Luke 6:27-38
27 “But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; 28 bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30 Give to everyone who asks of you, and if anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back again. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34 If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive payment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. 35 Instead, love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38 give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap, for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
What does it mean to have faith? One of the goals of this community is to give a potentially surprising, hopefully compelling, answer to this question. In common usage, “having faith” - especially in God - is usually taken to mean agreeing with certain propositions, assenting to particular assertions, signing off on doctrine, etc. For the Christian, faith especially means believing content about Jesus, who he was (and is,) the significance of his death and resurrection, what this means for our future hope, and so on. While I don’t wish to deny this aspect of faith, I do very much want to place the emphasis elsewhere, to say that, first and foremost, faith doesn’t mean believing stuff about Jesus but rather actually following Jesus. And by following Jesus I mean imitating his life and obeying his commandments, putting his teaching into practice. This might seem obvious, but the reality is that we often have made Christianity something that doesn’t attend to the stuff Jesus actually said and did, and we make faith a kind of abstract mental disposition rather than a concrete lived reality.
It seems to me that, if we’re going to call ourselves Christians, taking Jesus’ words seriously is about the most important thing we can do. Which presents a problem, because Jesus frequently says things that we’re not sure can even be taken seriously, much less that want to take them seriously. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own personal struggle onto the rest of you, but it seems to me that challenge of Jesus’ words here in Luke is not so much that they are difficult to put into practice but rather that it’s difficult for us to imagine that we would even want to. It’s not that we’ve tried and failed so much as we’re not really sure we even want to try. We hear what Jesus says and part of each of us is thinking to ourselves, “that’s not very good advice”. We have a picture in our minds, a feeling in our hearts, about what kind of life we want to live, what’s to our benefit and what isn’t, what price is worth paying, what pain worth enduring, and it points in another direction than where Jesus leads us. We can, of course, say we believe in Jesus, but if we don’t actually think that his words are true - which necessarily would mean some attempt, however meager, to put them into practice - then simple deductive reasoning would very much call that faith into question. (Conversely, if we do the stuff that Jesus said to do even if we’re not sure about him, it probably the case that we have much more faith than we realize).
Not to cast any aspersions, but I suspect that few of us are accomplished at loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us, and praying for those who mistreat us. All of this offends against our most basic urges, as well as our sense of justice and fairness. The psalms, with their repeated pleas for enemies to get what they deserve, give us the sort of righteous - possibly self-righteous - indignation we crave, but Jesus give us something altogether different. And this is not just a matter of recognizing that when we feel like we’ve been wronged that we need to consider that perhaps there’s another side of the story; Jesus seems to have in mind those times when we really are the victim. This is all contrary to human nature.
And it only gets more difficult from here. “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who asks of you, and if anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back again.” The standard move at this point is to interpret Jesus’ words as an illustrative metaphors suggesting that we shouldn’t fight back, or we should be generous, we shouldn’t worry about our stuff. But not only are Jesus’ words not reducible to some less demanding principle that we can convince ourselves we passively obey, he demands something active in response to the offense, that when someone takes from us we should be ready to give the offender yet more. And none of these examples are outlandish hypotheticals; all these things happen to us. (“Do to others as you would have them do to you”, Jesus says, which seems to presume that if I hit a guy that I should want him to allow me to hit him again.)
What is this all about, really? Jesus’ next words start to shed some light. He tells us that loving those who love us is not to our credit, “for even sinners love those who love them”. This kind of “love” is transactional, an act done with some expectation of reciprocity, of a benevolent quid pro quo. Now, few us are so morally degraded that we consciously think in these terms - at least not often - but we do tend to love those who have or whom we expect will love us in return. Again, this comes quite naturally to us. But Jesus commands us to love our enemies, those who have harmed us and who might continue harming us, to give to those whom we do not expect to give back to us, who might even continue taking. This is not commended as strategy that produces results, which might change the heart of the enemy and improve the situation; rather Jesus commends this as a way of being with intrinsic rewards, not only in the future when the worlds is turned upside down, but in there here and now. If you ask yourself, What kind of person could actually do this? What would that even look like? The answer is, of course, Jesus himself. Here Jesus does no more and no less than command us to obey the very words he put into practice. He is God’s own son, and if we imitate him, then we too will be God’s children, sons and daughters of the Father who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, who is merciful. The true character of God is reveled in Jesus, and by following Jesus we can ourselves partake of God’s own nature, we can know God, and this is all the reward we could ever hope for.
In the passage from Corinthians Paul insists upon the absolute necessity of Christ’s bodily resurrection for Christian faith to make any sense. Paul needed to re-assert this presumably because some people - people in the church - denied that the resurrection of the dead is a possibility, even for Christ. It might seem odd that people would convert to Christianity then deny the resurrection, but then we might want to consider just to what extent we believe in Christ’s resurrection. For death and resurrection names not just a transaction by which God saves us apart from us; rather it reveals the very essence of life, of being itself. “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.” A truth evidenced by the tiny grain of wheat which falls to the ground but produces life is a truth writ large in Christ, who poured out himself unto death and yet rose again, who lives not despite having died but who precisely because he died to himself. The way of life passes through death.
The essence of Christian faith is that the way of Jesus leads to abundant life, not just for him, but for all who who follow him, who likewise die to themselves, who love others who do not love them without expecting anything in return, who give of themselves without self-regard, without calculation, who do not look to their own interests but to the interests of others, who die that they might truly live.
The final command in this section, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned”, has long confused interpreters amateur and professional alike, but it seems to me that, in context, what Jesus is saying is that we should not judge anyone to be unworthy of our love, nor of God’s love, including especially those who commit injustice against us and others. We should condemn no one exactly because God did not come into the world to condemn the world but to die so that those who offend against him might live. If we instead forgive, we will know not just God’s forgiveness, but we will even know the God who is forgiveness. the measure with which we love others - the extent to which we follow Jesus - is the very measure with which we will know God’s love.
This is our faith, and the challenge is to believe it’s true. But, as always, the way to discover the truth of Jesus is by first following him, by putting his words into practice. It might look like a road that leads away from and place we want to go - indeed, it might lead to death - but in fact it is the way to true life.
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