Beloved Members of St. Martin’s, Last week in the lectionary, we heard Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, which is notable for its juxtaposition of specific and personal blessings and woes, instead of Matthew’s more general list of blessings. This week we will hear Jesus’s discussion about how we deal with those we would consider to be enemies.
In the first part of our gospel this week. Jesus will list seven rules for how to deal with those whom we perceive to oppose us:
Love your enemies,
do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you,
pray for those who abuse you.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
Give, and it will be given back to you.
Of these seven rules, the ones most of us have probably heard the most are numbers 5 and 6. The fifth rule is also known as the Golden Rule—and what’s interesting is that a version of that rule exists in nearly every religion and ethical structure across the globe, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, the Sikh faith, Taosim, Homer (representing Greek philosophy), Philo, Confucius, and even the Code of Hammurabi. The sixth one should be familiar to all of us—because we pray to live by that rule that every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer.
The power of our gospel reading today is in its promise of abundance at the very end: if we live a generous life toward others, we ourselves will find an abundance beyond measure, so much that it spills out of our cupped hands and into our laps.
Jesus’s teaching here is filled with active verbs that instruct us in what we are called to do to live as disciples of Jesus. We hear repeated positive commands:
Love. Do good. Bless. Pray. Give. Lend. Forgive.
Jesus here calls us to remember the grace we receive FIRST, a gift freely given though we may not deserve it. And in the same breath, he calls those who follow him to embody grace for ourselves, and then live out that grace in our interactions with others. To make God visible in this world, embody God’s values first: love, mercy, forgiveness, and grace, as Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde’s plea from a month ago reminds us all. To live as disciples, we are challenged to live by these precepts, DESPITE the world’s worship of grievance, vengeance, and division—the same values that fuel so much of the cruelty and tyranny in our world at the hands of human arrogance and contempt.
One of my teachers once explained it to me this way: “Just because we can get away with something, or think we have the right to, does not mean that we should. One person’s right to swing their arms around ends at the tips of the noses of the people around them.”
The message we receive today in Luke’s gospel and that Bishop Mariann pleaded from last month, starts from a place of gentleness and compassion—that amazingly generous gift known as grace which is better than riches or vengeance. Grace is a necessary component to any community, and to any society. Grace, and its offspring mercy and forbearance, is the bond that binds us to God and to each other.
In Christ,
Mother Leslie+