Sunday, February 24, 2019 | 4:00 p.m.

Jesus the Just: Love Your Enemies

“Who Is Jesus?” Sermon Series

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 37:1–11, 39–40
Luke 6:27–38

A couple weeks ago I taught the confirmation class so that Rocky, our associate pastor for youth, could teach an adult education class. Before I came in to the classroom, the youth leaders had the confirmands, about thirty eighth graders, thinking and talking about slogans and how slogans work to pull people together.

Sports teams have slogans to encourage their players. Advertisers have slogans to advance their products. Politicians have slogans to gain voters. Even churches have slogans. Presbyterians say that we do all things decently and in order. (That’s a line from 1 Corinthians 14:40.) In a way it’s a slogan, or maybe it’s more like a motto, of ours.

Many churches of different kinds share a kind of slogan, a refrain, an affirmation that we repeat together on Easter Day. If I say, “Christ is risen,” you say, “Christ is risen indeed!”

And we say this back and forth to each other several times in order to feel something—to celebrate and to remember and to internalize the message.

So I wanted to talk with the eighth graders about why we say this and what it means and what it feels like to say it on Easter morning year after year. Our topic for the day was resurrection. How can we talk to eighth graders about resurrection?

Well, to talk about that, I had to backtrack to the night of Jesus’ betrayal and his arrest. I talked about how much his disciples loved him, how much he had changed their lives, how much they depended on him. The disciples trusted him; they believed in him. And he believed in them. Even when they messed up he believed in them. He corrected them, but he never loved them any less.

The constancy of that love is so important. Jesus loved them all with the steadfast love of God. That kind of love changes a person. When you feel loved like that, your relationship to the world changes. You have an inner stability, a source of love that bubbles up in you. In the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38). This is the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. It is God’s presence in us.

In the first letter of John, it says it this way: “So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 John 4:16).

Now I didn’t go into all this depth with the eighth graders, but I did talk about the bond of love that the disciples shared with Jesus and how afraid they must have been when Jesus was taken away to be tortured and killed.

When they lost Jesus, they lost so much hope. They lost a source of love. They lost a sense of possibility.

In that time of tragedy, as Jesus was being killed, how could he pray to God, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do”? How could Jesus tell his disciples, earlier in his ministry, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you”? How could Jesus have said that?

Jesus must have believed in the power of love to change things. But his love was not a passive love. His love required passion and compassion, conviction and courage. His love required self-respect and dignity.

“If anyone strikes you on the cheek,” he said, “offer the other also.” Turn the other cheek, we say. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

Now this is a very important detail. If you strike someone on the right cheek, and you are right-handed, you have to reach across their body and hit them with the back of your hand. In Jesus’ time, that meant something. This is how a superior in the social hierarchy hit someone who was seen as inferior. But if someone hits you this way and you turn the other cheek, they can’t hit you that way again. They can’t reach your right cheek.

If you turn the other cheek like this, they have to hit you with the open palm of their hand, which would mean that you were equal with them. Or they would have to hit you back handed with their left hand, which was considered the impure hand. In that case it would be like saying what they were doing was an impure thing to do. Which it was, according to Jesus (Leah Watkiss, “Defiance, Not Compliance: Turning the Other Cheek,” Citizens for Public Justice).

Even though we don’t have the same cultural understanding about slapping and right hands and left hands, I think we can all understand this concept of disrespect. Sometimes people talk down to us. What Jesus is saying here is that when someone disrespects you, don’t take that disrespect into your heart. Don’t believe that you are less worthy than anyone else.

Turn the other cheek. Stand up tall. Even if they may hit you again, it doesn’t destroy your spirit because inside you respect yourself, you have dignity, you love yourself, you know yourself, you love God, and you know that God loves you. You know that what they are doing is not just.

Turn the other cheek does not mean submit and surrender; it means resist with dignity. It was a kind of resistance without retaliation, resistance without violence. Jesus was teaching his followers how to hold on to the love and respect that he had with them and to bring that integrity and honor into difficult situations.

So those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them: that teaching and that experience was and is foundational to what Jesus brings to the disciples and to us.

But love that stays in the personal realm is not complete. This same scripture from 1 John goes on to say, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from Christ is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also”(1 John 4:20–21).

Cornel West has famously said that “justice is what love looks like in public.”

And so in his Sermon on the Plain, which is what we call this section of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus gives the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Be generous. Love people, whether they love you or not. Give to everyone who begs from you. Give without strings attached. Be kind and merciful as God is. Don’t judge, and do forgive.

The goal is to love as God loves, but that is a high bar! Theologian Jürgen Moltmann once said at a conference I attended that there are some people he cannot love and cannot forgive. But he knows God can, and so he leaves that for God to do.

