7th Sunday after Epiphany, Year C
Feb. 23, 2025
Luke 6:27-38
Today’s Gospel message is a continuation of the Sermon on the Plain from Luke that you heard last Sunday–the one with the blesseds and the woes. This sermon, very similar to the Sermon on the Mount that Matthew recorded, encapsulates the most important principles Jesus taught his followers. If any Christian ever wonders what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, these two sermons have clearly spelled it out for us. AThe Good News of the Gospel is also hard news.
Lest you think love and forgiveness is weakness, this commandment from Jesus to his followers will take more training, fortitude, prayer, sweat, tears, and ultimate reliance on God than does the much easier tendency to retaliate, seek revenge, and harbor hatred and resentment. Living a Christian life according to the teachings of Jesus Christ is a radical lifestyle counter to the way of the world. It is not comfortable, so fair warning. We all might squirm a little as we look at today’s message from Jesus. There’s really no sugar coating it nor a convenient loophole to get out of these commands. Yet it is a powerful act of resistance in the face of evil.
Jesus begins this second part of the Sermon on the Plain by turning to his followers and saying, “But I say to you that listen to me [meaning those who have been following him], Love your enemies.” He goes on to dismantle the “I’ll just love those who love me” mindset and pushes us into the higher plane of the Kingdom of God, a place and a condition of one’s soul that reflects the nature of God.
Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu had every right to not forgive his worst enemies during apartheid—the racial segregation and oppression of nonwhite South Africans beginning in 1949—and yet when he chose to do so, he changed the world for the better.
Tutu helped to break the cycle of oppression, uprising, and retaliation in his native South Africa not by encouraging his oppressed followers to violence, but by asking them to forgive. Because of his advocacy of non-violence, of abandoning the right to revenge, South Africa is a more peaceful place today. Apartheid was torn down, not through death, but through negotiation.
This is the power of forgiveness, what it is to love your enemy.
It’s also important to emphasize, especially for those who have suffered at the hands of another, what loving your enemies does not mean. It doesn’t mean that you naively allow others to repeatedly wrong you—it simply means that you let go of the idea of revenge against the person who wronged you without excusing the wrong. When you forgive, you limit yourself to seeking justice rather than seeking to hurt. That’s an important difference.
Loving your enemy does not mean condoning, enabling, or excusing their actions. It seeks their good, hoping one day for their repentance and transformation.
It is also not becoming a doormat. Jesus’ command is not an invitation to tolerate abuse or injustice. It doesn’t mean allowing people to trample over you. Setting boundaries is wise and necessary and is itself a loving act. It is still the Christian duty to work for justice, to resist the wrong, to stand for what is right on behalf of those who suffer.
Love seeks the good of others and that means holding people accountable for their actions and their words. Words can also be an act of violence and hatred toward another–often causing more damage than actions. God’s command to love our enemies doesn’t negate God’s promise of justice. The scriptures are clear that we all are accountable for our actions and what comes out of our mouths. But God is clear that we are not to be the ones seeking vengeance. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. Too often we just want to be about the Lord’s business.
In sermon notes that Corretta Scott King kept after her husband’s assassination, Martin Luther King wrote, “forgiveness is a process of life and the Christian weapon of social redemption. Here then is the Christian weapon against social evil. We are to go out with the spirit of forgiveness, heal the hurts, right the wrongs, and change society with forgiveness. Of course we don’t think this is practical, [but] this is the solution of the race problem.”
Jesus is seldom practical, at least in terms of the way so much of the world seems to work. He is counter-cultural, but practical in terms of Kingdom values. It does not seem practical or reasonable to forgive one’s enemies. Jesus’ radical approach to the way one is to live upset a lot of people, especially those who benefited off the backs of the poor, whose greed caused hardship, who wielded cruel power against the powerless, and those who remained silent while others suffered.
I believe that loving our enemies has a lot more to do with learning to love ourselves, learning to truly love God, and therefore our neighbors, too. It is the key to the fulfillment of what Jesus called the Greatest Commandment. When we take on the arduous task of loving our enemies, we learn to recognize their humanity. The coworker that undermines you, the friend that betrays you was also made in the image of God. The hard truth is that too often we are not that different from some of our enemies. Yet I believe that if there is even only one tiny little spark left in someone that can be redeemed, God will do so. We are to pray for this.
When loving our enemies leads us to forgiveness, it isn’t ignoring the hurt they caused nor pretending it didn’t happen. But it is allowing the Spirit in to help with our own work in the release of our bitterness, refusing to hold on to grudges which only harm us, and trusting that God will bring justice when others fail to do so.
Forgiveness doesn’t excuse sin, but it frees us from being chained to it. Loving our enemies, learning to forgive is the path to freedom. Violence, retaliation, and holding on to resentments will never bring you freedom. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, Mahatma Gandhi was purported to have said. It was his commitment to nonviolent resistance that inspired The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr to take on his non violent approach to civil rights in the 1960s.
Loving our enemies isn’t just about them; it is much more about you and your relationship to God. Hatred and unforgiveness are prisons. They chain you to the past and rob you of peace. Breaking those chains that bind us to bitterness and resentment is for our sake, it is our path to the freedom that Christ has promised us. Your enemy no longer has power over you when those chains are snapped and you are no longer their mental or spiritual prisoner.
We reflect Christ when we are able to do this hard thing of love; we become witnesses to a power that transforms. We plant seeds of change. Love and forgiveness are choices we make. We disarm hostility when we bless instead of curse, and allow room for God to work. Blessing instead of cursing is a weapon of mass disruption that breaks the cycles of harm. Praying for our enemies changes us, opens the door to the first steps of what is sometimes a long road to healing and peace.
The practical steps one may take to this impractical command of Jesus to love our enemies is to begin by examining your own heart. In one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 139, is a powerful prayer, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Be honest with yourself and with your struggle, but keep praying. Look for small steps you can take, avoiding the steps that put you in harm’s way. You may never be able to face your enemy again, and in some cases shouldn’t, but you can do the work of freeing yourself from the chains that bind you. Small acts of kindness can pave the way for bigger victories.
Most importantly, you cannot do this on your own strength. Pray for the help of the Holy Spirit. Pray for God to do the work in you when you just can’t. Sometimes your prayer may be to pray that you will one day be able to pray for your enemy. The road to your freedom in Christ is one step at a time.
Corrie ten Boom, arrested in 1944 for helping Jews escape the Nazi regime, having spent the last year of World War II in various prison camps, shared her experience in her memoir, The Hiding Place, first published in 1971. She recalled the first encounter with one of her jailers many years later.
“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, a former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein.” He said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I prayed, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.
As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on God’s. When God tells us to love our enemies, God gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
Magdalena's Musings 