Abstract
Raymond E. Brown Distinguished Professor of New Testament (Emeritus)
St. Mary’s Seminary and University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
In the Sundays following the Epiphany the lectionary portrays different manifestations of Jesus in word and deed. The Gospels last Sunday and today are from Luke’s “Sermon on the Plain” (6:17–49) which is the counterpart to the Matthean Sermon on the Mount and is addressed primarily to disciples who are to be witnesses of his preaching, teaching and healing. Last week we heard the overture to the Sermon where Jesus pronounces blessings on the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful and reviled disciples with corresponding threats on the rich, the well-fed, and those who ridicule them. Yet the disciples are to rejoice because their ancestors the prophets bore the same sufferings from false prophets.
Today’s Gospel opens with four ringing unexpected commands: love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who maltreat you, and love of enemies is repeated near the conclusion of the section. These love commands bracket exhortations to reject a culture of retaliation (echoing Psalm 37). Do not curse in return but offer a blessing, when slapped in the face or robbed, expose the violence of the offender, and do not cling to material possessions. See yourself in the other person and realize that you will be great and children of a merciful God. Love of enemies and God’s mercy are the lynchpins of today’s Gospel. Where Jesus in Matthew urges his hearers to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, (Matt 5:48) in Luke Jesus summarizes love of enemies with the command ‘Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful’ (6:36)
A God of mercy, love of enemies, and breaking down walls of hostility are hallmarks of Lukan theology and a challenge for proclaiming the Gospel today. Hymns on the mercy of God permeate the overtures to the Gospel (Luke 1–2). The first words that Mary speaks after affirming that she is a ‘servant of the Lord’ proclaim the greatness of God, who shows mercy from generation to generation and brings help to Israel ‘in remembrance of his mercy’ (1:54). When freed of his silence Zechariah praises God who ‘has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors and has remembered his holy covenant’ (1:72) and turns to his new-born son who will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, when ‘By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us’ (1:76,78). Mercy in the Bible is associated with compassion, faithfulness, grace, steadfast love, forgiveness and saving help. The depth of God’s mercy echoes from Jesus’ words on the cross, ‘Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing”’ (24:34).
The love that Jesus proclaims for enemies does not mean romantic love, liking, or even friendship. It is rooted in the most fundamental experience of God’s presence and the unmerited acceptance of all people expressed in concrete acts of providence and salvation. Through faith in Christ a Christian embodies the love of God through the work of the Holy Spirit.
Luke’s Jesus does not proclaim ethereal ideals but lives what he proclaims. Jesus eats with and reaches out to those Pharisees who oppose him and gives of himself to those who beg for healing or forgiveness. Only in Luke at his arrest does Jesus heal the wounded servant of the high priest, while calling for an end to any violent resistance (22:50), and the dying Jesus prays “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (23:34).
These commands can be dismissed as utopian or, worse, used by the powerful to exploit the weak. Even in the NT itself slaves were told to love masters, and often abused spouses are told even today to react with love and forgiveness. A true meaning of the love command is not acquiescence to evil and violence, but imitation of God's love by freeing enemies of their hatred and the violent destructiveness, “to turn the disobedient to the wisdom of the just” (Luke 1:17). In his final words to his disciples the risen Jesus sends them to proclaim conversion and the forgiveness of sin (Luke 24:46–47). Evil is not to be regnant in human life, but mercy and love.
Luke recounts events in Jesus’ life where the enemy is not simply to be loved but is an example of true love of neighbor and of God. The hatred between Judeans and Samaritans was acute in the first century, as reflected in the Gospels. Luke counters this with three Samaritan narratives. At the outset of his journey toward his ‘taking up’ in Jerusalem Jesus sends the disciples simply as messengers ‘ahead of him’ to a village of the Samaritans ‘to make ready for him’ (9:51–52). But the people would not receive him, because his face was set ‘toward Jerusalem’ (9:53). James and John ask Jesus if he wants them to call fire down from heaven and destroy them, but Jesus rebukes them which foreshadows the reversal of attitudes toward the Samaritans that will unfold throughout the journey.
The rejection is followed later by the parable of the Good Samaritan which is often cited as an example of compassion and care for a suffering person, all the more powerful because it is the hated other who stops to aid the injured man. The parable also forces us to ask who today teaches us and enacts for us the meaning of love of God and neighbor. When Jesus asks, ‘who was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ the lawyer curtly answers, ‘the one who treated him with mercy’ (10:37). The neighbor becomes the one who enters the suffering world of another with saving help. The shock of the parable is that the one who enacts the deepest meaning of mercy is the hated outsider. Paradoxically he embodies the command of Jesus, ‘Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.’
The third ‘Samaritan’ narrative, the healing of the Ten Lepers (17:11–19) shows traces of the traditional form of miracle story for example, the request for healing; healing by powerful word, but the Lukan focus is clearly on the second part of the narrative, the actions of the Samaritan in 17:15–18. Here for the first time Luke mentions that one of those healed was a Samaritan, who then returns ‘glorifying God in a loud voice’; and with a gesture of worship falls with face bowed at the feet of Jesus, who exclaims ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?’ Reflecting his cultural world Jesus calls him a ‘foreigner’ (allogenēs, literally, a different kind of person).
Jewish teachers in the first century defined the two fundamental obligations as worship of God and love of neighbor. Worship of God was shown especially through offering praise and glory to God. The Samaritan leper who twice gives glory to God embodies the first of these fundamental dispositions, while the Good Samaritan is a model of love of God expressed in love of neighbor. Luke forcefully says that those who are called enemy and scorned as outsiders are fulfilling fundamental religious attitudes expected of both Jews and all followers of Jesus. Today many whom we would call enemies or foreigners are witnesses to God’s actions in the world.
In our world broken by hatred and violence, ‘love of enemies’ is perhaps the most challenging and misunderstood legacy of Jesus’ teaching—and yet the most crucial. The non-violent quest for justice and resistance to evil embodied by Gandhi or Martin Luther King incarnates Jesus' love command. Even more, such love affirms in the words of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, a realization that ‘the other’ can open our eyes to ways in which we can bemerciful as our heavenly Father is merciful. Who shall take up their mantle?