Luke 6:27-38
“Perfect Mercy”
February 24, 2019 – Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
Homer Simpson called Canada “America Junior.” Sometimes I like to think of that country to the north of us as “Bizarro America” or “Twilight Zone America.” I’m thinking of all the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between it and the United States, which make a visit to Canada an experience of finding things familiar-but-not. They have dollars but they don’t look like dollars and aren’t worth as much. They speak English but with little quirks like that “Eh?” which keeps popping up. They drive on the right side of the road but measure the distance and speed in kilometers instead of miles. So many things in Canada are familiar-but-strange enough that you can’t help noticing them fairly often.
The Gospel of Luke is the Gospel of Matthew’s Canada, familiar but strangely different, especially when it comes to the most famous sermon Jesus preached. We know the Sermon on the Mount well from Matthew chapters 5 to 7. The version found in Luke chapter 6 as the “Sermon on the Plain” is almost “Bizarro” in its subtle differences. One of the most interesting and actually helpful of those differences appears in verse 36 of our text today. Instead of Matthew 5:48 where Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” in Luke the Lord tells us, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” It makes a huge difference in how we understand Jesus in both Matthew and Luke.
In the middle ages the idea arose that many of Jesus’ commands in the Sermon on the Mount were “counsels of perfection.” That is, turning the other cheek or giving to whoever asks were not directions for all disciples, for all Christians, but only for a few highly select “religious,” clergy, monks or nuns who wanted to follow Jesus perfectly.
From a different direction, working from the Protestant idea of grace, the dispensationalists who arose in the 19th century argued that the Sermon on the Mount was a perfect restatement of Old Testament Law, and thus not applicable to any Christian. The commands of Jesus’ message are not there because God really expects us to be able to obey them. Instead, they show us clearly that we cannot live up to God’s perfect expectations. We have to throw ourselves upon His grace.
As I hope we can learn together today, neither of those “perfection” interpretations is correct. What Jesus meant in Matthew by being “perfect” is neither just for a few of us nor impossible for all of us. Luke shows us that the kind of perfection Jesus was after means giving up on the idea that either we or those around us should be “perfect.” It’s a difficult but possible standard which calls us all to be more like Jesus.
I have to admit, though, that our text starts out in verse 27 with a command from Jesus which certainly feels impossible. “Love your enemies.” It’s no strange-but-different version of what He said in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s exactly the same as Matthew 5:44, “But I say to you, Love your enemies…” What follows about how exactly to do that is a bit different in Matthew and Luke, but the basic command is the same. And it’s a hard one.
Miroslav Volf, in our book of the month, Free of Charge, talks about how hard it is to love one’s enemies, especially when they have hurt those you love. He tells of a friend of the mother of a colleague, a Cuban woman who wondered if Fidel Castro would be accepted into heaven if he repented and turned to God. Volf’s friend assured her that God would have grace even for Castro. She considered that and all the harm Castro had done to her country and taken from her and her family. Then she replied, “If Fidel gets to heaven, then I don’t want to be there!” [1]
Yet here it is, in every significant way the same in Luke as it is in Matthew, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Ancient church fathers said that command makes Christianity different from all other religions. Whether or not that’s exactly true, if you and I truly lived out this part of what Jesus taught us, we would be different, very different, from most people around us.
In the middle of The Cost of Discipleship, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflects on the Sermon on the Mount, he picks out that command of Jesus to love our enemies as the heart of what is “extraordinary” about the Christian life. Bonhoeffer published that book in Germany in 1937, as the Nazis were on the rise. He perceived what was coming and wrote:
This commandment that we should love our enemies and forgo revenge will grow even more urgent in the holy struggle which lies before us and in which we partly have been engaged for years. In it love and hate engage in mortal combat. It is the duty of every Christian soul to prepare itself for it… It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, who went patiently and obediently to the cross…[2]
For those of us who fear that evil times may be ahead in our own country or that political and religious leaders are leading many astray, we may need to stop and listen to Bonhoeffer and to Jesus here in Luke 6 and Matthew 5. Instead of some great moral crusade or political action campaign, our Lord may be calling us to prepare for days to come by learning how to actually do what He taught, to love our enemies.
He did actually tell us how to do it, you know. It’s right here in our lesson this morning, spelled out not once but three times in different ways. Jesus gave us specific examples of what He was talking about when He said to love our enemies. As I already mentioned from verses 27 and 28, He told us to “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Then verse 29 gets even more specific, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.”
The first basic piece of loving our enemies, then, is not so much to change how we feel about them as how we treat them. Do them good. Do them more good than they deserve. That last bit about giving up your shirt as well as your coat slides into the next dimension of Christian love in verse 30, “Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.” Give. That’s the second part of loving our enemies and anyone else.
In verses 32 to 34, Jesus reiterates those two points, doing good to those who don’t deserve it and giving to those who don’t deserve it. He points out that there’s nothing really special about being nice to people who are nice to you. We may fail to do even that sometimes, but it’s still the ordinary expectation. I go through the double doors at my athletic club and another member holds the door for me. I hold the next door in turn for him. We say thank you to each other, but there’s no great moral triumph going on, no huge display of love. But if somehow I were able to hold a door for the jerk who let the other one slam in my face, that would be different. It would be the kind of thing Jesus is talking about.
Jesus knows that we are typically nice to others because we hope and expect that they will be nice to us. Verse 31, what we typically call the Golden Rule, even implies that, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” So I’m courteous to the grocery checker in the expectation that she will be courteous to me and bag my groceries neatly. You pause and let another driver exit a driveway in front of you in a busy stream of traffic, expecting someone else to do the same for you the next day. In other words, we do good to others hoping to be rewarded by those others. It’s just good business.
