What Would Jesus Have To Say About Enemies?

  Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

A young mother was leaving the supermarket, a couple of children in her arms and trying to push a basket full of groceries and it was pouring down rain.  Well this supermarket happened to have one of those small portecochere covers, kind of a tent like thing, in which you could drive your car up.  Well there was a guy sitting there right in the middle of it, just sitting there.  Pouring down rain, this woman leaves the supermarket.  She goes to her car, drenched.  She gets her kids in the car, gets all the groceries inside.  But before she leaves, she walks over the portecochere with the guy sitting in it in his car; and she takes baskets and lines all the way around the car, basket after basket, so that he could not leave without getting out in the pouring rain himself.  Then she got in her car, smiled and waved, and drove on.  How do we feel when we here a story like that?  We go “Yes!”  We grow up born with the desire for justice.  I like to joke and say “What’s the first word out of a child’s mouth?”  And of course, it’s “No!”  Second word is “Mine.”  But if we could add third one, and it happens a little later, it’s “It’s not fair!”  Now that does happen later, but I think it’s congenital.  It’s part of our nature.  I think it comes out naturally because God has given us a desire for justice.  Now the problem with everything we have that God gives us, we tend to break because we’re broken.  It leads to revenge; and revenge, vengeance, is part of the subject today and part of the passage I’ll read to you along with God’s love.  It is maybe one of the well known passages, at least the subject matter, in the whole bible.  It is the passage with “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies” and the question is, how are we to understand it?  Well I am starting out by saying it has to do with the idea of revenge and love.  That’s how we are to understand it.

I’m preaching through a series of sermons called What Would Jesus Have To Say About… and today it’s about our enemies.  What Would Jesus Have To Say About Enemies?  Reading from Matthew, chapter 5, verses 38-48, a familiar passage to us, at least in subject matter because we’ve heard part of it before and indeed the whole world has.  Jesus says:

            "You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.  And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.  If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.  Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Would you pray with me?

Father we come upon passages in scripture that are very, very difficult.  This is one of them.  We ask your wisdom and your presence and your power as we hear it.  May we hear something that applies to us and that we can take home that we can use.  We ask your blessing Lord on the word that is preached and be with the one who preaches.  Be with all of us as we hear it.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

A wise man I know says all the time as a rule for what we should do in our lives and not do, he says, “Don’t do anything you don’t want published on the cover of the New York Times.”  Good rule to live by.  But imagine, if you will, waking up one morning and seeing a headline that says “Chris Carlson is a Murderer!”  What would you think?  Aah, the military finally got the best of Chris.  Chris has gone off the deep end; and you might be right about that but it’d be a different way.  No if you were to read the rest of the story, you would find out, perhaps, that I had accidentally ran over my neighbors cat; and in her despair, she ran out screaming, “You’re a murderer!  You’re a murderer!”  You know it’s a silly story, and it isn’t true, of course; but it makes a point that everything depends on the context in which we read it or hear it.  We hear news stories all the time out of context and we read the bible that way too.  The bible is taken out of context so often by so many folks, including us.  You really do have to read the whole thing.  In this case we read what Jesus has to say but what did he have to say at other places?  What did he do?  What did the disciples say?  How did they understand this passage?  What does the bible say about the subject being discussed here?  Well this passage has been taken out of context in so many ways and understood in so many ways and some are valid and some are not.  It has been used by some Christians over the years to justify something called non-violent sort of philosophy.  But is violence roundly condemned in scripture?  Not all the time.  Even Jesus took a whip and drove people out of the temple, animals and men.  I think it had to hurt.  It’s been used to justify kind of a total pacifism but the bible doesn’t always condemn war.  In fact when Jesus returns one day, he returns as a warrior who will make war on his enemies.  What does it mean there?  It’s been used to justify kind of a total pacivity toward evil, “Resist not the evil one”; and yet in the bible we’re told to resist the devil all the time, and to do justice, to take up for the weak, defend the fatherless, defend the widow.

