by CCW | 7 July 2013 16:11
The Gospel reading for today ends where the reading for The Fourth Sunday after Trinity began, “be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” Both Gospel readings are taken from the 6th chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, from what might be styled Christ’s Sermon on the Plain, in obvious allusion to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. There are certain parallels and commonalities and I like the idea that what is conveyed on high is also present for us here below. Like The Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Plain also turns the world on its head. Everything, we might say, is being placed on an entirely radical and new foundation.
What is that radical and new foundation? It is grace conveyed principally here in terms of the theme of mercy which challenges, corrects and ultimately perfects all the limited forms of human interaction. To my mind, Christ’s command to “love your enemies” is utterly astounding and gives fuller meaning to the nature of the divine mercy which is meant to rule and govern our lives. Why? Because I cannot help but think that this is a distinctive and unique feature of the Christian Faith which goes to the radical meaning to the idea of God as love. It signals the radical idea of the overcoming of all that opposes the truth and goodness of God and makes that idea the governing reality of our lives.
It is, I think, unique in the annals of religion and philosophy, which is not to say that it doesn’t have plenty of precursors that complement the radical nature of this concept in some way or another. There is the great Hindu classic, The Bhagavad Gita, which Mahatma Gandhi regarded as the manifesto of a kind of radical pacifism even though the Gita is set in the midst of the great war epic of the Mahabharata. Arjuna, a warrior prince whose dharma, duty or very character of being, means that he must fight questions, why? He stands between two immense armies; they are all his relatives. Nothing nastier, after all, than civil wars and conflicts within families. Sri Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, agrees to counsel him, teaching him the principles of the Hindu understanding. Arjuna discovers that he must fulfill his dharma but to do that means to surrender any attachment to the outcome. It is an argument for acting with a kind of detachment. In such a view, there are no enemies, really; the enemy is within.
Buddhism, too, in its classical form, does away with the concept of enemies. Such things really belong to the illusions of the self, the world and, even God. Suffering arises from the self and its attachments. Free yourself from yourself and all desire and you will have escaped the endless round of suffering and hardship. There is no you – no self – and if no self, then no other either, and, by extension, the other, then, cannot be your enemy. Enmity as a form of suffering is an illusion that belongs to clinging to your self.
With Judaism, things are more complex. There is the idea of the utter otherness of God as the very truth of reality which is not an illusion. Freedom and dignity is found in the law of God. In principle, it is universal, for all, and there are a multitude of wonderful passages that challenge us about how we deal with the stranger, the sojourner, the outsider. Beyond the ancient concepts of hospitality, Judaism locates all of us as sojourners; those who are on a kind of pilgrimage with God, learning in the wilderness of sin about the true and liberating nature of the Law. There is, it seems, a kind of overcoming of enmity. And certainly, there are the themes of mercy. But “love your enemies”? No, I don’t think so.
The utter clarity of the statement should arrest our attention. This is not about contemporary conflict resolution theories. This is something stronger and more compelling here. Jesus isn’t saying, first, that you don’t have any enemies, and secondly, that in loving your enemies all your problems simply go away and your enemies will cease to be your enemies. No. What is so radical here is that we are commanded to love those who hate us and seek our hurt and who may very well persist in that pursuit. What is astounding is that we required to love them even though they are our enemies. It is not about changing them. At issue is how we look at things.
This turns the world upside down. How is it even remotely possible yet alone thinkable? Because “God commended his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” The whole possibility of this impossible idea is what we have been given to see in Jesus Christ, in his death and resurrection for us, catapults us into the divine love, a love which has taken into itself all that stands in opposition to itself. We are sinners and as sinners are, by definition, the enemies of God. Yet God loves us “while we were yet sinners.” He seeks something more for us than the negative and self-defeating aspects of ourselves. It is about who we are in God’s eye and that is always something more and better than who we are in our own eyes or in the eyes of others.
One of the features of this radical teaching is that we have to learn to love ourselves. After all, we are the enemies of God in our selfish, self-centered and nasty ways. Yet God sees in you and me something more and something greater that transcends all the ways of division that belong to our willful selves. In commanding us to love our enemies, Jesus is really providing us with the fuller teaching of exactly what it means to be made in the image of God. For Christians, that means the image of the Trinity, the community of divine love which has gathered into itself all that stands against truth and beauty and goodness; sin and death have been transformed into the ways of love. We are commanded to love our enemies because it means loving who we and they are in God’s eye.
Nothing could be more outstanding and nothing, I suppose, could be more challenging.
Christ’s Sermon on the Plain challenges us to act out of the love of Christ, a love which overcomes and transcends our animosities towards one another and even within our selves. We are being reminded of the radical message of the Christian Gospel, the radical message of God’s love. It is not sentimental words and feelings. It is something much more challenging.
We are being challenged about how we see ourselves and one another by being opened out to how God sees us; not as enemies but as his well-beloved. There is, perhaps, no greater challenge; there is, perhaps, no greater truth.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VI, 2013
Christ Church/St. Thomas’, 3 –Mile Plains
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