Love Your Enemies; Sermon on the Mount as an Oracle of the Early Church

7 Epiphany A, February 23,2014

Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18 Psalm 119:33-40

1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23 Matthew 5:38-48

Lectionary Link 

   “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”  How’s that for setting the standard rather high?  And what is the point of confronting us with an impossible goal of perfection?  We have been reading from the Sermon on the Mount which in a way in how Jesus is revisiting the entire purpose of the Law and how it is fulfilled.

  The religious leaders in the time of Jesus were rather proud of the defining documents of their religious and national identity, namely the Torah or the Law of Moses.   “We are an exceptional people because we have been given the Torah.”  An obvious rejoinder to this would be, “Well, you are so exceptional that your land has been controlled by outsiders for many years.”    But we can understand how an oppressed but proud people would not want to be assimilated to the values of the foreign occupiers.  This resistance to the occupier was a daunting task since the people of Judaism could not help but interact with the Roman authorities.  This would mean that within the areas where freedom was allowed by the Romans, the Jewish religious leaders would want to work overtime for their people to retain their unique and exceptional identity.

   To remain distinct in the face of occupation would be to learn how to live with fear of loss. We've lost the control of the borders of our country; we don’t want to lose the very identity of our nation by assimilating to the values and habits of all of the Roman foreigners who have come to our country.

  We might have some pity upon the Pharisees and Sadducees who were trying to retain exclusive identity under the threat of being assimilated into the culture of the outsiders.

This meant that the religious authority understood the great Mosaic Law more for cultural identity and less for transformation of their lives in loving God  It also meant that they were perhaps intolerant with those who could not maintain the details of the laws in the same way that they did.

  Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.  How could this have an intuitive literal significance?

  Imagine an older sibling in any family who lords his experience over the experience of a younger brother.  Imagine being the younger brother who is ostracized or left out because he cannot perform at the same level as the older and more experienced brother.  Imagine an intervening father in such a dispute and the father might say to the older son, “Okay you are harassing your younger brother for not being up to your level of performance; well, now I’m going to require that you be up to the level of my performance.  Since you are requiring an impossible standard for your younger brother, I will require an impossible standard for you.”  And the older son would say, “That’s not fair because you are older than I am.”  And the father would say, “Exactly so do not wrongly judge your younger brother based on the difference in your life experience.”

  Jesus was saying even if someone is advanced in understanding and practicing of the law, they had no right to judge without mercy, someone who did not have the same understanding or the same practice.  Rather, they should set the moral direction of their vision upon the perfect Father in heaven and know that they always have to accept grace, mercy and forgiveness when they compare themselves with perfection.

  So, the words of Jesus teach a crucial lesson about where we should look for moral direction.  We should always look towards becoming better ourselves rather than being overly proud about how we think that we are better than others.

  I think that there is another level of understanding these Gospel words of Jesus based upon the unavoidable habit of writing history anachronistically.  This means that history writers include their own lives and subsequent events in how they recounts events and words of the past.  How were the seeds of what has already happened found in the original words and events of Jesus

  If the Jews in the time of Jesus were encouraged to love their enemies, who were the real enemies of the Jews and what would it mean to love them?  The real enemies of the Jews were the Samaritans and the various persons who represented the Roman oppression in their country.  How would you truly love these foreigners and enemies? Well, you would give them a message of love so profound that you would convert them and persuade them to begin to transform their lives.

  By the time this Gospel was read in the churches in the cities throughout the Roman Empires, the enemy Gentiles had become equal heirs and friends in the faith.  How could this great gap between Jew and Gentile be overcome?  By the message of the Gospel or the good news about Jesus Christ and how this good news could transform lives.

  And so now the Sermon on the Mount with its radical fulfillment of the law was actually realized in the churches which read and taught the Gospel.  The message of Jesus brought enemies to love one another because the former enemies had their lives transformed by the message of the love of God in Christ.

  The Father in Heaven who is perfect is Father of both the Jews and the Gentiles.  Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father has broken down the enmity between Jews and Gentiles and enabled them to live in love and fellowship because they had their lives taken over by the Spirit of God who was the evidence that Christ was still alive and with them.

  We might believe that the Sermon on the Mount is a radical teaching;  but it had already been fulfilled in the reality of the union between Jews and Gentiles in this new community of Christ.

  It is impossible to write the narrative of the life of Jesus without knowing exactly what happened because of the life of Jesus.  The Sermon on the Mount is a case in point.  The oracle of Christ within the church where Jews and Gentiles lived as friends and not as enemies proclaimed the reality of how enemies could be made to become friends.

    Our world needs this powerful transforming reality to happen in profound ways in our world today.  Enemies need to be loved into friendship.  This is the result of the Gospel; this is the power of the love of Christ.  Let us always look to the power of this love in our lives.  Amen.