Matthew 5:43-48 The Message
43-47 “You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’
I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst.
When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the supple moves of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves.
This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty.
If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.
48 “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You are kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”
Romans 13:8-10 Good News Translation
8 Be under obligation to no one—the only obligation you have is to love one another. Whoever does this has obeyed the Law.
9 The commandments, “Do not commit adultery; do not commit murder; do not steal; do not desire what belongs to someone else”—all these, and any others besides, are summed up
in the one command, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself.”
10 If you love others, you will never do them wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole Law.
43-47 “You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’
I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst.
When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the supple moves of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves.
This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty.
If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.
48 “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You are kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”
Romans 13:8-10 Good News Translation
8 Be under obligation to no one—the only obligation you have is to love one another. Whoever does this has obeyed the Law.
9 The commandments, “Do not commit adultery; do not commit murder; do not steal; do not desire what belongs to someone else”—all these, and any others besides, are summed up
in the one command, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself.”
10 If you love others, you will never do them wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole Law.
Reflection
II think you are like me, and we all prefer to see Christmas as a magical, loving, peaceful time and we like to see Jesus as this loving, peaceful, gentle, perfect baby and we forget that babies born at Christmas and all other times of the year cry and poop and throw up over your best clothes. And babies grow up.
Babies are their own person- wild and risky business if you ask me; who knows who and what they will become!
I imagine Mary, the mother of Jesus, thinking: “Carpenters attracted by the preaching of John the Baptist, once baptized go off into the desert: without his brothers or friends to watch over him I might add, and once returned, set out preaching around Galilee with a rag-tag band following him.
Even him coming home, Jesus that is, is just a bit of an embarrassment, I mean, one minute you are so proud of him, as he reads the from the prophet Isaiah in the front of the congregation, at the worship service, and the next minute he’s getting a little bit uppity, proclaiming himself as the fulfillment of the prophecy that he just read! Just a little humiliating!
But then the congregation starts talking together, and it gets a little scary when they chase him out of town.
Finally he settles down a bit- well, not really settling down, but as an itinerant preacher he is pretty good. You are hearing stories of him healing and chasing out demons, so at least he is doing OK. After all, how much harm can come to him in the backwoods of Samaria (not that anything good has ever come out of there) and Galilee.”
Love is wild and risky! God loving us. Us loving each other. Us loving our kids. Us loving God!
We think we know what it will look like when we take those steps, make those promises, and are overtaken by events but watch out, it is a risk we are taking; giving our hearts and minds to love, to God, and to Jesus. Our faith is that this Jesus is the one, who for us as Christians, reveals the love that is God. Jesus embodies the love that is God and shows us what that love looks like when it is lived out in the world.
It looks like healing and wholeness, it looks like acceptance and inclusion, it looks like Jesus calling us down from our perch in a tree, Jesus calling us to follow him, Jesus stopping on the road and talking to us because that is what he did.
And it didn’t seem to matter who you were in the hierarchy of the world, your standing in your community, what you did or didn’t do; in Jesus’ time his contact with people, his openness to people transcended all the social and political barriers.
Jesus met you where you were and called you into the Kingdom of God, into the Kingdom of acceptance and transformation and love.
You know how we are, we kind of like to put things into categories, we like things defined and labeled and in neat little stacks. Funny thing is the Greek philosophers liked to do that to love, so we kind of followed in their footsteps. There 6-7 categories of love: caritas, philia, agape, eros, storg and so on but I wonder, is that what God does, is that what Jesus did?
Jesus said this is the great commandment and the second is like it: to love God with all your heart and mind and to love your neighbour as yourself. And then, he added: Wait! not only love yourself, and love your neighbour but love your enemy!
What was he talking about? What is this love? What is Jesus asking us to open ourselves up to- telling us to love - our enemy?, those we turn away from on the street, those we would condemn and despise, those we sneer at and make fun of, those who have harmed us and threatened our way of life.
This has got to be one of the most radical calls that Jesus made to his followers, in a time when hating your enemy is what you did – it only made sense – they were the enemy.
You get it – anyone who threatens your way of life or your life literally – they are the enemy – Canaanites, Egyptians, Roman soldiers, tax collectors, Herod, gentiles, Samaritans, prostitutes, judges confiscating land for past due taxes or because you were a widow – enemies. Nations, ethnicities, governments, that group – there they are the cause of all that is wrong with the world – your life – your world - blame them! And Jesus says: “Yes, that enemy, that group, those people – you are called to love them and to pray for them”
Oh, he didn’t say it was easy, he said: this is how God loves. We heard it in our scripture reading from Matthew 5: “You are kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”
Another way to put Matthew 5:48 is “ Be perfect as God is perfect.” Be love as God is love. And keep on doing it!
Some would say it only takes hearing their story to turn an enemy into someone worthy of our attention and respect. Some say that God, reconciles everyone, and brings them into God’s own loving embrace, and that our job in life is to help that along by spreading the love we have received as generously and as graciously just like Jesus seems to have done in his life.
So what is love? but a softened and open heart, a willingness to see and understand the neighbour, as someone who underneath it all, is someone like yourself, and your enemy as someone who hasn’t told you’re their story.
More than anything Jesus epitomized love in the world: Healing the sick, raising Lazarus, taking the time to meet the blind and wash their eyes with mud and spit, to touch those with leprosy and heal them, to listen to the dispossessed and those left behind and left by the wayside, Samaritan women getting water at the well, in the middle of the day, women bleeding in the streets, tax collectors, lawyers, Zealots wanting to fight for a new Israel, Pharisees coming in the night, the rich, the poor, the demon possessed. Jesus’ love knew no bounds.
He prayed, he forgave, he overturned sellers tables in the Temple’s outer court, he brought people together on the mountainside and by the water and he told them stories about God’s Kingdom –inviting people in and into relationship.
For it is in relationship that our eyes are opened and our hearts softened, and we begin to understand this love, this Kingdom of God, that Jesus envisioned, preached and lived into.
We might cling to our categories and what to think of our love as caritas – what we might call mercy/charity but really it is life giving for us, we might want to think of our love as eros but really it is what stretches our hearts, we might want to think of it as philia but it is what unites us one to the other, we might want to think of it as agape but really, God’s love, it is what sets us free and all that love is wild and risky.
All that love turns our perceptions upside down, and opens our lives, our world to the unknown; it brings us to cradles to joyously celebrate the newborn and allows us to sit beside and be with those who are dying.
This is the Advent love we are talking about, the kind that really makes a difference in who we are and what we hold to be true in this world.
When God is born into the world as a tiny vulnerable baby; a Messiah is born, the light of hope shines, and Immanuel, God with us, comes to show us the Way.
May it be so Amen
II think you are like me, and we all prefer to see Christmas as a magical, loving, peaceful time and we like to see Jesus as this loving, peaceful, gentle, perfect baby and we forget that babies born at Christmas and all other times of the year cry and poop and throw up over your best clothes. And babies grow up.
Babies are their own person- wild and risky business if you ask me; who knows who and what they will become!
I imagine Mary, the mother of Jesus, thinking: “Carpenters attracted by the preaching of John the Baptist, once baptized go off into the desert: without his brothers or friends to watch over him I might add, and once returned, set out preaching around Galilee with a rag-tag band following him.
Even him coming home, Jesus that is, is just a bit of an embarrassment, I mean, one minute you are so proud of him, as he reads the from the prophet Isaiah in the front of the congregation, at the worship service, and the next minute he’s getting a little bit uppity, proclaiming himself as the fulfillment of the prophecy that he just read! Just a little humiliating!
But then the congregation starts talking together, and it gets a little scary when they chase him out of town.
Finally he settles down a bit- well, not really settling down, but as an itinerant preacher he is pretty good. You are hearing stories of him healing and chasing out demons, so at least he is doing OK. After all, how much harm can come to him in the backwoods of Samaria (not that anything good has ever come out of there) and Galilee.”
Love is wild and risky! God loving us. Us loving each other. Us loving our kids. Us loving God!
We think we know what it will look like when we take those steps, make those promises, and are overtaken by events but watch out, it is a risk we are taking; giving our hearts and minds to love, to God, and to Jesus. Our faith is that this Jesus is the one, who for us as Christians, reveals the love that is God. Jesus embodies the love that is God and shows us what that love looks like when it is lived out in the world.