Martin Luther tells a story about the “crazy saint”, a Christian who wouldn’t even take the lice off his body from nibbling on him because he thought he wasn’t to do any kind of violence to any thing.  He wasn’t supposed to defend himself.  What is the context of this passage?  Well it begins with the old saying that we know, “an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.”  Now how do you react to that phrase?  Most modern people think “How primitive!  How primitive that is.”  And yet when it was introduced in the ancient times it served to define punishment in a way that had never been done before.  In those days if you hurt someone, you could almost count on them hurting you back and killing your entire family.  This law served to stop that kind of thing.  Now certainly by Jesus’ time and actually many hundreds of years before that, the practice became that people would actually pay monetary damages instead of having a literal eye for an eye thing going on.  If we take it like that, we see it in our society all the time.  We just call them speeding fines; we call them jail sentences.  It’s simply the principle of just retribution going on here.  Now the context of this was that in Jesus’ time the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were taking this law out of context.  They were taking it out of the law courts, where it belonged, and putting it in personal relationships and saying “revenge is O.K., vengeance is O.K., retribution is O.K. in a personal relationship; and Jesus says “No, that’s not right.”  What Jesus is forbidding us is revenge.  We’re just not allowed.  But he doesn’t mean you can’t defend yourself.

Take the literal “turn the other cheek” thing.  Imagine you’re mugged with your family with you.  The guy has a big club.  Are you really supposed to stand there and say “Hit me?” Or more of that “Hit my daughter and my wife.”  Or somebody breaks into your house, “Take my money.  Rape my wife and my children.”  Is that really what he’s saying?  It’s O.K. to defend ourselves.  What this principle is, is something that we say on the inside.  Where does justice begin and revenge start?  It’s a great principle to live by.  Just think about it.  Every one of us has people out there who have hurt us.  Every one out there has situations where we have to deal with every day and they’re not easy situations.  I’ve talked with people in counseling sessions about their feelings toward their spouse and what they should do in the courtroom about their children, to someone being sued, to someone having this happen to them and that happen to them.  How do we deal with those kinds of things?  It’s not easy stuff.   How much are we supposed to get back or defend ourselves?  It’s not easy stuff.  But the principle is, no revenge.  Now we’ve learned over the last few weeks as we’ve talked about these passages that everything that happens on the outside starts in here.  So that, murder, or harming someone, starts with the anger that’s in here, or adultery, lust, starts with the desire of the lust, in here.  Same thing here.  The desires for justice, which spill over into revenge, start here.  So we have to ask ourselves, “How am I doing this, this situation?”  You know our desire is, if someone strikes us on the cheek, whether it’s by words or deeds, or whatever, our desire is that if somebody hits you, we want to hit them back; but just for good measure, we want to hit them back a few more times, to make sure it takes, you know, it’s like the shot.  Someone says something about us, well “we want to tell them off, man.  They called me one name, I’ll call you two.”  Our children do that, though we do the same thing.  So as we deal with any situation we ask ourselves how far am I going here with justice?  Because sometimes we really are called to stop someone who’s doing injustice to someone because they’ll just go and do it again.  We are called to defend the weak and to do what is right, to make sure things are right.  But how much of it is revenge and how much isn’t?  I can’t answer that question for you in your situation.  You have to answer that yourself.  You have to ask the Lord.  Sometimes we really are called to just take it.  Jesus didn’t take it every time.  Even when he was being interviewed by the Sanhedrin before he was crucified, he defended himself.  He didn’t take it, just taking it, but on the other hand sometimes we have to take it for the kingdom.  We have to take it for the good of all.  Sometimes it is good to just let them have your coat; and, oh by the way, here’s my cloak as well.  Sometimes it doesn’t do any good to fight back and we have to ask the Lord when that is.  We’re called to be different.  I’m not saying it’s easy.  I know what’s in my heart.  I know what I desire to do to people who hurt me.  I wish it would get easier as I get older.  It hasn’t seem to have done that yet, but I wish it would.  But it hadn’t. Every situation is different and every situation I have to sit down and say “Lord, help me.” 

