Matthew 5:43-48
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
July 7, 2024
Jesus is loving…and tough. He holds us to the highest standards – and is exacting and unrelenting in doing so. While we want to moderate the force of God’s commandments – making them more “reasonable”, we say – Jesus wants to magnify their force, especially when it comes to loving. Hmm…doesn’t He realize how hard it is to be good to those who’ve been bad to us, and how satisfying it is to pay back those who’ve done us wrong?
A man had long been wronged by an inconsiderate neighbor. One day he decided to change things between them. He wrote a letter: “Will, we’ve had three tumultuous years. When you borrowed my vacuum cleaner, you returned it broken without an apology. When I was sick, you blasted your music and wouldn’t lower the volume. When your dog kept using my flower boxes as his personal restroom, you laughed. I could go on, but I won’t hold grudges. In fact, to be a good neighbor, I write now to tell you your house is on fire and I’ll be sure to put this letter in the mailbox by five. – Love, Tom.”
Jesus never lets us stay self-satisfied. He disturbs us from our comfortable status quo, when we’d just as soon prioritize self-contentment over self-improvement. While He means to expand our circle of caring, we try to reduce it to a more manageable size – though, to do so, we like the scribes and Pharisees have to distort God’s foundational command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and rewrite it so it says instead, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” That tampering with God’s word both subtracts something essential from it and adds something contrary to it. It subtracts from the command to love our neighbor by deleting the words “as yourself” – which minimizes the quality of our loving – and adds to it by inserting the words “and hate your enemy” – which minimizes the quantity of our loving, limiting it to a smaller group that excludes enemy neighbors.
The faithful followers of Jesus will have none of this. They face the fact that the original biblical command is clear and right as written, and is echoed in many other biblical commands. For example, Proverbs 25:21 instructs us to feed our enemy when they’re in danger of starving.
God’s law tells us to help everyone, friend or foe, if they’re in desperate straits. We may not like them. We may have a legitimate grievance against them. But we still have a duty to help them if we can.
That means that, if an enemy has done us an injustice, we have to learn how to, while continuing to hate their sin, love them the sinner. C.S. Lewis had a hard time getting his head around this distinction until he realized how he’d already been making the distinction his entire life with one particular person: himself! In Mere Christianity he writes, “However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There’d never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason why I hated those things was that I loved myself. Just because I did, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did such things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for, say, cruelty or treachery. We ought to hate them…But it does want us to hate them in others the same way we hate them in ourselves: sorry the person did them, and hoping” they can do better.
When we love those whose actions we hate, we show ourselves to be true children of God the Father. For we are then enacting a love like that of the One who “makes his sun shine on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” With indiscriminate generosity, God bestows many bountiful blessings even upon bad people! When we love those who have been bad to us, we resemble God. It has been said, “To return evil for good is devilish; to return good for good is human; to return good for evil is divine.”
Though it still stuns and disturbs, should it surprise us that Jesus gives the daunting command to “be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect”?
Jesus cannot mean He expects His followers to attain ethical and spiritual flawlessness. After all, 42 verses earlier, He describes His followers as those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – but we can’t hunger and thirst for something unless we lack it; and 12 verses later, He teaches His followers to say the Lord’s Prayer and to keep asking God for forgiveness – but we can’t ask for forgiveness unless we’ve sinned. The perfection Jesus is talking about here cannot involve our fulfilling the moral ideal completely. The very context points in another direction. Jesus has just been talking about loving all others: the good, the bad and everyone in between. It’s worth noting that the word in Aramaic – the language in which most scholars believe Jesus spoke – the Aramaic word that is likely behind this English word perfection, is one whose basic meaning is “all-embracing” or “all-inclusive”. That understanding correlates better with the theme Jesus has just been proclaiming in the Sermon on the Mount and with the parallel verse in His Sermon on the Plain where Jesus puts the point this way: “Be merciful just as your Father in heaven is merciful”. In other words, Jesus is calling His followers to embody the universality of God’s all-embracing love. Since God the Father is concerned about, and kind to, both the evil and the good, we show ourselves to be chips off the old block as we share His gracious love as widely as He.
Of course, in commanding us to be perfect in love, Jesus the realist is expressing, not His immediate expectation for us, but His long-term aspiration for us. But some folks get pretty far in embodying God’s grace – like a big, muscular man named Daniel about whom Max Lucado writes in his book The Applause of Heaven.
Daniel had been swindled by his own brother; and had sworn that if he saw him again, he’d break his neck.
While recovering from his financial disaster, Daniel started following Jesus. For all that, however, Daniel couldn’t bring himself to forgive his brother.
One day, Daniel spotted his brother walking down a city street before he spotted Daniel. Daniel’s face grew red-hot and his fists clenched, as he stormed over to grab his brother by the throat and choke the life out of him. But as he approached, he noticed in his brother’s face the image of their father. He was looking at the same eyes, the same mouth, the same facial expressions. And the sight of the likeness melted Daniel’s heart. He says, “When I saw our father in his face, my enemy became my brother” – and Daniel threw his arms around the swindler, not to kill him, but to wrap him up in a warm embrace of God’s great grace.
May we who mean to follow Jesus see our Father’s face in everyone with whom we deal and love them as they are, just as the Father loves us as we are! We may never, this side of heaven, perfectly represent His graciousness – but by His grace, we get to grow in graciousness more and more! Let’s never stop!
Write a comment: