Love your Enemies – Part II

Luke 6:29-30

As I read these two verses, I am inclined to sweep them in with the verses before and after. Getting the context of a particular statement is very important. Hiding a statement you don’t want to deal with by piling it into its larger context so you don’t have to focus on it is another matter.

Here is the famous “turn the other cheek” passage. I remember being a kid and someone throwing this verse at me, along with “you can’t hit me because you are a Christian.” I never could figure out how a nonbeliever like that knew so much Scripture! But this is the verse that nonbelievers all know. It is, in fact, what they equate with what it means to follow Jesus. Why? Because it is so radically different from the way the world operates.

As Jesus says in the verses that follow, our goal as Believers is not to be as good as nonbelievers, but to go way beyond. “Even sinners do that,” he says about ordinary goodness. We are not to settle for normal, everyday, ordinary goodness.

We are, Jesus teaches, to offer our tormentors the other side of our head when they slap us on one side. We are, Jesus says, to let someone also take our sweatshirt if they take our coat. And he wraps up this scary line of thinking by declaring: “Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.”

Only an extremely secure person can handle this assignment. Where’s the exit?

For the most part, Jesus’ followers were extremely poor people. Even those among them who started off wealthy were giving it all away to help Jesus in his work and to bless the poor. No wonder Jesus said elsewhere that it was very hard for the wealthy to gain eternal salvation. They have too much to lose. No wonder that the poor are inclined to be more generous with what they have than the rich are.

Now in dealing with this kind of passage, definitely one of Jesus’ harder sayings, we are inclined to respond, “Surely Jesus doesn’t mean what we think he means. After all, this isn’t practical or doesn’t make sense.” Funny that those who are not so inclined to take Jesus at his word are more inclined to take this passage literally than those who are claim to be serious about Jesus.

Or if we are serious about Jesus’ teachings enough to wrestle with them, we rush to qualify such a passage as this with other teachings of Jesus’. But before we go doing that, we need to be honest enough with Jesus to sit and reflect on what he is saying to us right now at this point in this very passage.

What is he saying, regardless of whether I like it or it makes sense? Your security, he is saying, is not in what you own or have. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about losing anything, whether it is your pride or your reputation or your position or your possessions. Your ability to survive is not wrapped up in all these things. What he is saying now flows out of what he has just said about blessings and woes.

In the larger context he does say that our security is in God. But at this moment, he is emphasizing that our security is not in anything else. And if that is the case, then we don’t really lose when something is taken from us.

Oh, how we are tempted to race ahead to more comforting passages, but I hear Jesus saying these words to his audience on that day 2,000 years ago with a steadied rhythm that allows each sentence, each phrase to sink in deeply on its own. Give to anyone whatever they ask of you and if they take anything of yours without asking, let it go as a gift. Arrgh!!!