The Churches of

Hipswell Parish

Sunday Sermon - 20th February 2011

Revd Jan KeartonA sermon given by the Revd Jan Kearton

'Love your neighbour'

I have a friend who is a psychotherapist and in her consulting room is one of those small plaques with witty phrases. It says ‘before you meet Prince Charming, you have to kiss a lot of toads’. I suppose she put it there to remind her clients that the way to health goes through depression and grief and misery, rather than skirting around them. We have to confront and examine the things that make us unhappy if we’re to be positive people who live fulfilled lives.

I have to admit that today’s Gospel reading used to make me feel like I was in the middle of kissing a large toad, desperately hoping that wisdom and saintly detachment would follow. In the previous few verses of the Sermon we’ve been told that we mustn’t lose our temper and now we’re told that we have to give up the right to retaliate.          

Love thy neighbour image

What was Jesus saying when he told us to love our enemies, to stop resisting people who do evil things, to do good to those who hate us? It sounds like a recipe for complete anarchy, a charter of indifference that somehow allows Christians to float above the horrors of the world, their eyes fixed on heavenly things and firmly averted from the worst excesses of human nature.

I don’t think that can be right. We’re used to thinking about God as a God of justice and I don’t think that Jesus is recommending indifference. There are three questions that scholars have asked about this reading: what did Jesus mean by enemy; what did he mean by love; and what’s he trying to say about God in giving this advice that we find so hard to follow?

Let’s think for a moment about the kind of enemy Jesus might have had in mind. Jesus deliberately uses a Roman measure to make his point – a mile. The people he was with were probably used to the Greek word instead, so saying ‘mile’ is going to surprise them and make them think about the Romans. There was a lot of resentment about Roman soldiers pressing people to do all sorts of things, including carrying their back packs for a mile. Jesus knows that individual resistance to the might of Rome was useless and dangerous, and that people can become distorted by carrying emotional resentment every day. Going the extra mile is a way of showing the Romans that although you’re living in subjection, your inner self is free from oppression.

But why be nice to someone who oppresses you? Non-retaliation is a very difficult thing to take on board. It doesn’t usually change your enemy or convert them to your point of view. Is it for our own spiritual improvement then? Well, maybe. The most important thing is that it reflects God’s will for humanity – community and relationship. For that to happen, we have to be prepared to limit our anger, resentment, our need to protect ourselves and our need to hit back at others, to level the scores.

So what did Jesus mean by love? I think that he meant us to look at our enemies as neighbours, as people with whom we share a common humanity and people who’re also indelibly marked with the image of God. I don’t think that Jesus was just talking about feelings though. Love is about doing as well as feeling – about turning negative attitudes and acts into positive ones, about a refusal to become negative and to build negative relationships.

As a teenager, I can remember a type of village conversation that heaped one kind of shock-horror response on top of another. ‘He didn’t! well, she’s like that you know. Her mother was too and he learned that from his father. I don’t know what this village is coming to. You’ve only to look around you to see what an awful place it’s become. It wasn’t like that when I was a child, things were better then. The whole world’s gone mad if you ask me’.

At the beginning of the conversation I felt as though I was getting to know something important, exciting, and that I was really part of what was going on in the village. There’s no doubt that it did build a kind of community, but sadly it was a community of likeminded moaners and tittle-tattlers that would break and re-form daily as someone else in the village came in for a verbal drubbing. I can remember coming home and feeling a sense of growing hopelessness, as though the world was a much nastier place than I’d thought and people weren’t what they seemed to be.

God himself gets pushed out with negative thinking like that. The world that God created dims down - it doesn’t seem such a good place anymore. Jesus calls us to think and behave positively, to help people recover the positive from situations. It’s a response that marks us out as different from others, and we mustn’t ever make it in a superior way. It should come gently and automatically to us, because it should flow from being part of a Christian community that’s marked itself by this way of thinking and acting, a place that lives and acts as a reflection of God’s life of love in action.

So what’s Jesus’ thinking about God that underpins all this teaching? Is it that God’s making impossible demands on us to prove to us how much we need Him? Is it that we’re to change our enemies by setting a good and holy example, killing them with kindness? I don’t think so. Love isn’t manipulative and it doesn’t necessarily have an agenda. The key is in the reading from Leviticus. God says: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy’.

The word you is emphatic - you shall be holy, too. All that belongs to God should tend towards holiness, and Leviticus sets out the mindset of God’s community of people, a community marked by honesty, truthfulness, compassion, respect, relationship, probity and love.

God sends rain and sun on all equally – that’s God’s nature. Jesus in his sermon re-issues God’s ancient invitation to become more like him, to be his true children. We’re to become fools to the world’s wisdom and wise to God’s, as Paul says. If we’re to be the things we’ve spoken about in previous weeks - salt and light for the world and more righteous than the Pharisees - then we have to look at people from God’s perspective, and to love them and to make peace with them as God does. We have to have a better than legalistic view of others, to look at all our fellow human beings as worthy of God’s love and attention. That can feel very demanding, and I strongly suspect that we’re  kissing toads again – giving up the whole toady luxury of having enemies and taking up the much harder work of growing relationship from really difficult beginnings. 

Justice and mercy are hallmarks of God and I seriously doubt that we’re to give up our concern about them. But we are to give up our need for vengeance because God reserves that to himself: ‘vengeance is mine, says the LORD’. Our Christian responsibility is to let the world know and see the kind of love God has for them – the kind that we see in Jesus who went to the cross without speaking blame on any one. It’s generous, self-limiting, all-including love, love that we too can show in our own community and in radically different responses to hurt in the world. May God bless us as we continue to learn to reflect his love and glory to others. AMEN. 

          

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