Radical Love

This is one of those Scripture passages that is great for preaching but hard to live out.  I got excited when I saw that this was the Gospel passage for today.  I can preach this, I thought!   And then God did one of His God-things and reminded me that I needed to pay attention.  You see, there is someone in my professional life that I am really struggling with.  And Jesus says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  So, this is personal for me.  Today, I am preaching to myself!  You probably don’t need to listen because you don’t have anyone in your life like Jesus is talking about.  Or do you?

The Sermon on the Mount is a collection of Jesus’ most significant teachings.  If you want to know what Jesus is about – this is a good place to go – chapters 5 and 6 in Matthew.  It speaks volumes about who Jesus the Christ is.  It gives us a good picture of what the Kingdom of God looks like.  These teachings speak clearly about who we are to be if we call ourselves followers of Christ.  It’s good stuff.  But it’s hard teaching. 

Right at the outset of his ministry, Jesus lays it on the line.  To follow Jesus demands a totally different way of life.  A new age has dawned and the Sermon shows what human life must be like after we repent and commit ourselves to Christ.   In His Sermon, we see a sharp contrast between the standards of Jesus and the standards of the world.  We find a distinctive lifestyle, with radically different values and ambitions.   Jesus challenges His followers to do the opposite of what seems normal and reasonable.

Beginning with the Beatitudes we discover that the character valued in the Kingdom of God is upside down from that of the world.   The powerless are lifted up and the powerful are pushed down.  We learn that our reward is in heaven, not on earth.  Radical, radical teaching.

But Jesus is just getting warmed up.  He teaches us that anger toward someone is as great a sin as murder.  I’m no less of a sinner than a murderer?  That’s hard teaching. 

He teaches us that anyone who lusts after another person has committed adultery.  Wow!  Who of us hasn’t taken some pleasure, some delight in dreaming about what it would be like to be with some attractive man or woman?    His challenging teaching continues as Jesus talks about divorce, swearing oaths and retaliation.  Turn the other cheek?  Seriously, Jesus?

And then he ends this part of his teaching – this half of the Sermon on the Mount with a little lesson on love. 

What is love, anyway?  If you flip through the T.V. channels, you’ll find lots – and I mean lots of shows about love.  There’s a show called “The Bachelor” where a young, good-looking bachelor meets and dates 25 women, each week narrowing it down until after 16 episodes, he has found “his soul mate.” Is this love?

There are Soap Operas during the day and sitcoms at night each of which show relationships that come and go – all for the sake of love. People trade partners as often as our mother’s taught us to change our underwear.   Is this the world’s definition of love?  Something found after a few casual interchanges based on superficial information and impressions? 

Something tells me this isn’t the kind of love that Jesus is commanding us to have!  Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  BUT I TELL YOU:  Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”

Love is the central theme of all Jesus’ teachings – the central theme of his life and ministry. Love is the very core of who Jesus is.  So it should be no surprise that Jesus challenges us to love in radical ways.   He demands unlimited love.  Love the just and the unjust he says; love the good and the evil; love those who love us back, and those who are our enemies.  Jesus demands that his followers have undiscriminating and undifferentiating love toward everyone. That is a tall order! But that is the mark of our Master and so it must be the mark of His disciples.  We are called to love as God loves.

I will never forget the feeling I had when my oldest daughter was born and I held her for the first time.  My heart swelled with love.  I was completely overwhelmed with the intensity of my emotions.  These were feelings I had never experienced before in my life and the only other time I have ever experienced this intensity of emotion, was when I held my second daughter moments after she was born 2 years later. 

Perhaps you know what I’m talking about?  I am still overcome with emotion when I remember those first moments with those babies.  The feeling of love I felt for my beautiful babies completely and irrevocably swallowed me up and from that moment on, I would do absolutely anything to protect them. 

But you know what I find amazing?  This is only a small taste of how much God loves us!  You see, God loves us more than we can possibly love one another – even our children, because his love is truly unconditional.  It’s not conditioned on how cute we are or how well we behave or anything about us.  He loves us because we belong to Him.  

The love that Jesus describes is an intentional act - even for those we really dislike.  Jesus commands us to “choose” to love; to decide that we will love our enemies; to “will ourselves” to love those we hate. It is not an emotion.  It is a decision that we will love because God loves us. Christ’s disciples are commanded to reflect the generosity of God, who sends blessings upon both the righteous and the unrighteous.  Jesus says, “God shines his sun on evil people and on good people.  He sends his rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”  Why should we be different – we who call ourselves Christians?  That’s tough love.  That’s radical love.

