Hilton Head Island, SC – August 16, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 18:1-8; Matthew 5:43-48
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” – Mt. 5:44
The first in this series of sermons called World-Changing Sayings of Jesus was delivered last Sunday. It was that statement of Jesus, when he said, “Do not resist one who is evil.” Today’s sermon is related to that, in a way, but Jesus gives us a different slant on a similar issue.
Most of us do not have enemies in the way that gangsters have enemies or business tycoons have enemies or politicians have enemies. Our enemies are more likely to be people who “get under our skin” or “bug” us, or irritate or aggravate or annoy us. In a more painful example of this matter, they may be people with whom we once had a close relationship, but now that relationship is partially or completely broken. Such people might be a former close friend, a family member, a former spouse or boss or colleague.
Let us be honest. It may seem very hard to love certain people from whom we have become estranged for whatever reason. Who can easily love someone who constantly rubs you the wrong way, or stabbed you in the back, or cheated you or cheated on you or fired you without justification or betrayed you in a professional or business relationship?
Is Jesus asking the impossible of us? Is it realistic to suppose that normal human beings can truly love their personal enemies?
In order to answer those questions, let us examine various meanings of the word “love.” According to my Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus, English synonyms for “love” are “affection, attachment, devotion, fondness.” It further declares that other words related to or associated with the word “love” are “liking, regard, adoration, allegiance, fealty, fidelity, loyalty, emotion, sentiment, infatuation, passion, ardor, and fervor [my italics].”
Virtually none of those words are what Jesus was talking about when he told us that we should love our enemies. The thesaurus words about love refer primarily to feelings and secondarily to thoughts. Feelings of love are given expression by such words as affection, attachment, fondness, adoration, emotion, sentiment, infatuation, passion, ardor, and fervor. Thoughts of love may become realized as devotion, allegiance, fealty, fidelity, and loyalty.
However, Jesus was not referring to any of those notions of love when he told us that we should love our enemies. If not, then what was he talking about?
To move toward an answer, we need to look at variations of meaning for the word “love” from another language: Greek. In Greek, there are five primary words for “love.” First, there is phileo. That is friendship love. Next there is eros, erotic love, sexual love, the kind of love that is implied by the word “lovers.” Then there is philoteknos, “filial” love, the genetic love of parents for their children. Fourth, there is philadelphia. Everyone knows what that is; it is the meaning of the name of the biggest city in Pennsylvania; it is brotherly love.
The entire New Testament was originally written in Greek. And the word Matthew used to translate what Jesus said in his original Aramaic is a fifth Greek word, which is agape. In English you can pronounce agape A-ga-pe or a-GA-pe. (To refer to a previous sermon series, it’s like Philemon. You can say Phi-LEEM-un or PHIL-eemon. It’s OK either way, except to Greeks.
Anyway, agape is love for everybody in general without being a particular kind of love for anyone in particular. Agape is love for everyone, for anyone, for all people.
But what does that mean? What in the world does that mean, to love everybody? How can anybody love everybody?
On the front of the bulletin is a quote from Thomas Aquinas. He was a great medieval theologian who lived from 1225 to 1274. In the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas was declared an official saint. He is considered one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Catholic Church. In his forty-nine years he revolutionized the way the Church thought about God, Jesus, doctrine, the Church, and everything that was or is important in theology.
“To love anyone is nothing else than to wish that person good,” said Thomas Aquinas. If you remember nothing else about Thomas Aquinas than that profound statement, you will be greatly blessed by knowing only that. That statement is what agape means. That is what Jesus was talking about. And to realize that with respect to personal enemies is a world-changing event.
“Liking” is not agape. Affection or emotion or sentiment or passion are not agape. New Testament love, the kind of love Jesus always talked about, meant to wish everyone good, to do good to everyone, to be good to everyone, even to enemies and the people who bug us and rub us the wrong way and make it their business to make our lives miserable. To love them is to intend good for them, and not harm, to be kind to them, and not spiteful. That is the kind of love Jesus meant when he said we should love our enemies.
And that is hard. That is really difficult, for everyone in general, but especially for enemies in particular. People who irritate us irritate us. Maybe they always have, and maybe they always will. But if we want to be followers of Jesus, we need to try not to irritate them in return. Instead, we must seek do good to them, even if they never stop trying to get under our skin.
Here is another way of describing agape love. It means, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” That could have been, and probably should have been, another of the world-changing sayings of Jesus in this sermon series, but I didn’t think of it. I’m not going to add it in mid-series, anymore than a major league baseball team adds another game to a series unless there is a rain-out or postponement from a previous game date. I said there would be six sermons in this series, and six there shall be.
But the Golden Rule is the most comprehensible way of putting into action what “Love your enemies” means. Do to enemies what you would want them to do to you, and don’t do to them what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.
This is not rocket science. It’s very difficult, but not impossible, and it is definitely doable.
For years Nelson Mandela had a man named Dick Gregory who was his personal jailer on Robben Island just off the coast of South Africa. Gregory was a personal jailer because Nelson Mandela was such a hot-potato political prisoner that the Apartheid government of South Africa knew he could not be treated like all other such prisoners. If he were to die, there could be riots all over the republic, and that could potentially lead to a revolution. So at first his jailer ordered the future president of South Africa to do the work the other prisoners were forced to do, but not so much of it that he might get sick or injured or die from it.
Over the years the jailer learned from the prisoner, and the prisoner learned from the jailer. By the time Mandela was released from Robben Island, he had forgiven his jailer, and the two men became friends. In part because Nelson Mandela could forgive the man who kept him under lock and key for so long, and not do him harm when he was freed, he also could forgive the racists who had ruled South Africa since it became a republic independent of British colonial rule. He refused to punish the people who had so badly harmed the black and colored peoples of what Alan Paton called “the beloved country.” When Mandela was finally inaugurated as president, he invited the jailer to be a guest of honor, along with P.W. Botha, the most repressive former leader of the South African government. Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu said of his fellow black African leader, “Prison was the making of Nelson Mandela.”
