Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 7 July 2024

“Love your enemies”

How utterly improbable, how utterly impossible, and how completely nuts! But who says this? Jesus says it. Maybe, just maybe that makes us pause but maybe not. Yet this powerful moral imperative is based upon a profound theological truth. It signals what is at once a divine necessity and a human impossibility. This brings us face to face with the radical and awesome truth of the Gospel: as “baptized into Jesus Christ,” we were “baptized into his death”; as “buried with him by baptism into death,” so too we are raised up from the dead to “walk in newness of life,” being “also in the likeness of his resurrection.” That “newness of life” radically changes how we see ourselves and one another. We are no longer to be defined by the things that belong to division and animosity and, ultimately, death. Our life is both hidden and manifest in Christ.

How can we be commanded to do what we ourselves cannot do? Because God makes possible what is humanly impossible. In the commandment to “love your enemies” we see the real force and character of love; its truth and its reason. It is the radical overcoming of sin and evil through the reconciling power of Christ. This should shake us out of the soft sentimentalities and hard meannesses of our inconstant and divided hearts. We are shaken into a strong desire for the love of God, on the one hand, and into the conditions of its accomplishment, on the other hand. “Pour into our hearts such love toward thee,” we pray in the Collect, while acknowledging that “God has prepared such good things as pass [our] understanding,” and that his “promises exceed all that we can desire.” Obviously this is not just what we think we want but somehow a greater good which God seeks for us above and beyond us and yet belonging to the deeper truth and yearning of our souls for God himself.

The radical, uncompromising, and unconditional commandment to love confronts us with what is beyond our human understanding, considered in itself, in order to raise us to a divine understanding. “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more” so “likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord,” as the Epistle teaches. What is commanded by God for man is accomplished in Christ Jesus, both God and man. It is to be realised in us by the quality of our life in Christ. “Know ye not that so many of us as were baptised into Jesus Christ were baptised into his death?”, that being “with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.”

If we were simply commanded to do what cannot be done, then we would be left with the contradiction of ourselves in wanting what we know we can never get on our own. We would know what is true and right but which we cannot attain. There would simply be our futility. The contradiction is only overcome in Jesus Christ. It is overcome at the most extreme moment of division and tension: when we are ourselves the enemies of God. Only so can this imperative to love your enemies make any possible sense. What is the overcoming? It is the demonstration and the realisation of the love of God for us in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, the righteous for the unrighteous.”

We are all divided in our loves. Those whom we love the most we hurt the most. We can hardly love our families, our friends, ourselves, let alone God, let alone our enemies. “The good that I would I do not; the evil that I would not do that do I do,” as Paul says so concisely. And yet this is what God commands because this is what God makes possible.

And he makes it possible humanly. It belongs to the truth of our humanity that we should be commanded to love our enemies; in other words, to look beyond the enmities in our souls, our families, our communities, our churches. Jesus Christ shows us the truth of our humanity in unity with divinity. He is that unity, that perfect and divine mediation between God and man, between where we want to be and where we find ourselves in our enmity against God, against one another, and against ourselves. We are the enemies whom God loves. “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” And he did so “while we were yet sinners,” enemies of the good.

In the great Hindu spiritual classic, the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna faces a moral and theological dilemma.. He is of the princely class and faces a battle between two opposing forces that consist on both sides of family members. He is torn within himself about what to do. In his state of perplexity and confusion, Sri Krishna, an emanation of the divine Vishnu, appears to him, drawing out of him his predicament and then teaching him about his dharma, the law or duty of his own being. Ultimately, he is to fight but without attachment to the results. Nothing is said about forgiveness, but in a way there is a kind of transcending of opposition and enmity.

The love of our enemies is much more radical. It has to do with how we see one another not out of indifference but with respect to their good which is ours, as both made in the image of God. Ultimately, it has to do with forgiveness. For that alone is the overcoming of our ungood, our sin and evil. But this requires “a critical awareness of our divided nature without which there can be no freedom.” The grace-given freedom to love our enemies is to place them, whomever they and we might be, the enemies that are even ourselves in the disarray of our sins, in the compassionate love of God in Jesus Christ. He who is the Word and Son of the Father shows us the deep logic and reason of love: its perfect and perfecting power.

He commands that his love be the ruling principle in our lives. He commands us to what is possible but only as in him, only by the quality of our lives and our loves as rooted and grounded in the free and self-giving love of God. Only as in him because of who Christ is: the one who has overcome the world in its animosities and hatreds. How? By bearing all of our sins in his body on the Cross which makes visible the love that triumphs over all sin and evil.

Christopher Lasch makes the observation about the history of civilization that “the vindictive gods give way to gods who show mercy and uphold the morality of loving your enemy,” words which are explicit in Christ’s words to us. To love your enemies is to know them in Christ. That means to know them in the love of him who on the Cross prays, “Father, forgive them.” It means to see ourselves and one another in the motion of God’s love towards us which is love and forgiveness. Such is the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection is given to be the pattern of our lives, our lives in him, in Christ. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves,” know yourselves in Christ, and in him “love your enemies.”