Which leads us to the second piece, of loving your enemies.  I had a professor who used to say “Our job as Christians is to confuse and disrupt the world as much as possible.  It’s the only way we’re going to get them to listen to us.”  And reading this particular passage “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy’ but I say to you, love your enemies.”  That had to be terribly confusing.  Again the context of the teaching, the teachers of the law, the religious teachers, were smart people and they had heard God say you should “love your neighbor as yourself”; but being human beings like everybody else, they were into parsing what things meant.  They wanted to know what is is and all that kind of thing, so they said “Well, who’s our neighbor?  Oh, it must be my family.  It must be my fellow Israelites in my village.  It must be maybe a couple of villages around me.  It also means that I can actually hate my neighbor or my enemy.”  There were lots of Romans around to hate so that worked out pretty well.  And Jesus says “No.  That’s not what I’m talking about here.  You need to love your enemy.”  But right away we have lots of problems with that.  You know in the English language we are really hampered because we only have one word for love.  We have the same word of love for our dog and for love of our wife and hopefully it means two different things.  We have love which mostly in our culture is a feeling, a “good feeling” toward someone; or the romantic love that we are all familiar with kind of like this little poem I came up with or read.  A guy just had a date and he’s going inside.  He says “I climb up to the door; I shut the stairs.  I said my shoes and took off my prayers.  I shut off my bed and I climbed into the light.  And all because she kissed my tonight.”  Jesus is talking about action love here.  That’s why he said “Do good to them and pray for them.”  He doesn’t say you have to like them.  That’s where I run into trouble here, love my enemies?  I don’t even think I can like them.  I don’t want to be in the same room.  How do I love my enemies?  He’s talking about doing good to them.  You don’t have to have personal feelings.  Again you know Jesus said some things about the Pharisees.  You know, he said “You guys are like rotted corpses”.  He said “You guys are like snakes, poisonous vipers.”  I suspect if you say things like that about people you don’t really like them much.  But he did love them.  He ate with them. He talked with them.  He knew that they were going to kill him sooner or later, and he did all kinds of loving things toward them trying to turn them around.  And when he was on the cross he asked his Father to forgive them.  It had nothing to do with like or dislike.  Later Paul will say “Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It keeps no record of wrongs.”  That’s what love is.  It has nothing to do with feelings.  That’s what it means to love our enemies and every one of us in this room has at least one, maybe in your own household; maybe it’s someone who was in your household; maybe it’s someone at work; maybe it’s someone in your past.  We all have enemies.  What does it mean to love someone who’s unlovable?  We have unlovable people in our lives.  It means by, I think, first and foremost, praying for them, at least.  And when it’s up to you to do good and not bad, help and not hurt, to show mercy even as you were shown mercy too. 

These are not easy things.  And the third one is the hardest.  The third one is the most confusing and maybe the most disruptive to our own personal lives.  Jesus says “Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  I don’t like that one.  You know my human nature wants to compare myself with other people.  “I’m better than him.”  “I’m not nearly as bad as she is.”  “You know compared to everybody else, I’m doing O.K.”  Jesus says “Such comparisons are odious (in other words they stink).  They’re not right.  Compare yourself if anyone to God.”  How can I do that?  He knows I’m not perfect.  That’s crazy.  Why, I really do look at this command as more of a goal than an expectation because God does know everything.  He knows we’re not perfect and yet He’s still there.  It means we need to try to be like the Lord because that’s the way He’s like.  He loves enemies.  He sends rain on those who don’t deserve it.  He sends sunshine on those who don’t deserve it.  He shows mercy to those who don’t deserve it.  He offers salvation to those who do not deserve it, including you and me.  It reminds me, and it should remind all of us, that salvation is by grace.  It is by grace you’ve been saved, through faith.  This is not of yourself, but so is life.  Life is about grace.  The Christian life is not about climbing the holy spiritual ladder and getting as high as we can under our own power.  Jesus says these things so that we might have a kind of holy despair.  I want that one to sink into you just a little bit, kind of a holy despair.  It may sound like a contradiction, and that we despair in our own efforts in being good, in being perfect.  We look at the standard and we go “I can’t do that.”  And God says “Yah, you’re right.  But I can.”  So the prayer we start with is reaching up our hand and grabbing hold of His and He is trying to pull us up.  If we try to “turn the other cheek” by our own power, if we try to “love our enemies” by our own power, we will surely fail.  But with God’s help we can begin to do this.  We can begin to do this in the ways that God has outlined.  We don’t stop or stay at that holy despair.  It’s meant to have us turn to God for help in which we find joy and help and wholeness.  We can’t do it by ourselves, my friends, only with God’s help, only with God’s power.  So I would simply encourage you as you listen to this, say “Lord bring to mind those who in my own life I need to forgive, I need to love.  Bring those situations to mind in which I need to learn how to not have vengeance in my heart, and help me.  And He will.

Let us pray:

Father we know we aren’t perfect.  May that knowledge and that realization drive us to you who comes to us with open hands and heart and mind, who heals us and forgives us and gives us power to live.  Lord give us your power to live, that we may indeed be your children living under this sun and waiting for the Son to come back.  It is in His name we pray.  Amen.