by CCW | 11 July 2021 08:00
Today’s Gospel ends where the Gospel from two Sundays ago began. “Be ye merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” Both Gospel readings belong to Luke’s account of what is known as Christ’s Sermon on the Plain, a remarkable set of ethical teachings, some of which are utterly unparalleled in the Scriptures and are particularly challenging.
Perhaps, there is nothing more challenging than Christ’s commandment to “love your enemies” and to “do good to those who hate you,” words which mark the beginning of today’s Gospel. You did not hear in that reading that “blessed are you when men hate you,” but those are words which are part of this remarkable sermon. In between this text and the demand to love your enemies are four unique statements by Jesus, four ‘woes’ which complement the four ‘blessednesses’ or beatitudes in Luke’s account. “Woe to you that are rich for you have received your consolation (in the sense of getting what you called for or sought); woe to you that are full or satisfied for you shall hunger; woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep; and finally, woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” These call into question how we define ourselves in relation to others: as rich, as self-satisfied, as self-content, as highly regarded in the eyes of others; in short, how we compare ourselves to others and how we want to be seen by others. These ‘woes’ precede today’s Gospel reading which is in effect a kind of commentary on the blessings and woes that Luke records.
As commentary, it complements as well the Epistle reading about the radical nature of baptism not simply as rite but as the symbolic and sacramental reality of our life in Christ. Baptized into Jesus Christ means baptized into his death without which we are not alive. “If we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him,” “be[ing] dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Powerful statements which belong to the equally powerful demands of the Gospel about loving those who hate us, loving those who are our enemies; in effect, saying that this may actually be a blessing. But how do we make any sense of this? It seems so completely impossible and so completely counter to our experiences.
In truth, these words belong very much to the confusions of our age and to the empty rhetoric of apology. The American writer and social, gender, and racial activist, Roxane Gay, rightly notes a feature of our contemporary world in which, as she puts it, we have made “a fetish of forgiveness”. In other words, we talk the talk but that doesn’t mean we walk the walk, if you will ‘forgive’ the cliché. There are important questions about what exactly is apology and by whom is it made, to whom, and for what. What does it mean to apologize for the sins of others, for instance, (about which some have made a particular fetish)? We may regret any number of things which have happened in the past but that is not the same as apologizing for our own thoughts and actions and their consequences, nor is it the same thing as repenting.
Apologies have been made by the Government of Canada and by the churches involved in the government sponsored Residential Schools programme. Beyond that financial reparations, too, have been made in accord with the task of reconciliation at least by the United Church and the Anglican Church, though sadly the Roman Catholic Church has not been able to meet its obligations. Actions matter not just words. As many have noted there is nothing new about unmarked and unnamed graves nor about the disappearance of thousands of indigenous children while in the care of Church and State over the past century; a care that was sadly betrayed. What is new is a different spirit of outrage which calls into question the whole idea and possibility of reconciliation because of the idea of retribution.
I think that Jesus’s words go to the deeper heart of the matter, to our hearts and minds, and in ways that help us to think more clearly about our current world. Certainly there is a lot of hate towards the churches in Canada in the outrage and anger about the finding of unmarked graves surrounding some of the Residential Schools.
But if there is going to be any reconciliation that is real and meaningful it will have to engage with the deeper realities of forgiveness which is what Jesus here addresses. The real meaning of forgiveness has to do with the radical concept of loving your enemies, which extends not simply to others as enemies but even to ourselves as the enemies of God and thus the enemies of ourselves. Self-love is not ‘care for the self‘ but really a form of narcissism that is nihilistic and destructive.
While I appreciate Roxane Gay’s critique of “the fetish of forgiveness,” I think we need to reflect more deeply on the dynamic and meaning of the forgiveness of sins. “Why do we worship at the altar of forgiveness?”, she provocatively asks, and goes on to claim that “I do not think we have to forgive to live full lives.” This is contrary to what Jesus is saying in his Sermon on the Plain. What Jesus says counters the phenomenon of nemesis which is a feature of our times highlighted by Gay’s own writings.
