift than a regular Sunday morning, is pretty good. Collecting food for our neighbors with AFAC and serving at Community Assistance are feel-good ways to make good on Jesus’ instructions to love our neighbors. Greeting preschoolers in the morning or getting them riled up before they go back inside from recess is honestly fun. While clergy meetings, charge conferences, and annual conferences will never make my list of favorite things, they are still not so difficult or terrible that I consider them a hardship or impossible task. Sure, being a lay leader in the church is no picnic with monthly meetings, church budgets to balance, and dealing with a sometimes-needy pastor but at the end of the day it is not that bad.
Jesus’ words of love, blessing, and cheek-turning are like seemingly impossible tasks – impossible to do and impossible that I want to do them. If this scripture reading was in the regular rotation our weekly worship,[iii] if for some reason I decided to do a six-week sermon series on love, blessing, and cheek turning, I know many of us (the preacher included) would suddenly find convenient excuses to miss worship.
His words today in the Sermon on the Plain are probably why Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount receives more airtime in the church. Jesus’ words are seemingly impossible, downright difficult, and borderline offensive.
And, if I am frank, this preaching gig is tough enough without Jesus making it harder. There is always a feeling of insufficiency that comes with proclaiming the word of God. There is always the temptation to be new and original, to preach trendy sermons that will get the chapel clicks online (and Jesus names this temptation as idolatry). And then, Jesus goes and drops this love your enemies turn the other check business on us. The feeling of insufficiency goes through the roof because I am the last person in the room who wants to pray for my enemies.
The prayer I prayed at the beginning of this sermon was written by America’s Best Theologian according to Time Magazine,[iv] Dr. Stanley Hauerwas. And, I am with Dr. Hauerwas; let’s go with punishment over death so that my enemies can suffer a bit. After all, my they would not mind if the roles were reversed, right?
The problem with my reading of Dr. Hauerwas’ prayer is that there is a second part. I do not know if you noticed it, but the “Amen!” was conspicuously missing from part one.
“Yet you have bent us toward reconciliation, that we may be able to pass one another Christ’s peace. It is a terrible thing to ask of us. I am sure I cannot do it, but you are a wily God able to accomplish miracles. May we be struck alive with the miracle of your grace, even to being reconciled with ourselves. Amen.”[v]
“Bent toward reconciling us.”
Did you catch that?
You see, ever since sin entered the picture, and what Francis Spufford describes as “our human propensity to ‘mess’[vi] things up”[vii] has taken the world by storm, God has been heaven-bent on reconciliation. Reconciling us to God so that we can be reconciled with one another. All of which is rooted in God’s action, mercy, and grace. And we are the recipients of God’s action, mercy, and grace.
If left to ourselves, we would, and some have, develop a hierarchy of love – something like family first, then community, then nation, and only after that, the rest of the world.[viii] And this runs contrary to what Jesus told the crowd on the plain and to one of the scribes who asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the first of all?”[ix]
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength…You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[x]
The way God flips what it means to be in a relationship with those we deem to be our enemy is bad news for our politics, business, and general ordering of the world. Still, it is the best news because God has flipped, is flipping our hierarchy of love.
In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul told wrote that the new life Roman Christians had as Christ’s body was the result of “the mercies of God”[xi] and that the mark of a follower of Jesus is love.
“Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.”[xii]
“If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this, you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”[xiii]
All of this is offensive, to say the least, because our societal norms require interactions to be reciprocal. We like to pretend that we always live by the golden rule, but as my New Testament professor, Dr. Sharon Ringe, put it, it is more like “treat others the way they treat us.”[xiv] Our norms insist on eye-for-an-eye punishments for them and mercy or special treatment for those in positions of power with high-price attorneys who can find loopholes.
The truth in God reconciling all things, in making all of creation new through the mercy of God’s grace, is that when our sin could have made us an enemy of God and God could have cast vengeance upon humanity – upon you and me – God instead extended, God is extending mercy.
It is downright offensive to think of God extending mercy to the person we despise the most until we realize that is how Jesus loves us, not because we deserve it or have earned it but because God does not know any other way. The merciful love of God is what enabled Joseph to forgive his brothers after they sold him into slavery.[xv] The same merciful love softened Pharoah’s heart and later inspired Hannah to pray, “God raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.”[xvi]
God's merciful love caused a crowd to drop their stones and go home,[xvii] and for a savior to extend a word of forgiveness[xviii] and the promise of paradise[xix] with his last breaths. And that kind of mercy and love will break our hearts open, even for those we would prefer to curse rather than bless.
[i] Hauerwas, Stanley. Prayers Plainly Spoken. Wipf and Stock, 2003. Page 94.
[ii] Luke 6:27-29
[iii] Don’t worry, it is in the regular rotation known as the Revised Common Lectionary.
[iv] Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “Theologian: Christian Contrarian.” Time, Time, 17 Sept. 2001, time.com/archive/6664859/theologian-christian-contrarian/.
[v] Hauerwas.
[vi] Spufford uses another word that begins with “F” and rhymes with “duck.”
[vii] Spufford, Francis. Unapologetic: Why, despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. HarperOne, 2013.
[viii] For more on the hierarchy of love within American politics and Christian Nationalism read “The Gospel of Love vs. the Idolatry of Nation.” Brewing Theology with Teer Hardy, Teer Hardy, 31 Jan. 2025, teerhardy.substack.com/p/the-gospel-of-love-vs-the-idolatry.
[ix] Mark 12:28
[x] Mark 12:30-21
[xi] Romans 12:1
[xii]Romans 12:9-10
[xiii] Romans 12:20-21
[xiv] Jarvis, Cynthia A., and E. Elizabeth Johnson. Feasting on the Gospels. Luke. Volume 1, Chapters 1-11. Westminster John Knox Press, 2014. Location 5933.
[xv] Gensis 45:3-11, 15
[xvi] 1 Samuel 2:8
[xvii] John 7:53-8:11
[xviii] Luke 23:24
[xix] Luke 23:43
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