Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity
“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you,
and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man!”
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.
