Luke 6- You want me to love who?
These teachings of Jesus are among the most challenging words he ever spoke. He says, (6:27-31, )
"… Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 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. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
Now “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” we get. That is the rule we find in Exodus 21:24. There we read
“if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exodus 21:23-24).We get that. Someone harms you so that you lose an eye, well you can’t kill them, but you can take their eye. … The Old Testament is often about limiting the damage of sin. So, someone punches you and knocks out your tooth, you can’t get revenge by killing the person. Otherwise, one sin could turn into many more. If you escalate the situation by killing the person who knocked out your tooth, then their family retaliates against you and soon we have a feud that could last for generations. “Eye for eye and tooth for tooth” was meant to put limits on retaliation. It limits the effects of sin. We get that. That is sort of the system we use. You do damage to me or my property and the law says you need to compensate for that damage, and it also says I can’t seek revenge in a way that exceeds the crime done to me.
However, if you take away the context and you just think about the act of taking a person’s eye, or tooth, we see that it is an act of destruction. One anonymous Church Father said,
“If therefore we begin … to return evil for evil to everyone, we are all made evil”.… Jesus wants us to live in the kingdom right now. He wants us to behave as citizens of the kingdom now. … So, in everything we do we need to ask ourselves, is this the kind of act that we would find in God’s kingdom? Is a person who lives in the kingdom of God the kind of person that can gouge out a person’s eye? … Destructive actions like taking a person’s eye out do not have a place in that kingdom. Those acts of destruction belong outside the kingdom, so participating in them does something to us and our ability to live in the kingdom Jesus speaks about. We are suddenly acting like people of the fallen world, rather than people of the kingdom.
Jesus knew that when we use fire to fight fire we are likely to have a giant fire that will probably burn us and others. We need a different way of responding to evil and citizens of the kingdom of God. We need water, not more fire. … Put yourself in the attacker’s position, if you hit someone and then they hit you back, you suddenly feel very justified in hitting them again. But, if you hit someone and they don’t hit you back it is usually harder to feel justified in hitting them again.
Some, like Bishop N.T. Wright, believe that there is strategy behind Jesus’ words. If someone were to strike you on your right cheek it probably meant they struck you with the back of their hand. This was not only a violent act, but it was insulting as well. It was an action that declared you were an inferior. What Jesus says isn’t “run away”, nor is it “hit back”. Jesus says to face them and turn to them the other cheek. To hit you on the other cheek with their right hand means suddenly the person has to treat you as an equal, rather than as an inferior.
Gandhi was incredibly inspired by these words of Jesus. He believed that not hitting back and looking the attacker in the eye called out the deeper humanity of the attacker. Gandhi is probably the person that comes to mind for most people when we think about the reality of living these words out. It is ironic that a Hindu man has become iconic for living out these words of Jesus. The other famous example is The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a Christian minister, but who also wrote that Gandhi’s teachings were “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change”. It was a Hindu man who taught the Christian minister that the words of Christ could be lived.
Though, there are other examples of love for an enemy. On October 2nd, 2006 there was a school shooting in Pennsylvania. It was a one room schoolhouse in an Amish community. The gunman, Charles Roberts, shot 8 of the 10 girls aged 6 to 13. Five of the girls died. He then turned the gun on himself. This horror shocked the nation and beyond. … But, there was equal shock when the nation saw how the Amish community responded. … The community responded with deep forgiveness and reconciliation. A grandfather of one of the murdered girls was heard warning some younger relatives, “We must not think evil of this man.” Members of the Amish community even reached out to the family of the shooter only hours after the shooting to comfort them and offer forgiveness. 30 members of the Amish community attended the shooter’s funeral and they even set up a charitable fund for the shooter’s family. They also invited the shooter’s widow to the non-public funeral of one of the girls.
Bishop N.T. Wright has said,
“The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity. Think of the best thing you can do for the worst person, and go ahead and do it. Think of what you’d really like someone to do for you, and do it for them. Think of the people to whom you are tempted to be nasty, and lavish generosity on them instead. These instructions have a fresh, springlike quality. They are all about new life bursting out energetically, like flowers growing through concrete and startling everyone with their colour and vigour.”
These are examples of Kingdom living. These are ways of imitating the Heavenly Father of Jesus Christ, who showers blessings and mercy on everyone- the deserving and the undeserving. … I don’t think Jesus meant these as rules we are to blindly follow. But, the Early Church also understood the complexity of these teachings. … The early church father Theodore of Heraclea (355ad) says,
“he does not command to give to everyone who asks without exception, even if one has nothing to give, for that is impossible. Nor does he instruct us, if we have plenty, to give to someone who asks with a bad motive. For the donation then goes for evil things. … For why is it said [in Acts 4:35] concerning the apostles that ‘distribution was made to each as any had need’? This tells us that they gave not so much to those who simply asked but that they provided for others on the basis of need.”So, the early church understood that these were complicated issues.
The examples Jesus gives are examples of the kinds of things we might do as children of God as we attempt to imitate the holiness and generosity of our heavenly Father. … Our reasons for not wanting to follow these teachings seem to have to do with fear. We fear that if we don’t hit back, then our enemy wins. We fear that if we give to everyone who asks that we won’t have enough for ourselves. … To follow through on these teachings we have to really believe that our hope is in another kingdom. Our hope is not found in our earthly safety because we will all die. Our hope is not found in our possessions, because they can be easily stolen from us. Justice will only ultimately be found in the Kingdom. To live in the way of Jesus requires us to put our hope in God.
The kingdom way that Jesus describes is also about our own spiritual health. Loving our enemy benefits our enemy, but it also benefits us. If we sit in our hatred of our enemy we are hurting ourselves. The same anonymous church father said,
“I think that Christ ordered these things not so much for our enemies as for us: not because enemies are fit to be loved by others but because we are not fit to hate anyone. For hatred is the prodigy of dark places. Wherever it resides, it sullies the beauty of sound sense. Therefore not only does Christ order us to love our enemies for the sake of cherishing them but also for the sake of driving away from ourselves what is bad for us. … If you merely hate [your enemy], you have hurt yourself more in the spirit than you have hurt him in the flesh. Perhaps you don’t harm him at all by hating him. But you surely tear yourself apart. If then you are benevolent to an enemy, you have rather spared yourself than him”.[1]
One of my favorite teachers, Dallas Willard, once commented that if we think loving our enemies seems impossible we should look at the lives of those who hate their enemy. Perhaps we could look to Palestine and Israel, or the Hatfields and McCoys. Then we can ask ourselves which way of living seems more desirable- hating our enemies or loving them?
We should also remember that Jesus is not asking us to do anything he himself didn’t do. Jesus lived the kingdom life. Bishop Wright says,
“When they mocked him, he didn’t respond. When they challenged him, he told quizzical, sometimes humorous, stories that forced them to think differently. When they struck him, he took the pain. When they put the worst bit of Roman equipment on his back- the heavy cross- the piece on which he would be killed- he carried it out of the city to the place of his own execution. When they nailed him to the cross, he prayed for them”.Jesus asks his followers to live the way he did. And he promises that it will lead where it led him- to resurrection and eternal life. AMEN
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