February 23, 2025, Jesus Never Said I Had to Like You, Luke 6:27-38 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ February 23, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

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We all know Jesus told us to love our enemies. But people like to point out that when Jesus told us to love our enemies, he never said that we have to like them – which can be a very comforting thing for us to hear. It’s a big relief to think that we can obey Jesus’s command by doing the right things, even though we are very aware that we still have all these nasty old “feels” of hurt or resentment or just plain old dislike, deep down, in our heart of hearts.

And it’s absolutely true – Jesus never commanded us to have warm fuzzy feelings towards our enemies. Which is a good thing, because our feelings are, by and large, totally beyond our control. We can choose what we do, theoretically; but we can’t choose how we feel. We can choose to pray for the good of the person who hurt us. But we can’t choose to stop feeling pain or anger or fear when we think about them. Jesus gave us practical, active ways to love our enemy: by giving generously to them, by offering even more than they have taken from us, by lending to them with no strings attached, by praying for them, by asking God to bless them as he blesses us. And that’s hard enough. But it seems do-able.

But then, Jesus went on. He summed up this love-your-neighbor command by saying, “Do to others, as you would have them do to you.” Treat everyone, your enemies included, the way you want them to treat you. It’s what we call the “Golden Rule,” probably the best-known command Jesus ever gave us. So just think for a moment: how do you want to be treated? And, specifically, how do you want to be treated by God, because of all relationships in our lives that is the most important of all.

We know that God does good things for us. In fact, he does good things for everybody. God sends the rain on the just and the unjust – and that means a blessing, not a curse, because rain means the crops will grow and the harvest will be good and people will have enough to eat. God gives generously to all people, even when we don’t deserve it. God forgives our sins – not seven times, and not even seventy times seven times, but every time, as many times as we have sins.

So here’s the million-dollar question: is that good enough for you? By which I mean, do you care how God feels about you? If God acts kind and merciful to you, and if he is generous toward you, and if he forgives you every time you screw up, does it make any difference how he feels about you? And I would say, it makes all the difference in the world. I am certainly thankful that God forgives my wrongs over and over. I give thanks for his abundant blessings every day. But what gives me real joy and real comfort is knowing that God loves me tenderly as his beloved child, that despite all my many flaws and failings he delights in me. Above everything else, that’s what matters to me, that is what I want from God, what I need from him, more than anything else.

And that means, to me, that even if we are only able to love our enemies by our outward action, right now – and sometimes that’s really the best we can do, or more than we can do – but it should be our desire; it should be our goal, to grow in god-like-ness so that some day we won’t only act mercifully toward our enemy, but we’ll also feel compassion for them. It should be our deep longing that some day we won’t only give generously to our enemy out of obedience, but we will honestly rejoice in their abundance from the bottom of our hearts. It should be our desire to be to others, even our enemies, what our Father is to us.

Which, of course, is something that can only happen through a radical transformation of our hearts. We can make ourselves act correctly – or theoretically we can, anyway. But our hearts can only be changed, by the work of the Spirit within us – by spending time in God’s good company. We are being transformed day by day, through the love of God which is poured into our hearts. And some day, believe it or not, we will know the joy, not only of acting in love toward our enemy out of obedience to God, but of loving our enemy as we love our very selves, just as God loves us, tenderly, with genuine affection, as his precious children. Maybe you’ve already experienced that joy in your own life, or maybe not. But you will.

In the Old Testament reading today, Joseph comes face to face with his enemies. They’re his brothers, it’s true, but brothers from one of the most dysfunctional families in the whole Bible These so-called brothers had sold Joseph, their own brother, to a band of traveling slave-traders out of pure hatred, because Dad played favorites, and also because Joseph was a boastful twerp. Joseph had suffered greatly for years, not only as a slave but also locked up in an Egyptian prison, for a crime he didn’t commit. And now, when God had raised Joseph up to a position of power almost equal to that of the king, here came these brothers of his. God put their pathetic, miserable, hateful lives right into Joseph’s hands.

And their reconciliation is one of the most vivid and beautiful pictures in the whole Bible of what Jesus is talking about when he tells us to love our enemies. Joseph is in a position to even the score for all the evil his brothers have done to him. He has the right, humanly speaking, to satisfy his vengeance, and he certainly has the opportunity.

But he doesn’t.

First of all, through all his experiences, the good and the terrible, Joseph has grown in his understanding and in his ability to show grace. He’s begun to see God’s hand in his life, and not just the hands of his brothers. He has suffered a lot, but he’s also begun to see God’s plan: the almost unbelievable truth that God is using him, Joseph, the bratty kid brother, to save the lives of thousands and thousands of people – even the lives of his own family. God has brought Joseph to a place where he can see how much bigger God’s plan is than all the shabby, cruel little schemes of his brothers.

And because God has given him this new perspective, Joseph finds it in himself to offer his brothers forgiveness, to do good to them even though they did him harm, to bless them even though they had cursed him, to show them mercy even though they had treated him mercilessly, to withhold the judgment they deserved. Joseph has the power now to hurt his brothers even more than they had hurt him. But instead, he treats his brothers as he would have wanted them to treat him. He demands no restitution. He’s not out for payback.

And there’s more than that happening here. Joseph’s brothers are standing before him powerless, terrified, ashamed of themselves, probably reeling in shock. And unexpectedly, Joseph loves them – maybe more than he has ever loved them – maybe for the first time in his life. He acts in all the right outward ways towards them, but he does more. He opens his heart to them as well. He tells them who he is, and then he embraces them and kisses them. He weeps over them, so loudly that the Egyptians in the other room hear him. But the bottom line is, that long-broken relationship begins to heal, and that healing, that true reconciliation, is what it really means to love our enemies.

In this broken world, we all have relationships that will never be fully healed, on this side of Christ’s return. There are relationships that aren’t safe for us to try to restore. Offering the other cheek should never mean allowing someone to keep on hurting us; it doesn’t mean being someone’s doormat, or someone’s punching bag. Sometimes there are people who just aren’t willing to be reconciled to us. Other times our hurt is so deep, the relationship is so broken, that the healing of our wounds might be the work of many years, maybe even our whole earthly lives. So Jesus gave us tools that we can use for practicing, now, step by step. We can pray for those who have done harm to us. We can bless them when we are tempted to curse them. We can lay down our rights. We can leave their judgment in the hands of God.

God might give you the blessing of reconciliation in your lifetime, or he might not. You might find it in your heart one day to feel real compassion for someone who considers themselves your enemy, or it might take every ounce of your strength just to refrain from cursing them. But in God’s final plan, God’s end game, when the whole Creation is healed and set right, then all relationships will be restored at long last. Then we will greet one another with a holy kiss. Then we will weep together for joy. Then all enmity will be healed forever. That’s the vision, that’s the ideal that we should keep in our hearts at all times, even with the most broken and hopeless of our relationships. Because that’s the kind of love God has given to us already, right now – not just the outward acts of canceling our debt or withholding our punishments, but love from the heart, a Father’s love, freely and generously given, even to us, who time and time again have acted like God’s enemies, but now have been called to be his beloved children.

I want to close with a quote from Evelyn Underhill’s little book about the Lord’s Prayer. The book is called Abba. She writes about the first words of the prayer Jesus taught us: “Our Father”. “…in these first words, the praying soul accepts once for all its true status, as a member of the whole family of man. Our Father. It can never again enter into prayer as a ring-fenced individual, intent on a private relationship with God…This wide spreading love, this refusal of private advantage is the very condition of Christian prayer…Here my enemy prays by my side, since the world of prayer has no frontiers; and in so doing he ceases to be my enemy, because we meet in God.” +