It looks like healing and wholeness, it looks like acceptance and inclusion, it looks like Jesus calling us down from our perch in a tree, Jesus calling us to follow him, Jesus stopping on the road and talking to us because that is what he did.
And it didn’t seem to matter who you were in the hierarchy of the world, your standing in your community, what you did or didn’t do; in Jesus’ time his contact with people, his openness to people transcended all the social and political barriers.
Jesus met you where you were and called you into the Kingdom of God, into the Kingdom of acceptance and transformation and love.
You know how we are, we kind of like to put things into categories, we like things defined and labeled and in neat little stacks. Funny thing is the Greek philosophers liked to do that to love, so we kind of followed in their footsteps. There 6-7 categories of love: caritas, philia, agape, eros, storg and so on but I wonder, is that what God does, is that what Jesus did?
Jesus said this is the great commandment and the second is like it: to love God with all your heart and mind and to love your neighbour as yourself. And then, he added: Wait! not only love yourself, and love your neighbour but love your enemy!
What was he talking about? What is this love? What is Jesus asking us to open ourselves up to- telling us to love - our enemy?, those we turn away from on the street, those we would condemn and despise, those we sneer at and make fun of, those who have harmed us and threatened our way of life.
This has got to be one of the most radical calls that Jesus made to his followers, in a time when hating your enemy is what you did – it only made sense – they were the enemy.
You get it – anyone who threatens your way of life or your life literally – they are the enemy – Canaanites, Egyptians, Roman soldiers, tax collectors, Herod, gentiles, Samaritans, prostitutes, judges confiscating land for past due taxes or because you were a widow – enemies. Nations, ethnicities, governments, that group – there they are the cause of all that is wrong with the world – your life – your world - blame them! And Jesus says: “Yes, that enemy, that group, those people – you are called to love them and to pray for them”
Oh, he didn’t say it was easy, he said: this is how God loves. We heard it in our scripture reading from Matthew 5: “You are kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”
Another way to put Matthew 5:48 is “ Be perfect as God is perfect.” Be love as God is love. And keep on doing it!
Some would say it only takes hearing their story to turn an enemy into someone worthy of our attention and respect. Some say that God, reconciles everyone, and brings them into God’s own loving embrace, and that our job in life is to help that along by spreading the love we have received as generously and as graciously just like Jesus seems to have done in his life.
So what is love? but a softened and open heart, a willingness to see and understand the neighbour, as someone who underneath it all, is someone like yourself, and your enemy as someone who hasn’t told you’re their story.
More than anything Jesus epitomized love in the world: Healing the sick, raising Lazarus, taking the time to meet the blind and wash their eyes with mud and spit, to touch those with leprosy and heal them, to listen to the dispossessed and those left behind and left by the wayside, Samaritan women getting water at the well, in the middle of the day, women bleeding in the streets, tax collectors, lawyers, Zealots wanting to fight for a new Israel, Pharisees coming in the night, the rich, the poor, the demon possessed. Jesus’ love knew no bounds.
He prayed, he forgave, he overturned sellers tables in the Temple’s outer court, he brought people together on the mountainside and by the water and he told them stories about God’s Kingdom –inviting people in and into relationship.
For it is in relationship that our eyes are opened and our hearts softened, and we begin to understand this love, this Kingdom of God, that Jesus envisioned, preached and lived into.
We might cling to our categories and what to think of our love as caritas – what we might call mercy/charity but really it is life giving for us, we might want to think of our love as eros but really it is what stretches our hearts, we might want to think of it as philia but it is what unites us one to the other, we might want to think of it as agape but really, God’s love, it is what sets us free and all that love is wild and risky.
All that love turns our perceptions upside down, and opens our lives, our world to the unknown; it brings us to cradles to joyously celebrate the newborn and allows us to sit beside and be with those who are dying.
This is the Advent love we are talking about, the kind that really makes a difference in who we are and what we hold to be true in this world.
When God is born into the world as a tiny vulnerable baby; a Messiah is born, the light of hope shines, and Immanuel, God with us, comes to show us the Way.
May it be so Amen
