Pastor Mark Nieting
Matthew 5: 38-48
Part 6 in our study of the Sermon on the Mount
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For Terry Anderson, a reporter in Lebanon back in 1985, it started right after a game of tennis. He was just leaving the court when a group of Shiite Muslim terrorists who were angry at America for helping Israel, kidnapped him. For nearly 7 years he was chained to a wall in a dark and dirty cage. He was beaten. He stayed sick for years. He was tortured. Amazingly…..a purely “God Thing,” he was allowed to have a Bible, which he read over and over. Finally, after spending 2,455 days in captivity, he was released. The media asked him, “Can you ever forgive them?” Anderson said that the words of the Lord’s Prayer flashed through his mind, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” His response? “As I Christian, I must forgive them and I will forgive them, no matter how hard that seems.”
In Lancaster County Pennsylvania, October 2006, a gunman barricaded himself into an Amish schoolhouse filled with schoolgirls. He shot 10 of them, killing 5, before committing suicide. The American media seemed quite confused when the Amish community responded by refusing to express hatred for the shooter and by expressing love for his family.
In these two sections of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encourages His hearers to move into the deeper waters of discipleship with one statement: LOVE YOUR ENEMIES!
Let’s start with a very simple illustration. You are talking with someone and they SMACK you in the face. There are two possible options for you at that point. What are they? A) You hit them back. B) You DON’T hit them back. If you DO hit them back, THEY can hit you again or THEY can stop, but because they started it, they aren’t inclined to DO that, so they may hit YOU harder. At which point you might decide to hit THEM even harder…… do we see where this is leading? It’s not going to go anyplace good, is it? It won’t be too long before this spiral of violence gets someone very hurt or very dead.
Is that they way we want it to end? Maybe I shouldn’t have asked!
In verse 38 Jesus quotes three different Old Testament passages that sum up the condition of God’s Law at the time of Moses: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This didn’t mean people exchanged body parts when someone else got hurt….. it was a system where each offense had a cash equivalent that had to be paid out to hold offenders accountable. So “an eye’s worth of hurt” would only be worth an “eye’s full of vengeance.” No more. No less. It was a system designed with two goals in mind: to LIMIT the amount of vengeance someone might want and to LET people know there was a price to be paid for violence.
It was also, and this is important to remember, designed to apply to the government, NOT to individuals. God has and still gives governments the authority to keep order in society by establishing both Laws and systems of retribution for the breaking of those laws. That is the responsibility of the “Kingdom of the Left Hand,” of the governments under which we live. But just like the previous sections we’ve discussed already, people, even GOD”S PEOPLE, who live also in the Kingdom of the RIGHT HAND, the Kingdom of God, had gone so far as to take matters into their own hands…..even when it came to violence and vengeance.
Now comes Jesus who quotes this “law of equal retaliation” and then says, “Do not resist an evil person.” Then He gives four different illustrations:
If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn the other one to him too!
If someone wants to take your shirt, give him your coat.
If a Roman soldier orders you to carry his pack a mile, carry it TWO!
If someone begs from you, don’t refuse him.
All of these things we would do in a heartbeat for a friend. All of these things would come naturally there. But for our enemies? For those who hate us?
What is Jesus saying here? Is He telling us we have to be spineless doormats who roll belly up at the first sign of struggle in our lives? Is He saying we should give away all we have and not protect our families and our property? Are we supposed to ignore sin….and sinful behavior? Certainly NOT.
Once again Jesus is speaking to the condition of our hearts. Once again He is reminding us of the two great summaries of the Law: Love the Lord God with all our heart, soul and mind; and, we are to Love our neighbors as ourselves.
Step back, says Jesus, and focus your hearts and lives on the bigger picture of life. My people are to be SALT and LIGHT. My people are supposed to be noticeably different, says Jesus, than those who don’t know me.
How did Jesus go about DESTROYING the power of Satan in this world? He did this by voluntarily allowing Himself to go to the cross. It was one of the most amazing demonstrations of strength the world has ever seen. It wasn’t through weakness, not for a moment. When He was being questioned by the high priest, a servant slapped Jesus on the cheek. He doesn’t hit the man back but simply says, “If I was wrong, say so. But if I was right, you don’t have any reason to hit me.” With those words Jesus stopped one particular cycle of violence, not with weakness, but with strength.
