Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity
“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.”