Jürgen Moltmann wrote our litany of confession that we used today. It comes from a sermon of his called “Revolutionary Love of Our Enemies” and is published in a book called The Power of the Powerless.

As we said in that litany, “Heavenly Father, we have not been able to love our enemies. . . . [Yet] you lead us out of the constriction of fear and out of the prison of hate into the wide space of freedom.”

This is what Jesus promises us—that we can be led out of the constriction of fear and out of the prison of hate.

Jesus teaches about a kind of justice that says “Love wins.” Love can change hearts and minds; forgiveness can wear away at fear and even hatred until what remains is hope. When a person is freed from the hatred they hold in their hearts, they are indeed free of a great deal of suffering. Hatred destroys a person’s soul. Disrespect and disdain directed toward others also eats away at the spirit of the one who dwells in that disdain.

Is there any freedom for a person who hates? As long as they cling to their hatred, are they free? We can ask ourselves this question about ourselves, too. When we stew in our anger, fear, resentment, are we truly free?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached a sermon called “Love Your Enemies.” It’s a difficult word and not a simple one. In that sermon, Dr. King speaks about an individual’s spiritual practice of love. But he also knew that sometimes love can overcome hate only when we come together in communities of resistance.

In communities of resistance the power of our love is even stronger, and we need strength in the face of violence. But here, in this sermon, Dr. King described the spiritual work of an individual like this:

You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.” (Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies” in A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr,. ed. Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran, pp. 53–54)

This process of transformation through love is a long process and a difficult and sometimes dangerous process. And so I need to say very clearly that if someone is hurting you, Jesus wants you to protect yourself. God wants you to love yourself as much as God loves you, and that is a lot.

You are worthy of love and safety. If someone is hitting you, turn the other cheek means taking action so that they can’t hurt you anymore. Get help, and get away from that violence. Turning the other cheek sometimes means leaving.

And if they’re not hitting you but they are tearing you down emotionally, it’s the same thing. Don’t let that hatred get inside you. Love yourself as much as God loves you, and get any help you need to get away from that emotional violence.

But if you are safe, or once you get safe, and someone is being hostile toward you, then you have an opportunity to do some spiritual work. Then you have an opportunity to hold out an alternative possibility to that person and to live into an alternative possibility yourself.

I know that when I try to do it, I usually have to learn about myself more deeply. I have to try to understand why another person’s words and facial expressions and tone of voice have so much power over me.

I have to learn where the vulnerability is in me. I have to learn about the doubt or the shame that they are triggering, and I have to work on healing that place in me. When that place is healed in me, no one will be able to trigger that pain anymore.

Cornel West wrote that “to be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely—to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.”

That something that sustains us is being grounded in God’s love for us. Then we believe in our value. Then we become bully-proof like a raincoat is rainproof. A bully’s words can’t get in. A hater’s hate can’t hurt us.

Then we can let go of hate, even defensive hate, and we can build something new out of love. Then we can change our laws and policies, too. We can affect the lives of our neighbors. We can set boundaries on what is and what is not acceptable. We can stand strong for justice, the kind of justice that restores humanity and heals people.

Cornel West has also said that he is a prisoner of hope, and hope is different from optimism. Optimism, he says, is a passive thing—that when you look at the evidence, you decide that things will get better.
But when the evidence does not look good, when the forces of injustice seem to be growing, hope is a stance of resistance. “To live,” he wrote, “is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word” (Cornel West, “Prisoners of Hope” in The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, ed. Paul Rogat Loeb).

And that brings me back to the confirmation class and our lesson about resurrection. It was my job that day to give a kind of testimony—to tell the eighth graders what resurrection means to me. And I told them that we Christians are a resurrection people.

We tell the stories again and again of crucifixion and resurrection. The arc of history is long, and we proclaim that it bends toward justice. And so we call out and respond to each other on Easter Day that Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed. Amen.

Despair does not have the last word, we remind ourselves and each other. Death does not have the last word. Cruelty does not have the last word. Torture does not have the last word. Injustice does not have the last word. Hatred does not have the last word.

Why? Because Love wins. Because God reaches into the graves of our lives and pulls us out. God reaches into the deepest despair and pulls out hope.

Now I want to do with you what I did with the eighth graders, so I need you to come along with me. I need it to be Easter for a couple of minutes here.

When I say Christ is risen, you say Christ is risen indeed. When I say Love wins, you say Love wins indeed. Whatever I say, you repeat, and you add the word indeed. Say it with gusto!

Here we go:

Christ is risen; Christ is risen indeed!
Love wins; Love wins indeed!
Hope wins; Hope wins indeed!
God wins; God wins indeed!
Christ is risen; Christ is risen indeed!

This is our story. This is our embodied hope. This is our joy and our vision of a world based on justice. The justice of Jesus is love lived in public. The justice of Jesus redeems, transforms, and restores. Hallelujah. Amen.