Were it not for the astonishing attitude of Nelson Mandela, Apartheid would almost certainly have ended violently and catastrophically. There was some violence when independence came, but not much. Millions of black South African tribesmen and mixed-race South Africans had many reasons to lash out against the whites who had oppressed them so long, but for the most part, they didn’t. They didn’t because Nelson Mandela taught them how to love their enemies.
Did that mean they suddenly liked all the white Afrikaners or the white Britishers? No. Nor did they have loving feelings toward them. But they didn’t strike out in hatred, they didn’t stage large-scale violent protests. The transition from white rule to black rule occurred with astonishingly little bloodshed, and it was largely due to the extraordinary example of Nelson Mandela. He did good to those who had done harm to millions of dark-skinned South Africans; he made a place for them in the new system, rather than freezing them out of the system.
Agape love is not about feelings; it is about actions. It isn’t determined by what people think; it is determined by what people do. We must do good to everyone, including enemies, and we must never do ill to anyone, including enemies.
Luke 18:1-8 is a very peculiar parable about a very obstinate judge. In it, Jesus tells a story about a widow who kept coming to the judge, demanding that he vindicate her from her adversary. Jesus didn‘t bother to tell us who the adversary was, or why the widow needed vindication. But she kept coming, and the judge kept doing nothing, and she kept coming, and he kept doing nothing. Finally she came to him one day, and he gave her what she wanted; she wanted justice. He did good in response to the evil of whoever had wronged her.
But why did he do it? Jesus put these words into the mouth of the obstinate judge, “Though I neither fear God not regard man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her, or she will wear me out by her continual coming” (Lk. 18:4-5).
For whatever it’s worth, here’s what I think about that parable. Luke got the story right, but he got the context out of which Jesus told his story all wrong. Luke said Jesus told the parable “to the effect that (we) ought always to pray and not lose heart.” If that was why Jesus told this parable, this was a very odd parable to underscore the notion of persistent prayer. The judge did what he did to get the widow off his back, not because he intended to do her any favors. In contradistinction to that less than laudable motive, surely God does good to us, whether or not we ask Him to do it. This parable is not about prayer at all. It’s about doing the right thing.
Further, so you know where I’m coming from (as we say), I chose this parable to say that if we do good to someone who is constantly bothering us, it should be because it is good to do good, and not because doing good stops people from bothering us. Loving deeds ought never to be enacted as a quid pro quo: You do this for me, and I’ll do that for you. Love should be something we do for everyone, even our worst enemies, because that is what God wants us to do. And how do we know that? We know it because we know Jesus. And if we don’t know Jesus, we should get to know him, because he can change our world.
Rain Man was an Academy-Award-winning movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. Both were nominated for Best Actor, and Dustin Hoffman won the Oscar. Charlie Babbitt is a Los Angeles hustler who learns that his wealthy father has died in Cincinnati. He flies back home, expecting to receive all of his father’s estate. What he discovers is that he had a severely autistic brother whom he knew nothing about, and all Charlie Babbitt received from the will was a yellow 1950s Buick convertible and some prized rose bushes. Without permission, he drives his brother Raymond across the country, because Raymond refuses to fly. He hopes to become Raymond’s guardian so that he can control the trust which had been set up for Raymond by their father.
The picaresque journey with his brother to California is a humorous, touching, enlightening, expansive experience for Charlie Babbitt. On the way it is revealed to Charlie Babbitt that Raymond is a mysterious figure from when he was two years old who disappeared from Charlie’s life. He realized the boy who left his life when he accidentally scalded Charlie in the bathtub was the autistic Raymond, whom he know only by the mystery moniker, Rain Man. Charlie had every reason to perceive Raymond as his enemy, because he had gotten all the money Charlie had understandably assumed was his. But by the end of the film, he knew that it was in Raymond’s best interest to return to Cincinnati to the facility where he spent most of his life and which gave him the rigid routines by which he could achieve as much happiness and contentment as possible.
There is another word that defines the kind of love Jesus was referring to when he commanded us to love our enemies. It is the word altruism. It is the essence of the kind of love of which Jesus almost always spoke. The dictionary gives this definition of altruism. It is “unselfish regard for and devotion to the welfare of others.” Charlie’s love for Rain Man was altruism.
When we are as devoted to the wellbeing of others, especially those who are often or always a thorn in our flesh, we will have discovered the meaning of agape love. Most of the time when we think about love, it is filial or family love, friendship love, or the love of lovers. We expect love to be offered and returned in all of those kinds of relationships, and indeed those are vital links of love. But the love that most changes the world is unexpected and perhaps even undeserved love, which is agape love. It means doing good to people we don’t know and see rarely: the inept person who is always at the counter in the store, the clerk at the Motor Vehicle Department who takes half an hour to do what should be accomplished in three minutes, the plumber who finally comes to fix the leak in your faucet after the fourth call, the unknown miscreant from Amazon who sent you the wrong widget, although you admit you used to go the hardware store to select your widgets but you don’t get out much anymore, the co-worker who torpedoed you from getting a promotion twenty years ago who showed up on the island yesterday and wants to stop to see you after all these years. None of these folks is really an enemy, but they may seem like it, and we are to do good to them rather than to want to wring their necks.
Paul stated it in beautiful prose. “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in the wrong, but rejoices at the right” (I Cor. 13:4-6). Love your enemies.