Yet that command to love our enemies makes the Golden Rule more difficult than being nice so others will be nice to us. Jesus is telling us not to expect any reward from the people to whom we are good, to whom we give. Be good to and give to people whom we know for a fact aren’t going to be good to us in return. Verse 35 says, “But love your enemies, do good and lend, expecting nothing in return.” But then Jesus goes on, “Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High…”
That suggestion of a reward from somewhere else instead of from other people shows up again in the last two verses today, “Do not judge and you will not be judged; do not condemn and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you.” Those rewards of course come from God. When we are gracious to our enemies, He will be gracious to us. When we give to those in need, He will give to us.
Wait a minute, though. Is being nice in hopes of a reward from God any better than being nice in hopes of a reward from other people? Isn’t it all still kind of mercenary and business-like? Where’s the love in it? Shouldn’t we just be good out of the goodness of our hearts, and not expect anything in return, even from God?
The problem is that, if we are honest, we know we really don’t have that much goodness in our hearts. I, at least, have a fair amount of empathy for that Cuban woman who wasn’t ready to go to heaven if Castro is going to be there. Johnny Cash sings a song, “Down There by the Train,” about God’s grace. There’s a line which talks about who is there to hop on that train, which sounds like it’s going to heaven, “down there where the train runs slow.” It goes, “I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth.” I don’t like that line. It feels to me like it goes too far. Is God going to let those two in? I can’t find much empathy in my heart for people like that at all. But that’s just it. Both Jesus and Johnny are telling us that God has that much love in His heart.
St. Augustine read verses 37 and 38 in Luke here and summed them up by saying it’s all about “giving and forgiving.” That’s the subtitle of Miroslav Wolf’s book, you know, Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Augustine says that giving and forgiving are the “two wings of prayer, on which it flies to God. Pardon the offender what has been committed, and give to the person in need.”[3] In other words, by giving and forgiving others we give wings to our prayers to fly up to heaven and be heard by God.
Giving and forgiving are not a bad summary of what Jesus taught us to do, whether here in this sermon or anywhere else in the Gospels. My guess is that many of us are probably a bit better at the first than we are at the second. We may manage to do a fair amount of giving, but forgiving is lots more difficult.
That’s where the verse here that I started with comes in. As I said, in Matthew 5:48, Jesus told us to be perfect like our Father in heaven is perfect. Here in Luke in verse 36, He says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” That verse helps us make sense out of all the rest of it. It helps us see both that it’s not about absolute moral perfection and that we can in fact do what feels impossible, love and forgive our enemies. Because the love and forgiveness, the mercy, doesn’t start with or come from us. It has its source in God.
And we don’t have to worry that when we give to or forgive others in the hope that God will give to us or forgive us, it’s somehow crass or selfish. That reward we are seeking is already ours. God has already been merciful, has already blessed us. Jesus said at the end of verse 35, “for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” God’s kindness, God’s mercy precedes, comes before whatever you and I may or may not do that’s good.
In our Old Testament reading from Genesis 45 we read the moving story of how Joseph forgave his brothers for selling him into slavery. He told them how God was good to him and planned that Joseph be in Egypt so that could save his family from the famine. Over in Genesis 50 verse 20, Joseph told them again “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”
We learn to give and forgive by remembering just how much God has already given and forgiven us. Why are we going to begin Lent next week and hang pictures and poems about Jesus going to the Cross around our sanctuary here? It’s because that story of how God gave us His Son and forgave us our sins, is the heart of everything. We become giving and forgiving people by soaking our hearts and minds in the truth that we are children of a giving and forgiving God.
“Be perfect,” is an impossible command. Even “Be merciful” is more than most of us are capable of, like that poor Cuban woman. Yet “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” is more doable when we aim at our Father’s perfect love for those, like us, who are far less than perfect. And “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful,” is not completely beyond us if we only constantly keep in sight all the gracious mercy we have received from a Father who gave His only Son to die for us.
Again in Free of Charge, Miroslav Volf tells how when he was just one year old his parents lost their first son, his older brother Daniel who was five years old. It was a tragic accident in Croatia. The little boy would go out to “play” with the friendly communist soldiers. One day when his nanny “Aunt Melica,” should have been watching him, a soldier took Daniel for a ride on a horse-drawn wagon. As it passed through a gate, the boy unobserved stuck his head out and it got caught between the post and the wagon. He died on the way to the hospital. [4]
The first person to be blamed was that nanny, but Volf’s parents never said a word about it in front of the children. So Volf grew up with her still caring for him. He saw her as an angel, all because his mother kept silent about Melica’s one huge failing.
The careless soldier was full of remorse, so much so that he was hospitalized in his mental distress. Volf’s father went to visit and comfort him. Eventually the soldier was brought to court for what he had done, but Volf’s mother and father refused to press charges. “Why should one more mother be plunged into grief, this time because the life of her son, a good boy but careless in a crucial moment, was ruined for life by the hands of justice.” They insisted to the court that they had forgiven the soldier.
Volf writes “’The Word of God tells us to forgive as God in Christ has forgiven us,’ said my parents, ‘and so we decided to forgive.’” His father even went to visit the soldier after he was sent home to tell him more about God’s love.[5]
It’s hard for me to imagine being able to do what Volf’s parents did, but I do see very clearly where it came from and how they did it. As Christians they had soaked in for decades God’s mercy to us in Jesus Christ as the truth above all truths, as the love above all loves. When the time came for it, that mercy flowed back out of them as if it were perfectly natural. May God, in His unlimited mercy to us through Christ our Lord, grant you and I that same kind of perfection.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2019 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), p. 178.
[2] The Cost of Discipleship ((New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1963), pp. 167, 170.
[3] Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Luke (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 110.
[4] Free of Charge, p 121.
[5] Ibid., pp. 122, 123.