Love is Action

Many of us at this time are reflecting on the nature of love and its apparent limitations when we seem to be surrounded by those with great power and only love for themselves and their own. Let us be encouraged, empowered and challenged by the command of Jesus to love our enemies! (Seventh Sunday after Epiphany. Genesis 45:3-11,15; Psalm 37:1-11,40-41; 1 Corinthians 15:35-50; Luke 6:27-38.)

Some of us may have just celebrated Valentine’s Day, or at least been aware that many now mark the day in some way, so we will have had “love” on our minds to some extent. Or the lack of love in the evening news may have caused us to reflect on the limitations of love in the face of crude power and wealth. Whenever we reflect on love – romantic or otherwise – many of us will have to admit that despite our advanced philosophies and theologies on love and human relationships we struggle to truly, deeply, madly love those we are bound to. and we certainly fall short of loving our enemies!  Many of us can only manage to love those who promise to love us back! At this level relationship is transactional. “I will seek to treat you this way and I expect that you will treat me in like fashion.” This reciprocal care and benefit is part of the Hebrew Bible’s ethic and part of our social contract.

But the gospel takes us to a whole new and less contained level of loving and living. The new guidelines as how to love do not assume that those we are called to love can or will want to “pay us back” or even appreciate what we give or do. We are to love with great and even foolish generosity because that is how we are loved by God (think of the parables of the prodigal son and the one lost sheep). The instruction to love our enemies, to do good to those that hate us, and to bless those who abuse us is so outrageous that if we really listen then we are thrown out of our right or usual mind. And maybe that is in part the purpose of this confounding teaching – to set such an impossible standard that our mind or ego is unseated and we are somersaulted into another way of seeing how life works and how we are to live with others.

But let us go back to our discipline of considering “what is behind the text”. Jesus is talking to those of the Jewish faith and they would all know the Leviticus teachings on loving God and neighbour, even the alien who dwells in your community. Rabbinic commentary spoke of the need to aid one’s enemies. Now Jesus is telling them to love their enemies – a very large step further. (It is a little like the “You have heard it said ... but I say ...” sayings in Matthew’s gospel.) Jesus is taking the essence of a known teaching and magnifying it so much that it cannot be contained in the tradition any longer without expanding and breaking free. Also of course the people of Jesus’ day are a people who are oppressed and ruled over within their own land. They would probably have said that they do enough turning of the other cheek, allowing their shirts as well as their coats to be taken, giving up hope of having what has been taken returned to them! Is Jesus really suggesting that they simply cheerfully put up with what is being done to them? I cannot image so. At this point I need to make a note that I do not think this teaching is suggesting that those who are vulnerable within a relationship – women, children, the employee – are being commanded to put up with unacceptable treatment. While it’s a whole other conversation all people are entitled to safe and respectful treatment and it should be your decision as to how you respond to anything that is not safe or respectful. It is also one of the reasons why the non-violence and protest movements work best as groups – so that there is encouragement, some safety, and witnesses in situations of vulnerability.

What if Jesus is teaching that even when there seems to be very little power in a situation that there is agency in how we engage – that by entering into an otherwise unfair relationship in a ridiculously loving attitude that the situation is changed and radically charged with the power of God’s love? Some rabbinic commentary suggests that this is part of why one was to aid enemies – to challenge and shame them into abandoning their evil intentions!

And when we look “within the text” itself then we will notice how this provocative teaching flows directly out of the Beatitudes which are all about seeing the world, including very much the broken crazy world, in an utterly different way. An attitude to life that sees blessing in mourning and persecution just might lead us to love our enemies and see freedom in turning our other cheek. And the teaching following this week’s reading (which we unfortunately won’t hear this year because we are nearly at the beginning of Lent) is about how judgement is a two edged sword that invariably cuts us more than it harms others. With these two punctuation marks or book ends we might consider how indeed loving our enemies and those experiences we would not wish for help us be opened up to receive the wildly extravagant love of God and then let that flow through us out into our world including those people we might call enemies and those situations we might call curses.

Then here we are sitting “in front of the text” in our current situation -  broken, bruised and living in a brutalising world! How does this wild and provocative teaching impact us? How is loving our enemies good news for us when many of us feel under siege at this time?

Well first of all maybe we should consider that in this gospel teaching, at least, love is not primarily a feeling but about action, about what we do and how we conduct ourselves. Therefore we are not primarily being asked to have nice feelings about our enemies. We are being commanded to treat them well – outrageously well. This means of course that loving our enemies is certainly good news for our enemies – instead of being punished they are treated to our best behaviour. Such compassionate and courageous behaviour may “convert” our enemies and may lead to a shared respect and enjoyment of one another. Or it may not.

Maybe this commandment is good news for us in that when we are in life situations where we have no or little power over our circumstances – when we are hated, cursed, abused by our enemies – that we can find the life giving flow in the situation by doing right by our enemies, doing good to those who wish us no good, and praying for love to be present in the situation. If we resist and enemies wrong demands and behaviour let out energy and courage come from love not hate; is we hand over our coat let us do it with dignity and the clear communication that we are empowered by something greater than their hate and fear; and maybe when we have no other power we are most ready to surrender to the flow of God’s love through us to others and in this way we are emptied and filled, taken by surprise and moved to a place beyond what we knew existed. Martin Luther King jrn said it this way: “I have decided to stick with love … Hate is too great a burden to bear.” When we are able to go beyond being disappointed and frightened that life is not rational or fair, predictable or controllable, we may find ourselves flung into a broader, deeper, more eternal love than we ever knew existed.

Even so, come Lord Jesus Christ, teach us how to fall into such a deep unfathomable love that we can love our enemies too.

This is my work informed by everything I have heard, read and experienced. I am indebted to the wisdom of others. This week I especially grateful to:

Dr Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler eds for footnotes on Luke 6, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation”, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011

John T Squires, several articles on Luke 6, An Informed Faith  www.johntsquires.com