The Sermon on the Plain – 6) – A Lesson on Love

Hilton Head Island, SC – June 30, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 6:27-31; Luke 6:32-36
A Sermon by John M. Miller

Text – But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. – Luke 6:27-28 (RSV)

 

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark was the first man to write a Gospel that the early Church approved for being included in the New Testament. Whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew was familiar with the contents of the Gospel of Mark, and used much of its material. Whoever wrote Luke knew of both Mark and Matthew. If the writer of the Gospel of John was familiar with the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, he chose not to include very much that was in those Gospels, because his Gospel is more unlike than like the three Synoptic Gospels. Apparently the leaders of the Church in the third and fourth centuries decided it was probably wise to have three Gospels which were essentially alike and one that was quite different from the other three.

 

Matthew’s “Sermon on the Mount” is three full chapters in length, whereas Luke’s “Sermon on the Plain” is only one chapter long. However, many of the things Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount are found elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel. For whatever reason, Matthew chose to clump many of the sayings of Jesus into one long sermon, while Luke chose to make his Sermon on the Plain shorter. However, many of the same sayings found in Matthew, chapters five through seven, are scattered elsewhere throughout Luke.

 

Have you noticed lately how frequently news announcers say, “That said…,” and then they go on to say something else? It has become a journalistic catchphrase. Well, all that having been said that I just said, I would also go on to say that Luke gives a singular structure to his Sermon on the Plain that is not found in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Specifically, Luke has Jesus begin the sermon with not nine but rather four “beatitudes,” which are statements of blessing for certain people. Blessed are you poor, blessed are you who are hungry now, blessed are you who weep now, blessed are you when people hate you.

 

Those four Beatitudes are followed by four “woe to you” statements. Woe to you who are rich, woe to you who are well fed now, woe to you who are laughing now, woe to you when everyone speaks well of you.

 

Then Jesus immediately followed the four “woe” statements with eight statements about how and when and why we should love others who take advantage of us, rather than do to them what they did to us. 1)Love your enemies; 2) do good to those who hate you; 3) bless those who curse you; 4) pray for those who abuse you; 5) to him who strikes you on the cheek, turn to him the other cheek also; 6) give to all who beg from you; 7) those who seize your goods from you, don’t ask for them back again; and 8) as you wish that people would do to you, so you must do to them.

 

Four blessings, four woes, and eight points in the lesson on love. Jesus seems here to be something of a theological mathematician, someone who suggested that we should express twice as much love toward those who abuse us as they showed abuse to us by doing what they did. In the kingdom of God, Jesus is saying, love is twice as powerful as acts of hatred or abuse, because only love can overcome hatred and abuse.

 

Have you ever heard someone say that life is not fair? It’s absolutely correct; life isn’t fair. God never promised us that life would be fair. People are going to mess with us and trick us. That is inevitable. But God does promise, and Jesus does validate, that God will be with all of us if we choose to follow the law of love. And the law of love is what is found at the end of Luke’s eight-fold lesson on love or Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (7:12), “As you wish that  people would do to you, so you must do to them, for this,” said Jesus, summarizing the essence of everything  written in the Hebrew Bible, “is the law and the prophets.”

 

Life will never be fair! Others shall abuse us, and we, all of us, shall sometimes abuse others in one way or another. It is a certainty. We are, after all, humans. But what do we do about it when that happens? That is what the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain are all about.

 

Jesus was not the first person to articulate the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” That idea was first suggested in a negative form fifty years prior to the time of Jesus’ ministry by a famous Judean rabbi named Hillel. “Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you,” said Hillel. Incidentally, in countless college campuses all across America, the Hillel Foundation is the student center for Jewish students. That is appropriate, because Hillel was a great scholar, and Jews revere his memory in the name of their campus religious organization.

 

I was personally a recipient of a very kind application of the Golden Rule last week. A taxi driver was trying to make a quick U-turn in our parking lot. He didn’t quite succeed, bashing into the rear fender of my car. He left a note on my windshield, however, saying I should call the taxi company, which I did, instantly. Fortunately, it was exactly as the note stated. The owner of the company will pay to get the fender fixed. My only problem is that it can’t be repaired before I go on my three-thousand mile odyssey that I exp0lained earlier in the service. Therefore I will have to try to convince a lot of skeptical people that an old codger didn’t back into somebody. But that’s far better than having somebody who didn’t believe in the Golden Rule who might have stiffed me and I would never have known who the fender offender was. Bashing my car was an accident, but letting me know who did the bashing was an act of love and the employment of the Golden Rule.

 

There is a different summary of the Old Testament religious law that is found in all three synoptic Gospels, but I prefer the one in Luke. In both Mark and Matthew, an expert in the religious law asked Jesus what was the essence of the biblical law. Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” In Luke the man asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Instead of Jesus answering that question, Jesus asked the man another question; “What does the Torah (the Old Testament law) say? How do you read its essence?” So the man repeated what Jesus was reported to have said in Mark and Matthew. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” In response to that answer, Jesus warmly commended the Torah expert. “You have answered right; do this, and you will live” (Luke 10:25-29). 

