[This message, based on Luke 6:27-38, was delivered at Ogden NY Presbyterian Church on February 23, 2025. A video version can be found on that church’s webpage.]
Valentine’s day was just over a week ago. So this should be easy for us. Let’s think of one person that we really love. Focus on that person now. What does that do for our inner beings? Is there a warmth? A bit of a heart throb? A good feeling?
Now let’s think of someone that we don’t love. Someone we really don’t like. Perhaps an enemy or adversary. Maybe someone we hate. Don’t think of a group of people, but of one person. It may be someone we don’t know or someone we do know. Focus on that person now. What does that do to our bodies? Is there tension in us? A quickened heartbeat? A cold feeling?
If we had certain monitors connected to us, they would have indicated some big differences in us. When we think about someone we love, there are changes in our body chemistry.
Dopamine, the ‘reward hormone,’ reinforces the pleasure we feel from love and encourages us to seek more of these feelings. Oxytocin, the ‘love hormone,’ promotes trust, connections, and bonding with others.
When we think about someone we hate, there are also changes happening in us. Hatred leads to anxiety, restlessness, obsessive thinking, and paranoia, which affect overall mental health. Hatred negatively impacts the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system.
So, let’s stretch Valentine’s Day to every day of the year. It’s healthy for us to think about those we love. In the passage I just read, Jesus used the word love six times. Every time he used the word for God’s love, agape, love that exists in giving, not receiving, in seeing the best in the one loved. Loving others does good things to our beings and our bodies.
I follow the lectionary as I preach in different churches most Sundays. I didn’t select the reading from Luke 6 today. Over the last month I have preached in a different church almost every Sunday. I have been following Luke 4-6 for a month. Today’s passage is the second in a section called the sermon on the plain. It is similar to the more famous sermon on the mount in Matthew 5-7, but a bit different. Every word in today’s text is directly from Jesus. Luke doesn’t add commentary. If you have a Bible with the words of Jesus in red, this is a red-letter passage; every word from Jesus.
I read about a pastor that recently felt the spiritual nudge to preach about the undercurrent of strife in our nation. The text before the pastor was a direct teaching of Jesus. The pastor preached the message, trying to honor the words of Jesus and speaking to the current situation. At the door after that worship service, some people avoided greeting the pastor. One couple, however, stepped right up to the pastor and said this. “We don’t appreciate what you said today. Please stay with the gospel in the future.” What is the gospel if not the words and teachings of Jesus?
I take my task to be what Nehemiah 8:8 says: “So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” That is what I am doing whenever I preach. I seek to give the sense of the passage, to bring understanding. In today’s text there are three sayings of Jesus that jump out at me and all point to the same truth, like a braid of three strands. A braid of three strands is always much stronger than any one strand.
- “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you;bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.” (vss. 27-28) Love is an action we take for the other. It has emotional content, but it is far more than an emotion. Jesus goes on to say that if we only love people that we like, people easy to love, people that can easily send love back at us, we are missing his point. He is calling on us to love people that are not easy to like or love, even people who hate us and curse us.
- “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (vs. 31) We commonly call this the golden rule. It was known before Jesus came on the scene. The rabbis of Judaism used it before Jesus, but they used it in the negative: “Do not do to others as you would them not do to you.” Jesus gives it a fresh new meaning by putting it in the positive: Do to others. It is an active doing.
- “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” (vs. 36) Mercy withholding the judgment or punishment people deserve, but treating them in love. I think of Micah 6:8, perhaps the highest peak of the prophets of ancient Israel: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” There was a sermon preached in the National Cathedral on January 21 in which the preacher urged the new president to be merciful to people that are scared. The call to be merciful comes directly from Jesus.
Did Jesus really mean what he says in this passage? Maybe he was exaggerating to make a point. If so, the point was made very clearly. We are to love people in a radical way. The word radical is often misunderstood today. People refer to radicals as extremists. The word literally means to get to the roots of a matter. Jesus is calling us to practice a radical kind of love, the kind that comes from God. Jesus calls us to a new and better way, not the way of retribution, retaliation, and revenge. Jesus is calling us to love, mercy, and blessing. Martin Luther King, Jr.
said it memorably: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
A president of another nation, one now gone from us, told of this incident.
“After I became president, I asked my escort to go to a restaurant for lunch. At one table a man waiting to be served. I said to one of my soldiers: go and ask that gentleman to join us. The man got up, took his plate and sat down right next to me. While he ate his hands trembled constantly and he did not lift his head from his food. When we finished, he said goodbye without looking at me. I shook his hand as he left.
“The soldier told me: That man must have been very ill, seeing as his hands didn’t stop shaking while he ate. Then I told him: That man was the warden of the prison where I stayed. After he tortured me, I cried asking for some water and he humiliated me, laughed at me and instead of giving me water, he urinated in my head. He is not sick, he was afraid that I, now president of South Africa, would send him to prison and do to him what he did to me. But I’m not like that, this conduct is not part of my character, nor of my ethics.
′′Minds that seek revenge destroy states, while those that seek reconciliation build nations. Walking out the door to my freedom, I knew that if I didn’t leave all the anger, hatred and resentment behind me, I would still be a prisoner.” –Nelson Mandela
Jesus speaks these words to those that are listening. Are we listening? There is a difference between merely listening and really hearing. Let us listen and hear the words of our Lord: “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you;bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you…. Do to others as you would have them do to you…. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
Sailing toward Wisdom 