How can we possibly do this?  How can I possibly love this person that has been so cruel to me?  That has hurt me?  Not on my own, that’s for sure!  We are able to be gracious, forgiving, hospitable, generous, and loving because we are children of the God who showers us with His abundant grace, mercy, and love – grace, mercy, and love that we don’t deserve either.  Those who know God’s love, can love their enemies; those who experience God’s forgiveness; can forgive those who persecute them; those who claim God’s gift of generosity, can give back to those who have little or nothing. 

In a 1938 sermon, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When you confront your enemy think first of all about your OWN antagonism with God and about God’s compassion towards YOU.  “Think first about your own antagonism with God and about God’s compassion toward you.”  It sure makes me pause.

Can you say you have never sinned?  Can we as a Church say that we have always exemplified the life of Christ?  Can we say we have never hated?  Never held onto anger?  Never retaliated? 

Every time we sin; every time we fall short of the glory of God every time we oppose God, we become his adversary.  And isn’t an adversary the same thing as an enemy?  Yet unbelievably, God continues to love us.  Jesus commands us to be no different. 

If we call ourselves Christian, we must choose to love… will ourselves to love, as

God loves us.  God loves us with a perfect love that knows no boundaries.  A love that doesn’t discriminate.  A love that is more than an emotion based on the behavior of another.  In this teaching, Jesus shows us that our loveless attitude toward our enemies is identical with that of the very people we despise.  This is tough love. But just because it’s hard – just because it seems impossible doesn’t make it less of a truth.

If we really listen to this passage and take it to heart, we realize what a radical thing Jesus is asking us to do.  It is easy to love our children, our spouses, our parents, our friends – especially during the good times.  We all do.  Even those “unloveable” people in our lives are somebody’s daughter, son, mother, father, or friend and love or are loved by friends and family.  I believe it is how God created us.  After all, He created everyone in His image.

Jesus says in John 13:34, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  But to love those who rub us the wrong way and those who we find un-loveable is a challenge.  To love those who actually disagree with us, who believe differently than we do – is difficult.  To love people we don’t even know, perhaps have never heard of is even more complicated, for they almost don’t exist. But to love our enemies – serial killers, suicide bombers, terrorists – now that is another matter altogether.   To love as God loves “unlovable us” is what we are called to do every moment of every day.

Does Jesus love me more than He loves you because I am a pastor; a “supposed woman of God”?  Does Jesus love you more than the person on the corner because you come to church most Sundays and he doesn’t?  Praise the Lord that God’s love is not conditioned on who we are or what we do.  Because friends, I am a great sinner.  What about you?  Jesus destroyed any illusion that we are somehow better than others when he compared those with harbor anger in their hearts to murderers!  What a gift that we don’t have to earn God’s love but rather He freely gives it to us.  That is why we are called to love others – because God loves us and he loves them too. 

In Christ, we are called to a radically different way of being in this world; one that is often difficult and hard to swallow.  God’s love for the world trumps our wish for vengeance and our need to be self-righteous before others.  God’s love is for all of God’s creations and that happens to include those who do not love us and who wish to destroy us.

Yet God walks with us even as we struggle to love those we don’t want to love and who do not love us.  He walks with us to do good to those who wish us harm.  Nothing can separate us – or anyone else, from the love of God in Christ Jesus, not even our own bigotry and hatred of those who are different than we are. 

What would happen if we took Jesus’ teaching to heart?  What would it be like if we truly loved as Christ commanded us to love?    What would happen if we loved so radically that it drew people to Christ?  Christ’s love is transforming – after all, it has transformed each of us so why couldn’t it transform the world? 

Let us pray:  Loving God:  You love people whom we do not love, You read the hearts of others, whom we do not understand, You know the inmost suffering of those whom we ignore.  Open our eyes and our hearts.    Enlarge our heart that it may be big enough to receive the greatness of your love.  Stretch our heart that it may take into it all those who with us around the world believe in Jesus Christ.  Stretch it that it may take into it all those who do not know Him, but because we know Him, are our responsibility.  Stretch our hearts that it may take in all those who are not lovely in our eyes, whose hands we do not want to touch; but whom you love unconditionally in the same way that you love us.  Teach us to love with your perfect love. Through Jesus Christ, our Savior.  AMEN.