 

As the song says, “Love makes the world go round, love makes the world go round.” The lack of love is also what constantly knocks the world off its track. The Beatitudes are what we need. The Golden Rule is what we need. The “woes” are what we do not need, because woes indicate a failure to express love.

 

Before he died, Abraham Lincoln sensed that his life would be cut short. Several times in the weeks leading up to his assassination, he had a dream in which he was on a ship that was sailing very quickly onto a rocky shore. He took it to be a sign of his imminent demise. Before his death, Lincoln made as many provisions as possible for as smooth a re-uniting as possible with the South.

 

 In his Second Inaugural Address, which Lincoln delivered only five weeks before he was killed, he ended by saying, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

 

Abraham Lincoln meant those words to apply to all soldiers, widows, and orphans in both the North and the South. He had no interest in punishing the South any more than  had already happened. Had he lived, the just purposes upon which the Reconstruction Movement had been founded would have eliminated many of the animosities which were allowed to fester under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson. Lincoln meant to become a uniter of all Americans: Northerners and Southerners, ex-slaves and free citizens, blacks and whites. Johnson was a divider: of Southerners versus Northerners, former slave owners versus everyone else; whites versus blacks. The lesson of love intended to be implemented by Lincoln was neither heard nor followed by Johnson.

 

In the aftermath of World War II, the Axis powers, along with most of our allies, were in a devastated condition. America set about assisting the defeated nations as well as our allied nations. The Marshall Plan was aimed to help the countries of southeastern Europe where Soviet communism was a threat. In addition, though, many billions of dollars of assistance were poured into Germany, Japan, and Italy to rebuild their cities, industries, and economies.

 

Today, all three of those Axis nations are among our strongest allies. Nations naturally act primarily with self-interest in mind, but there was an amazing amount of altruism in the assistance given to our former enemies. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who abuse you” will not automatically improve things, but to do those things is more likely to restore a healthy relationship than to engage in the same tactics which were used against us by others who considered us their enemies.

 

When people do evil things to other people, there is inevitable suffering and rancor. But to repay evil with evil is to guarantee that suffering and rancor will continue. Jesus was not referring to national responses to aggression, although his words have limited relevance even there. He was talking mainly about interpersonal relationships. How should we deal with individuals who seek to hurt us: the gossips, the cheats, the abusers, those who use force or intimidation or cunning against us?

 

We should love our enemies because they are our enemies! We should love the one who is despised precisely because she or he is despised! We should love those who bother us the most even if it seems counterintuitive, and we should do it exactly because it is counterintuitive! Love doesn’t come naturally to us except in very close interpersonal relationships: parents for children or children for parents; spouses for their spouse; close friends for close friends. That kind of love generally is easily enacted, and is therefore is easily offered and reciprocated.

 

It is love that is severely tested by difficult circumstances which is the hardest to offer, but also has the greatest possibility of making the biggest difference. When Catholics and Protestants finally laid down their arms, peace finally came to Northern Ireland. When the horrendous tribal carnage between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda finally ended, a painful truce enabled Rwanda to regain its footing as a nation.  When a miffed neighbor forgives a miffed neighbor for an offense which may be either real or imagined, and the neighbor accepts the cessation of the spoken or unspoken animosity, peace comes.

 

Love is the lubricant which alone can smooth fractured and shattered relationships. God does not command us to like our personal adversaries. That might never happen. But He does command us to love them. That means we must avoid harming them or to continue to do battle with them. We must not berate them to others or directly to themselves. We must treat them with respect. There is no one who is alive who is not a child of God. Even the worst of sinners are still sons and daughters of God. As Christians, we are commanded by Jesus to love everyone.

 

Every now and then we read about a murder trial in which the accused is convicted. Sometimes it is a wife or daughter or son who is killed. Occasionally, where the murder occurred in one of those benighted states which still allow capital punishment, the husband or parents of the murder victim will take the witness stand to plead that the killer’s life be spared. That is an act of love in the most trying of circumstances. If those family members can ask the judge and jury not to end the life of the murderer who ended the life of the one they greatly loved, there can be no greater expression of love than that. Love, freely offered, transforms the world; it really does.

 

Admittedly that doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. And it happens because someone heard and responded to Jesus’ Lesson on Love.

 

All of us can readily identify people who are perpetual thorns in our side to one degree or another. What we fail to recognize is that we also may be thorns in the side of other people. Thorny relationships can be overcome only by the conscious exercise of love expressed. If it isn’t  actually expressed, the relationship is bound to remain strained. Love is altruism in action.   

 

   Biblical love is perhaps even more a test of character than it is a test of faith. However, it surely is both. The most difficult challenge in life may be to love everyone with biblical love, because some people are simply so unlovely and seem so unloveable. Nevertheless, that is the challenge with which Jesus confronts all of us.

 

Love your enemies. Do good to those who make your life miserable. Bless those who curse you. Don’t strike back at those who strike out at you. As you would like others to do to you, do so to them. It is the law and the lesson of love.