Jesus’ point in the Sermon on the Mount is that our reply to hatred, envy, slander or persecution should not be more hatred, envy, slander or persecution, but instead, our help, our love, our prayers, and our blessings. Revenge might feel good for the moment, but does it point people to Jesus? Is it showing love for our neighbor?
The Pharisees were the masters of the fine print of Jewish Law. In Luke 10 one of them asked Jesus to define “neighbor.” Jesus responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who was the neighbor? It was the Samaritan, people despised by the Jews, looked down on by them as their traditional enemies. Martin Luther summarizes it this way: Our neighbor is any human being, especially one who needs our help, even one who has done (me) some sort of injury or harm. (AE27:58)
If “everyone” is our neighbor, who are our enemies? Who are YOUR enemies? Can you bring to mind right now the one person in your life who gives you the most trouble, the most grief, the one who has caused you the most stress? Hold that face in your mind for a moment as we consider Jesus’ words to us; that we are to LOVE them.
It’s a very specific word that Jesus uses here. It’s not a word that evokes EMOTION, rather, it speaks to ACTIONS and ATTITUDES we are to have about “our enemies.” We are, Jesus says, to:
- pray for them.
- to be fair towards them and respectful to them.
- to treat them as if we DO love them, despite what they do to us!
Imagine God holding OUR faces in His mind, God who IS perfect, God who cannot tolerate sin. God who removed Adam and Eve from His presence because of their sin in Eden. How does God act towards us? In love….
In Romans Paul says that while we were still sinners, while we were in active rebellion against God, Christ died for us. That is true love….and that, Jesus says, is what I want you to extend to your “neighbors” and your “enemies.”
Still have that one, special person’s face in your mind’s eye? Are you asking WHY you should show love to someone who has given you so much grief?
There are at lot of good things that come to us through loving and forgiving our enemies. The first is a PHYSICAL benefit. When we’re upset with someone, it’s like poison runs through our bodies. Scientists have found that chronic anger and bitterness can be far worse for us than even a high fat diet! Anger can shorten our lives. One researcher studying Jewish holocaust victims found that those who adopted an attitude of forgiveness lived much longer and better lives than those who lived in bitterness.
Second, there is a RELATIONAL benefit. Proverbs 23 says that we are what we think. People who are angry too often turn into angry people, and they are no fun for anyone to be around. When we make a decision to return GOOD for evil, it’s like dropping the end of a rope in a tug-of-war……it ends the tension. It short circuits the flow of hostility. Martin Luther King Jr once said, “Love is the only power that can transform an enemy into a friend.”
There is also a SPIRITUAL benefit, and this is huge. Scripture says that our relationship with Jesus can be strengthened or weakened depending on our ability to love our enemies. It’s IMPOSSIBLE, dear friends in Christ, to allow the love of Jesus to flow into our lives when we stubbornly refuse to forgive someone. If your worship feels dull and empty; if you feel far from God this morning, you may wish to examine your attitude towards other people, especially that person I invited you to picture in your mind. By forgiving that person, you are freeing YOURSELF and closing the gap between yourself and God.
Finally there is a KINGDOM benefit to loving our enemies. What GOOD is it, Jesus says several times in this sermon, if you love your friends. BIG DEAL! Everybody does that….even unbelievers! There’s no salt there. There’s no light there. But when we, as people of the Kingdom of God, show love to those who hate us; when we offer forgiveness, people take notice.
NOBODY would have blamed Terry Anderson if he had wanted to bomb the terrorists. Nobody would have blamed the Pennsylvania Amish if they had withdrawn farther from society because an “outsider” murdered their girls. Nobody would have given that a second notice! But when God’s people offered grace, mercy and forgiveness, the world gasped……and asked WHY. They Asked HOW. This is what makes Christians different from other people. It’s doing what DOESN’T come naturally. It’s doing what isn’t EASY. It’s the quality of righteousness that outshines the false righteousness of the world.
It is this “above and beyond” kind of love that drove Jesus to the cross and drives us to love those who aren’t easy to love….and it is this kind of love that always points to Jesus. It always reflects God, whose very definition IS love (1 John 4).
Amen.
Jesus ends this section by raising the bar as high as it can be set….”Be perfect, just like God is perfect.”
