Grateful Expectations
Luke 6:27-38
I never cease to be amazed when the lectionary makes it seem as if the readings for Sunday were specifically chosen to address the past week’s headlines. It happens more often than you would think. Some might call it coincidence, but really it’s yet another indication that the Bible is a living, breathing document. While the many books that make up the Bible may have been written some 2,000 years ago or more, in times and places and cultures very different than our own, the words of scripture reach across time and space and culture and address us as though written for us today.
To what am I referring? Why, of course, ordo amoris. Come again? Ordo amoris. No, it’s not the latest dish on the menu down at Union. Ordo amoris is a concept that comes from Catholic moral theology that means “order of love.” Basically the idea is that, as Christians, we are to will the good for everyone, no matter how close or distant our connection to them. However, because we are finite creatures, we cannot do good for everyone. Therefore, we ought to give special regard to those with whom we have a close connection, such as family, neighbor, and community.
I’m not going to get too much into the weeds on this because, although I was raised Roman Catholic, I don’t remember ordo amoris ever coming up in my confirmation class. I’ll just say that as articulated by Augustine, the great North African theologian of the early church, ordo amoris is a concession to our limited human nature. As Christians we are called by God to love everyone in principle, but as finite creatures, i.e., because we exist in a particular time and place, we cannot love everyone in practice. It’s akin to the words of a popular song from 1970: If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.
What ordo amoris is not is a hierarchy of love. It does not say that our highest duty is love of family, then friends, then neighbors, then members of our community, then our fellow citizens, and then finally, at long last, after all those other responsibilities have been met, the stranger. Ordo amoris is not a kind of trickle-down charity.
Yet that is how it has been bandied about by some touting it to justify cutting off our nation’s aid to the world’s poor. “Let’s take care of our own first before helping the poor in other countries. Charity begins at home.” Or as I saw it expressed on a bumper sticker slapped on to a telephone pole near my mother’s condo, “Help veterans, not refugees.” To which any reasonable person could reply, “Why not both? Why posit this false choice?”
Beyond presenting us with a false choice that pits the familiar against the unfamiliar, the near against the distant, the notion that Christians ought to have a hierarchy of love that starts with family at the top and then gradually trickles down to the stranger is problematic on a deeper level—it ain’t biblical. At least, it’s certainly not something that ever came from the mouth of Jesus. Quite the opposite, in fact.
When Jesus is told that his mother and brothers are looking for him, he replies, “Who are my mother and brothers…? Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:33,35).
When Jesus explains the cost of being his disciple, he says in no uncertain terms, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:25). Ouch!
I could go on. There are many other examples. Alright, just one more! How about today’s passage? “If you love those who love you,” Jesus says, “what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same” (Luke 6:32-33). Far from focusing on family first, Jesus enjoins his disciples to “love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28).
Jesus’ command to “love your enemies” follows on the heels of his pronouncing blessing upon the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are hated and excluded on account of him. In other words, if you don’t like experiencing poverty, hunger, and the hatred of others, you can always pray for those who mistreat you! Good times! Sometimes I marvel that Jesus had any disciples at all! Who would want to sign up for this?
I mentioned last week, when we read the verses that come just before today’s passage, that chapter 6 is Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. Luke’s version is quite a bit shorter than Matthew’s, and the setting is different, but in both gospels the sermon is the height of Jesus’ moral teaching. It’s where Jesus makes it clear to his disciples, as well as to the crowd, what being his disciple entails. Let’s just say that it’s not an easy road to walk.
And yet, at the same time, it’s a cakewalk. Nothing could be easier. What do I mean? Let’s get some context. Jesus is preaching this sermon quite early on in his public ministry. It was just before this, in chapter 5, that he called the twelve disciples. After calling them, he came down the mountain with them to address the crowd.
That means that this sermon is the first time that all twelve have been with him in public as his disciples. This is their first taste of what being his disciple means. Given the sermon’s message of radical self-denial, I don’t imagine that when Jesus finished preaching they were high-fiving each other and shouting, “Yes, let’s go love our enemies!”
