Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 19 July 2020

Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 6

“Jesus said, Love your enemies”

Today’s Gospel ends where the Gospel for Trinity IV began. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” Both readings belong to the Lucan counterpart to the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel. Christ’s Sermon on the Plain in Luke complements Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. Mountains and plains, death and life, friends and enemies. It seems that we confront a series of binary opposites in these readings and yet something greater overrides and unites. It is mercy.

The radical nature of that mercy is shown in this Gospel. It is about reconciliation and reciprocity which is a dominant feature, it seems to me, of the great philosophical religions of the world but expressed most clearly and emphatically here. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says. The Gospel opens us out to one of the commonplaces of the ethical understanding that appears in other cultures, namely, the ethic of the golden rule. “As ye would that men should so unto you, do ye also unto them likewise.” The underlying assumption is that we properly and rightly seek the Good for ourselves and for one another.

As Plato notes no one seeks what is evil, only what is good, however mistaken we might be about what we think is good. But to command us to love our enemies takes that thought much further because it implies that opposition and enmity, antagonisms and even hatreds, still persist. To love your enemies is to love those who hate you. Love is in the face of those oppositions, not in their overcoming. Or to put it another way, to love your enemies requires transcending ourselves. It means to see ourselves in a new light and consequently to see others not just as enemies but as friends, as companions, as one with us in our common humanity. I in the other and the other in me.

I am trying to place this radical and essential Christian concept within a larger ethical framework because it is, I think, at once a commentary on the universality of the golden rule and an intensification of it in a most remarkable way. It is, at first glance, an impossible ideal. The question is how can it be possible to love our enemies? How is this impossible to be made possible? For if it is not possible then Christ’s commandment is mere nonsense.

Consider the difficulty here. How can we love our enemies when we struggle to love those whom we regard as our friends and companions? How can we love our enemies and do good to them which hate us when we find ourselves hurting those whom we love the most? How can we love our enemies when we hate ourselves? In other words, we are caught in a dilemma and it has to do with us. That is, perhaps, where we have to begin in trying to understand this mystery.

We find ourselves in a world of intense divisions, animosities, hatreds and enmities in which there can be no possible resolution either because our current oppositions presuppose the setting of one against another in the conflict of self-identities or in the fear of the other that turns to hatred and animosity. The real question is whether these identities are true to what it means to be a self. More than diversity and difference there are competing claims demanding recognition of one thing to the exclusion of another. There is an inescapable logic of division and opposition in the current discourse in part because the self is constructed in opposition to the other and in its projection of itself into externality. Such are the tribal divisions of identity politics.

The ethical concept of the golden rule requires something very different. It requires us to see ourselves in the other and here in Christ’s Sermon on the Plain in the most radical way imaginable. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, becomes enlightened after stepping outside his palaces of luxury and pleasure and encountering human suffering in the form of a sick man, an old man, and a dead man and a guru with a face of calm serenity. How to achieve serenity in the face of dukkha, human suffering in its varied yet fullest extent? His great insight is that the cause of suffering is us, in the self, in our desires and attachments. The radical Buddhist response is to get rid of the self. There is no you. The self is an illusion.

All of the world’s religions demand some kind of renunciation of the self. “Deny yourself and take up your cross,” for instance. Die to yourself and live to God and to one another. “Reckon yourself to be dead unto sin,” as Paul puts it in Romans. In a myriad of ways, the idea is that of a kind of sacrifice of the self to find the self, to be freed from the illusion of the self, or to be found in God himself. Arjuna in the great Hindu epic, the Bhagavad Gita, stands between two competing armies of his own relatives. His dilemma is how and why should I fight? The dilemma is within himself about his dharma which Sri Krisha undertakes to instruct him. In a way, it is about transcending the opposition by following the law of your being, your dharma, but without attachment to results, to outcomes. How this is possible is only by way of the teaching of the immortality of the soul. You are more than your actions and more than the things which happen to you.

Jesus, too, is saying that there is more to us than our divisions and animosities. We cannot be reduced to enmity and opposition. Something else is presupposed which is greater than such oppositions and which fundamentally contains them, a greater principle of unity.

The Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel provide the radical charter of Christian love. Blessedness is found in and through suffering and not in a flight from it. The poor and the persecuted have their blessing in the kingdom of God and God is ever now and always. The Beatitudes all operate on the principle of difference: those who mourn shall be comforted; those who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be satisfied, and so on. But there is one exception. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy,” mercy for mercy, as we saw on Trinity IV. There is a kind of reciprocity. Here Luke grounds that idea in God himself as the merciful. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.”

This is the principle upon which Jesus’ impossible command becomes possible. It has altogether with who we are in God and not in our self-projections. This provides the possibility of seeing ourselves in the other. It also highlights the point that the enmities we confront are not simply external; they are within each of us. We are the enemies of ourselves and the enemies of God. The radical teaching here is that God loves us even while we are his enemies. The last words of the Cross remind us of that: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”; “Father into thy hands I commend my Spirit.” We are returned to God in his mercy because God is mercy. To love our enemies means even loving ourselves but as found in God. To rest in our own self-hatred denies the mercy of God who is greater than our hearts which condemn us.

The Collect provides the most effective antidote to the problem of hatred and self-hatred in reminding us of the mercy and goodness of God who “hast prepared for them that love him such good things as pass man’s understanding” and which indeed “exceed all that we can desire.” God is always more. His mercy is more. “If we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him; knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.”

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in a remarkable little book, The Tragic Imagination, says that tragedy is a failure of the imagination, the failure to imagine yourself in the situation of another. Such a failure is also a kind of presumption of the self in its assertions and claims, an absolutizing of what is finite, partial, and incomplete. Ultimately, it is a denial of the greater principle of divine unity without which all differences collapse into animosity and opposition. The challenge is to get beyond ourselves. Love your enemies means to see ourselves and one another in the goodness and unity of God. Without that divine ground, Christ’s words are but mere platitudes that ring in our ears but do not resonate in our hearts. The radical teaching of Christ here speaks to our hearts even in its divisions and its distress. It is mercy, the mercy of the God who is in us.