In an article “The Pleasure of Clapping Back,” she celebrates and promotes the idea of retribution. Nemesis is the ancient Greek God of retribution who “punished evil deeds, undeserved good fortune, and hubris,” as she notes, wonderfully illustrated in the story of Narcissus, whose arrogance Nemesis punished by his being enraptured by his own reflection in a pool of water. He drowns in himself, we might say, in the illusion of his self-image reflected back to him. In a deeper sense, he is his own nemesis which is, I think, the deeper meaning for the ancient Greeks and a profound commentary on our contemporary ‘selfie’ and image culture. Narcissism is our nemesis.
But Gay wants to hold onto all those whom she thinks are her nemeses and to use them to motivate her in her work and life. She says, “I have ten nemeses – people who have slighted me in ways both real and imagined who are now mortal adversaries I must defeat.” This is essentially confrontational and oppositional. It is to persist in the illusion of the enemy, the other, as the one over and against whom you define yourself. It is to hold on to resentment and hurt whether real or imagined. That is the problem which Jesus addresses. He is cutting through all of the forms of conflict narrative and the endlessness of the grievance culture to speak directly to our souls. It is not easy talk but it challenges the power narratives of our current culture from all sides. “Mortal adversaries I must defeat,” says it all. It means to be defined by enmity and to deny the possibilities of reconciliation.
To love your enemies transcends the very nature of the oppositional by way of a recognition of our common humanity. It means that there is something more than “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Hamlet, Act 3, Sc. 1), something more than the contingencies and injustices of the human condition, something more than our divisions and animosities, both our wrongs and our being wronged. There is no end to hurt and suffering and it is never equally distributed.
Life is not about retribution which in the guise of justice is really about power and domination and a kind of indifference towards those who have wronged us or whom we have wronged. Real justice can only lead to mercy and forgiveness because it requires us to take others seriously and even to see ourselves in the other. To see the other not as ‘other’ but as ‘br-other’. There are no practical programmes for this. It is entirely about how we look at things. Jesus is saying in the profoundest way possible that we have to look at one another as God looks at us, as his beloved children and as made in his image. This is a very different sense of identity than victim and victimizer, perpetrator and survivor, colonizer and colonized, white supremicist and exploited indigenous, and so on. None of these are essentialist forms of definition. They betray us in our humanity when we make them so. Baptism recalls us to the primary form of our identity in Christ and as such to the primacy of our lives of service and sacrifice, dying to ourselves and living for one another. Such is the life of Christ in us. It is what we struggle to realize in our lives.
The Canadian story is really about displaced peoples. Many who came to Canada were fleeing persecution and oppression, poverty and despair, displaced from their homes and caught in the conflicts of nations and the economic fall-out from what became the industrial revolution. That history of cultural displacement set in motion the displacement of the various native cultures in one form or another. It is by no means a single story.
The challenge here is to recognize the futility of seeing the world and others as the enemy. For one thing, we are at enmity with ourselves because of the same problem: the inability to see one another and ourselves in the love of God. And yet, is that not the Gospel message however much we have failed to live up to its teaching? Is this not what we see not just in the words of Christ but in his death and resurrection? The first word from the Cross is not about retribution; it is forgiveness. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
We have to find ways in our own hearts to love those who hate us. We cannot own their hate for that would be to remain trapped in opposition and division; in short, in enmity, as the perpetual enemies of one another. The counter to our enmity lies in seeking to love ourselves and others as we are loved in Christ. That is the radical ethical teaching for all times and all places including our own. The idea is captured beautifully in the wisdom of the Collect. “God hast prepared for them that love him such good things as pass man’s understanding.” We will have to pass beyond the culture of nemesis to embrace the radical nature of forgiveness. It will mean to live fuller lives if we learn to “love [our] enemies and do good” for such is blessedness. To forgive and to be forgiven, to repent and to seek reconciliation is the constant challenge.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 6, 2021
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/07/11/sermon-for-the-sixth-sunday-after-trinity-10/
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