Make no mistake, the disciples were not pillars of moral purity. They were not spiritual superheroes. They were flawed human beings, susceptible to the same sins and foibles that we are susceptible to. They could be selfish, rash, and unforgiving. They jockeyed for positions of honor, resented the grace that Jesus gave to outsiders, and were comically lacking in self-awareness.
Luke doesn’t tell us what they thought about Jesus’ message of loving your enemies, blessing those who curse you, and praying for those who mistreat you. But regular people that they were, they were probably as troubled and confounded by his words as we are. Actually, even more so, because while we have heard Jesus’ moral teachings many times over the years in sermon after sermon, they were hearing all of this for the first time. What to our ears has been softened by repetition and interpretation, to theirs must have sounded uniquely harsh and uncompromising.
What Jesus is calling for is beyond our capabilities.
“How can anyone do this?” I imagine them asking. I ask myself the same question. And I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming that you’re asking yourself the same thing right now. What Jesus is calling for is beyond our capabilities. To pray for blessing upon the one who curses you, and not to object when someone takes from you, does not come naturally to anyone.
Plus, not only is maintaining such a strict moral standard next to impossible, it’s not practical! This good news is bad advice! I mean, are we supposed to be doormats and just let people walk all over us?
No, of course not. “Well then, okay, we’ve heard how hard this is,” you’re thinking. “Didn’t you say something about this being easy?” Did I? Yes, I did! To understand what I mean we must view what Jesus is saying through the lens of the cross. At the time of this sermon, Jesus had only just begun his ministry, and the cross lay in the future, but from his perspective it was a future inevitability because he chose it. He walks within its looming shadow, knowing that each step he takes brings him closer.
He walks toward the cross knowing full well that among these twelve disciples whom he’s just called, one will betray him while the rest will flee from him. One, when asked, will three times deny even knowing him.
With friends like these, who needs enemies? But that’s just it. The disciples, to a man, along with every single one of us here and everyone out there, we all were enemies of God. In our sin, in our relentless devotion to and pursuit of our own self-interest, we were enemies of the God who calls us to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The Apostle Paul comes right out and says it in Romans, “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life” (Rom. 5:10).
Yes, we were enemies of God, but we are no longer, because even while we were enemies, God, through the death of his Son Jesus, reconciled us. We are no longer enemies but rather children of the Most High.
What do we, or did we, have to do to effect this change? Absolutely nothing! Not a thing! It was done for us! It was accomplished on our behalf by the God who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. That means not only those people over there but everyone right here. The work of reconciliation has been done. All we need to do is accept it with gratitude.
Gratitude is the key. When we are grateful for what Christ accomplished on the cross, we hear the command to love our enemies very differently. Rather than hearing the voice of the law, we hear the voice of grace. We don’t hear, “If you love your enemies, then I will love you.” We hear, “Because I love you, you are free to love your enemies.” We hear, “Be merciful, just as your heavenly Father is merciful.” Merciful to me, merciful to you, and merciful to everyone.
To love an enemy, to turn the other cheek, to bless those who curse us is not an act of will that we summon from within. It is the power of a grace that is greater than our sin, a grace that transforms us by helping us cling to Christ and his mercy rather than to our pride, our possessions, or any sense of self-interest or self-preservation.
Lent begins 10 days from now. I’m going to end by reading an excerpt from a Lenten devotional that was written by the Dutch Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. Hey! We started with the Catholics; why not end there? If you participated in Tea-ology last spring, you should recognize his name. We read his book Life of the Beloved. This excerpt comes from another book of his, a devotional titled Show Me the Way. In it he writes:
It is indeed the paradox of hospitality that poverty makes a good host. Poverty is the inner disposition that allows us to take away our defenses and convert our enemies into friends. We can perceive the stranger as an enemy only as long as we have something to defend. But when we say, “Please enter—my house is your house, my joy is your joy, my sadness is your sadness, and my life is your life,” we have nothing to defend, since we have nothing to lose but all to give.
Turning the other cheek means showing our enemies that they can be our enemies only while supposing that we are anxiously clinging to our private property, whatever it is: our knowledge, our good name, our land, our money, or the many objects we have collected around us. But who will be our robbers when everything they want to steal from us becomes our gift to them? Who can lie to us when only the truth will serve them well? Who wants to sneak into our back door when our front door is wide open?