by CCW | 8 July 2018 16:00
It doesn’t get much more radical and more challenging than this. A parade of seemingly impossible and impractical demands. Love your enemies? Do good to them which hate you? Bless them that curse you? Pray for them which despitefully use you? Don’t just turn your cheek away from him that smites you but offer the other cheek as well? Hit me again, Sam! To the one who takes your cloak, let him take your coat too? Give to everyone that asks you? To him that takes away your goods, do not ask to have them back? What is going on here?
As utterly impossible and, perhaps, utterly ridiculous as these demands might seem, they simply belong to a rich and powerful tradition of ethical understanding, to what is sometimes called ‘the golden rule,’ summed up here by Jesus who says “as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise;” a concept of reciprocity. He elaborates upon this concept as being the very nature of love and mercy, qualities that have everything to do with the goodness of God alive in us, principles of the highest ethics of justice and the Good. They counter and correct the more commonplace tendencies of our instrumental use of one another. Indeed, “lend,” Jesus says, “hoping for nothing again”! Try telling that to the financiers of Wall Street or to the Davos elites of our world and day.
Nothing could be more radical, it seems, than this Gospel. Yet it belongs to the radical nature of our incorporation into Christ as the Epistle reading from Romans makes so abundantly clear. Baptized into Christ, we are baptized into his death so that we may be partakers of his resurrection, walking now “in newness of life.” And so we are bidden “be ye therefore merciful even as your Father also is merciful.” Here the impossible becomes not only possible but necessary.
Love your enemies. This is one of the great Christian contributions to the moral discourse about the virtues of the soul, especially justice. Is it right to give back to your neighbour who is gone mad the axe which you borrowed from him? It is his but he is mad and therefore a danger to himself and others; in short, an enemy of all, an enemy of the human community. This is Plato’s argument against the commonplace but mistaken or at least incomplete idea that justice is about giving to each what is their due. The deeper question is precisely about what do we owe to one another? Or is justice simply doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies? Again, Plato in the Republic makes the strong point that justice cannot be about harming anyone or anything. “Love your enemies, and do good,” Jesus says. Somehow we have to think the Good in order to do what is right.
The great Hindu classic, the Bhagavad Gita, ‘the song of the Lord’, is set within a massive epic war poem, the Mahabharata, the longest written epic of all time. Arjuna is a warrior prince. He rides out between two great armies in his chariot with Sri Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, an aspect of Brahman in Hindu theology. He faces a dilemma. Why fight? The two armies are composed of members of his own family. Such is the hideous nature of civil war. We are at enmity with one another, at enmity really with ourselves. The enemy is rarely the other. The enemy is really us.
Sri Krishna undertakes to educate Arjuna about his dharma, the law or duty of his very being. He is a warrior prince. His dharma is to fight but, as Krishna points out, he is to follow his dharma without attachment to results, without self regard and emotional engagement; in other words, he is to act for the greater good, a good that transcends the divisions and tensions of the world’s wars. The battlefield, the field of dharma, is really within. Thus Mahatma Gandhi regarded the Bhagavad Gita as the definitive text for a policy of nonviolent protest and pacifism in the contemporary world.
My point is that the great religious and philosophical traditions challenge our ordinary assumptions about justice, about doing good to and for one another. Here is where the Christian gospel contributes to that ethical discourse and in very direct and provocative ways. It arrests our attention, especially at a time when we are greatly perplexed and confused, angry and afraid about ourselves and our world. In a way, our religious and philosophical traditions speak to a contemporary failure of the ethical imagination. They demand that we think about the Good without which we are less than nothing.
In the Gospel, Jesus confronts us with ourselves. We are divided within ourselves. That is an important spiritual insight into the human condition. Created in the image of the God who made all things and which is all good, we are also divided from God, from ourselves, and from the world. Such is the Fall. Such is original sin, we might say. It is the awareness that things are not as they should be; not just with the world but with us. The strong point here is not about ‘others’ – the proverbial enemy, as it were. No. It is about ourselves. We are the enemy. “The good that I would, I do not; the evil that I would not do is what I do,” as Paul puts it elsewhere in Romans, articulating so very clearly the human predicament that catches us all. It is this understanding that underlies the seemingly impossible ethical demands of today’s Gospel. We are opened out to the radical nature of the goodness of God in himself revealed in the Christian understanding in Jesus Christ. His impossible demands are made possible in him and only in us as we are in Christ.
We do not “trust in our own righteousness,” as The Prayer of Humble Access puts it, but simply and entirely in God’s “manifold and great mercies.” This is to transcend the oppositions and enmities of our own hearts. In ourselves we are the enemies of God, of the very principle of what is good and just, of love and truth. To know this is, well, good news. Why? Because it presupposes our awareness of God, our awareness of something greater than ourselves; indeed, an awareness of “such good things as pass man’s understanding,” as today’s Collect beautifully puts it. We are being freed from ourselves in order to find our freedom in God, “dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” There is no magical formula, no manual to follow; such things belong only to our presumption and arrogance. When we think we are the problem-solvers of our world and day, then there can only be the discovery that we are ourselves the problem. Instead, there can only be our willingness to wrestle with our consciences about the nature of the Good day in and day out without presuming that we have all the answers and solutions.
Facere quod in se est. This is a old medieval ethical precept. To be or do the best you can seems reasonable practical advice but only if we take on as well Luther’s great scriptural insight that what is in us, even our best, is never good enough. “There is none that doeth good, no not one”, as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 53.3). We confront our limitations and our failings not so as to render us inactive and in despair but to ground us in Christ.
The Gospel challenges us to think more deeply about the nature of our obligations towards one another. It goes far beyond the consequentialist ethics of utilitarianism, itself about a narrow and instrumental good, the good as means to an end. It goes beyond the simple ethics of duty, itself about actions that are rule-based but without regard to consequences, a separation which might justify just about anything – the madman might even get back his axe. It goes beyond virtue ethics which while they are about character and principle, suggest that those things all lie within our power. The Gospel confronts us with ourselves as the enemy and with the overcoming of our enmity in Christ.
It makes the impossible possible by pointing us to God in Christ. We beseech God to “pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire.” To know our own limitations, our enmities and divisions, is to begin to look to God and to our freedom in Christ. It does not mean doing nothing but it means acting prayerfully, full-knowing our limitations and shortcomings. It changes entirely how we see one another. We learn to know ourselves and one another in Christ. Such are the radical demands of love.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 6, 2018
Christ Church & St. Andrew’s
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/07/08/sermon-for-the-sixth-sunday-after-trinity-7/
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