When you were in school, did you ever arrive to class after the instructor had begun teaching? That’s a little like where we find ourselves today, listening to Jesus.
Because of how the lectionary – that three-year cycle of readings that we follow – is divided, Jesus’ sermon on the plain comes to us in three parts. It began with the gospel we heard from Pastor Alfredo last Sunday – where Jesus proclaimed blessing for the poor, the hungry, and those who weep and declared woe for those who are rich or sated or laughing. In that text, Jesus promised that God’s ways are different from the ways of the world.
Today’s gospel continues his sermon and then, there is yet a third part - the concluding verses of this chapter - that we won’t even hear in worship.
When we hear Jesus say, “But I say to you,” we know we need to hear
today’s verses in the context of what came before, in order to understand what
Jesus is saying. Because Jesus is not condoning abuse and he is not advocating
staying in violent or unsafe situations. He is saying that
our lives cannot be lived in response to either our enemies or even our friends, but to God.
In today’s gospel, Jesus tells us, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
God calls us to act in love and grace toward all people, not only those whom we like or who like us. Not only those who convictions and beliefs are the same as ours. Not only those whose behavior is acceptable or even legal. But all people, because all people are created and beloved by God.
If that sounds difficult, you’re right; it is difficult.
And we are not the first people to
struggle with Jesus’ teaching.
Throughout God’s story, God’s people have heard this difficult word – to be merciful, to be generous, to do good – and struggled with it.
In the Old Testament, after God spares Nineveh, Jonah angrily complains to God, saying,
Isn’t this what I said, Lord? I knew that you’re a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. (Jonah 3:2)
Then in the parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew, the landowner hires workers throughout the day and when evening comes, he pays them their wages and when the workers who had been hired in the morning saw they were all paid the same, they began grumbling. And the landowner asks, “Are you envious because I am generous?” (Mt. 20:15)
And in the story of the prodigal or lost son, the older son became angry when he sees how his wayward brother is welcomed home, complaining that “this son who has squandered your property comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!”
So I ask you, “What do you make of God’s impartiality?”
Part of my story of faith is coming to believe that God’s grace extended even to me. I had not really grown up in the church, although I’d been christened in the Episcopal Church. I was pretty self-destructive in my late teens, but I was drawn back into relationship with God in college through campus ministry and it was there that I finally came to understand that God’s mercies were new every morning and that God’s forgiveness was even for me;
that as Luther writes in the explanation of the third article of the Apostles’ Creed in the Small Catechism– “the Holy Spirit abundantly forgives all sins – mine and those of all believers.”[i]
Because of God’s great love for each one of us, God therefore forgives us all our sin, known and unknown and invites us into life with God.
For Luther, the relationship which God establishes with us through the forgiveness of sins in love was at the center of our life of faith. [ii] He writes in his commentary on the psalms, “Where there is no forgiveness there is no God; where there is no God, there is no forgiveness.”[iii]
In Unbroken, World War 2 veteran bombardier Louie Zamperini describes returning to Japan and meeting the Japanese prison guards who had been responsible for the years of mistreatment and abuse that he suffered as a prisoner of war. In 1950, He went to Japan and traveled to Sugámo prison where many of the guards were held for their war crimes and there, Zamperini told each one face to face that he forgave them.[iv]
Where was faith when he was 8?
It was watching his mother pray on her knees.
Where was faith when he was lost at sea on a life raft in the Pacific?
It was pledging himself to God’s service if God saved him.
As his faith evolved, he put his faith into action, in love and in forgiveness.
Importantly, Zamperini’s act of forgiveness did not erase the crimes
the guards had committed; it did not commute their sentences, change their
consequences or diminish their accountability.
But it did release Louie from the burdens of anger, vengeance and retaliation, and we can imagine that it released the guards from their burdens of shame and alienation. We know from his account that several of the guards found faith through his act of forgiveness.
The late American poet laureate Maya Angelou is often quoted for saying, “You cannot forgive without loving.” She was careful to say forgiveness wasn’t about sentimentality and it didn’t mean she was going to invite the person to Sunday dinner. In her words, forgiveness was “having [the] courage to stand up and say, “I forgive. I’m finished with it.”
Jesus commands us to love our enemies, but following God’s commands, even the ones to love and forgive, isn’t something can do all on our own. We are dependent on the Holy Spirit to keep us in faith and grow in living in response to the love God has first shown us through Jesus.
So I invite you to a prayerful practice. Take a minute to silently name a person who you have struggled to forgive. Be as specific as you can. And commit to praying for God’s help to forgive that person. Ask God for the courage and will to love your enemy, to forgive and be merciful. Commit to pray daily and see what happens.
Let us pray…
Good and gracious God,
Thank you for giving each one of us abundant mercy and forgiving all of
our sins.
Thank you for your Son Jesus who teaches us to pray and calls us to
love, forgive and be merciful.
Today, by your Holy Spirit, enlighten us with the name of someone we
have struggled to forgive and, day by day, give us the courage and will to
forgive.
We pray in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
[i] Martin Luther. Small Catechism.
[ii] Martin Luther. Commentary on the Psalms, 1532-1533 cited in George W. Forell, Faith Active in Love. 63.
[iii] ibid
[iv] Laura Hillenbrand Unbroken. 2010; also, in film 2018.
