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Seventh Sunday After the Epiphany

Luke 6:27–38 (see also Matthew 5:38–48)

Leviticus 19:1–2, 9–18

Most of what we learn in the church, whether in worship or in some sort of Christian education program, is not actually something we didn’t already know. That’s especially true for people who grew up in the church, but it’s also true for those who came in as adults. The reason is simple: there’s just not much to Christianity. We spend much of our time complicating the simple ideas that Jesus presented to his followers, developing theological arguments about predestination and free will or the Trinity, two subjects Jesus was notably silent on, I should note. The rest of the time we’re mainly reminding one another of the truths we already know, those that make up the truly important parts of faith.

This section of the gospel of Luke (and Matthew, which is similar) is one of those aspects of Christianity we’ve heard again and again. Of course, so had Jesus’s followers, who were Jewish. The passage from Leviticus makes it quite clear how we should treat those around us: we should give food to those who are hungry; we should respect others, whether through not stealing from them or not lying to them; we should protect those who are unable to defend themselves (the image of a stumbling-block in front of the blind is one that we have mainly forgotten and one we need to revive, as it sums up so well how we place obstacles in the way of those without power in our society); we should not hate, take vengeance, or bear a grudge; in short, we should love our neighbors as we do ourselves.

Jesus’s hearers would have known the Torah so well they could have quoted passages like this one to another. They would have been able to discuss this passage at length, drawing on years of rabbinical discussion to lay out all of the nuances that we, as people who are reading it in translation from a distance of thousands of years, cannot hope to see. They would have read it in the synagogues and in their homes; they would have taught it to their children. Knowledge of such passages was not their problem. Jesus isn’t telling them to do to others as they would do to themselves because they don’t know that Leviticus makes essentially the same statement. He’s telling them to do it because they don’t.

Such an approach is similar to an old church joke about a new minister. On his first Sunday, he preaches a sermon about how the congregation should love their neighbors as themselves. People compliment his sermon, then go about their lives. On the next Sunday, he preaches the same sermon. People are polite, but clearly confused. He preaches the same sermon on the third Sunday and the fourth Sunday. Finally, people are talking about him to the leadership, so a group of elders goes to talk to him. One of them says, “While we think you’re doing a good job, we have a concern about your sermons. We’re wondering why you keep preaching the same sermon.” The minister replies, “When you start loving your neighbor, then I’ll start preaching about something else.”

In the same way that the minister’s congregation struggles with loving their neighbor, so, too, does the crowd around Jesus. They don’t do it because it’s almost impossible to do. It goes against everything in human nature. That’s the same reason we don’t love our neighbors or our enemies, of course. Everything in our beings and in our culture tells us to do the opposite. We have developed over the course of thousands of years to protect ourselves, to survive; our culture tells us that we should look out for number one, that no one else is going to have our interests in mind, so we should. The only person who will try to take care of me is me, so I have to let others take care of themselves. Of course, we see where such a society leads: to unbridled competition, to the strong crushing the weak, to the people in power trampling the marginal, to corporations that care more about profits than people, to churches who focus on budgets and buildings instead of love and justice.