"Love Your Enemies?" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday February 23, 2025 (7^th Sunday After Epiphany)
Scripture Reading:  Luke 6:27-38


OK – so I have to confess that this is maybe one of my least favourite teachings of Jesus.  I don’t like it, because it’s HARD.  I can get behind most of what Jesus teaches about love – love one another, as I have loved you; love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; love your neighbour as yourself.  This is all good, because, after all, what the world needs now is love sweet love.

But in this passage, Jesus pushes me to expand my understanding of who should be included in that circle of love.  Jesus tells me that I am to love not just my friends and the people I like, but I am to love my enemies too.  Jesus tells me that I am to do good to people who hate me.  Jesus tells me that I am to bless people – not only the people who will bless me in return, but I am to bless the people who will return curses for my blessings.  Jesus tells me that I am to pray for people who mistreat me.

The last time we had this reading assigned to us by the lectionary was 3 years ago, February 2022, right in the middle of the Trucker’s Protest in Ottawa, and I said then that this was a hard reading.  With everything going on in the world, I have to say that it is maybe an even harder reading now than it was then.

The thing is, I don’t really want to love my enemies; I don’t want to love the people who hate me; I don’t want to love the people who curse me; I don’t want to love the people who mistreat me, or who mistreat vulnerable people.  I don’t want to do it.

In fact, if I’m being honest, there are people in the world that I kind of wish would just sort of disappear.  I don’t necessarily want harm to come to them, I just think that the world would be a better place if they weren’t in it.  I think of the people who, just a couple of weeks ago, hung swastika flags from overpass bridges in Cincinnati.  I think of the people who are making decisions to drop bombs on hospitals and on playgrounds.  I think of the people who are removing the right to exist from transgender folx south of the border.  I think of politicians who cut foreign aid funding, meaning that vulnerable people are literally going to die.

Jesus tells me that I am to love my enemies, but I’m finding it very hard to love people who are causing such great harm.

But then I remind myself who is speaking here.  Jesus didn’t live in a time and a place where vulnerable and marginalized people where cherished and protected by the government.  In fact, Jesus lived in a time and place that bears a striking number of resemblances to our time and place.  Jesus lived in a backwater nation under the control of the Roman Empire; and not only that, but he was from the region of Galilee which was the back of beyond even within his own country.  All of the power was concentrated in a small number of wealthy people.  Nations were taken over by force.  Taxes were paid to support the military structure that was the Roman Empire, and if you weren’t able to pay, you would be out on the street or imprisoned.  Those of you who are history buffs might be familiar with the concept of “Pax Romana” or the Roman Peace – this was not what we think of as peace which is a space where everyone can flourish; rather this was a peace that was the absence of war, enforced by the threat of military might.  Put one toe out of line, and you’re likely to end up on a cross as an example to others.

This was the context that Jesus was speaking to.  And he wasn’t speaking to the emperor, or to the tech billionaires of his time and place.  He was speaking to a crowd of farmers and fishermen – people who were trying to produce enough food to feed their families for the year, and to pay the taxes and rent that were demanded of them.  He was speaking to people who were one bad harvest away from destitution.  He was speaking to people who would have turned down a side alley in order to avoid encountering a Roman military officer.

I can imagine that Jesus’s teaching wasn’t received any better by his original audience than it is by us.  “What do you mean, we are to love the tax collector who extorts more than needed?  What do you mean, we are to pray for the health and safety of the emperor in Rome?  What do you mean, we are to bless the Roman soldiers who are dragging someone off to be crucified, for the simple crime of questioning if we might be better off without Rome?”

What do you mean, we are to love a government who is sending refugees back to places where they will be killed?  What do you mean, we are to bless the people in the Department of Government Efficiency who are firing tens of thousands of people without cause?  What do you mean, we are to pray for a tech billionaire who is accumulating obscene wealth by eliminating the social security net?  What do you mean, we are to pray for an Emperor-President who wants to expand the empire by military might?  (I’m trying really hard to avoid naming names.  But I’m sure that you would be able to add to this list, on a global scale, on a local scale, or on a personal scale.)

And yet Jesus says that we are to love our enemies.  Jesus says that we are to do good to people who hate us.  Jesus says that we are to bless people who curse us.  Jesus says that we are to pray for people who mistreat us.

And it. Is. Hard.

But then I remind myself who is speaking.  Jesus himself is going to be executed by Empire – nailed to a cross and left there to suffer until his breath is literally squeezed out of him.  And yet, with his dying breath, he forgives and prays for the people who are executing him.  In just a couple of months from now, on Good Friday, Jesus is going to model this radical and difficult teaching he is giving us today.  “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Jesus never said that it was going to be easy, but he is consistent in his message that we are to love radically.  We are to love expansively.  We are to love generously.  We are to love, even when the love isn’t reciprocated.

And not only do I have to remember who was speaking, the people he was speaking to, and the context he was speaking in; but I also have to remember that there is a very good chance that there is someone out there who considers me to be their enemy.  There is a very good chance that I am the person that someone wishes would just disappear from the earth.

Robb McCoy, one of the hosts of my favourite preaching podcast, Pulpit Fiction, re-worded this passage in a way that really hits home.  His version goes:  “Jesus said, it is easy to love the people you like. It is much harder to love the jerks, but I’m telling you to love the jerks. Because there was a time you were a jerk and someone loved you.”  And I think that this is the heart of the Golden Rule found in this passage from Luke:  “Treat people in the same way that you want them to treat you.”  When I mess up, I want people to be able to forgive me; therefore I need to be willing to forgive and love and bless and pray for others when they mess up in big or small ways.

It is hard.  Jesus knew that it was hard.  Jesus himself experienced how hard this is.  But part of the good news is that we don’t have to do it on our own.  We all have the Holy Spirit working within us, empowering us to do the hard things we are called to do.  God calls us to walk this difficult way of unconditional love, and it is God working in us who equips and enables us to walk this difficult way of unconditional love.

And above all, we keep on loving.  We love radically.  We love expansively.  We love generously.  We love, even when the love isn’t reciprocated.  We love, and in doing so, we refuse to let ourselves be dragged into cycles of violence and hatred and revenge.

And may the God whose very essence is love, surround you and allow you so to do.  Amen.

“Hands, All Together”
Used with Permission