Love is a strategy (Luke 6.27-38)
Many of us remember the Beatles song, “All You Need is Love.” Originally released in 1967, it had all the optimism of the mid-1960s, before the calamities that occurred, at least in our country, in 1968. Here are some of the words (I won’t sing them!):
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy
Nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy
Nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
From our point of view, many years later, after several unwinnable wars and economic collapse and declining standards of living and terrorist attacks and failed attempts at reform, it may not look so easy, or so simple. Is love really all you need? We might be inclined to say you need a little more than that. You need power. You need some rough justice. You need to be willing to stick it out through a hard slog with uncertain results. In other words, our world today seems to call for much more than love, love, love.
We all know this, no matter what our politics or our religion, no matter what part of the country we come from or our class background. We have rejected the sentimentalism (or at least we think we have) of previous eras. Now, we may still like the Beatles’ old song, and we may think of love as an ideal that is impossible fully to realize but that should at least be tried. We may still believe that love, or a least some facsimile of it, is an essential ingredient in livable human relationships. We know that, without something like love, human life can descend into a series of cold transactions or else a brutal competition that creates misery everywhere. But, most likely, we recognize love as an ideal rather than a practical possibility—we no longer think of it as easy or simple—and we may even excuse ourselves knowingly for our failure fully to embody that ideal in our words and actions. I know I really should love so-and-so, but, at the end of the day, everybody has to protect their own, don’t they? Who’s going to look after my own interests if I don’t?
I mentioned the calamities of 1968. One of them, of course, was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We are at the end of Black History Month, and I always try to read something from Black history in America during the month of February. This year I read parts of Dr. King’s collection of sermons, The Strength to Love, published in 1963. There’s a lot of soaring rhetoric in those sermons, but one thing there is not much of is lofty idealism that thinks anything is easy or simple. Dr. King was influenced by the Christian realism of protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Niebuhr taught American Christians to become aware of the stubborn fact of what he called “collective egotism,” which made any attempt to establish more just and humane society very difficult. Simply put, there would be people with vested interests in things like racial segregation and white supremacy, and making the reforms necessary to enable equality for African-Americans was going to be anything but “easy” or simple, because they would be fought with every weapon available to segregationists, including the media and popular culture as well as law enforcement. “All you need is love” wasn’t going to cut it. And no one knew this more intimately than Dr. King.
But Dr. King also knew the verses we read this morning from Luke six. He knew that Jesus said to “love your enemies,” to “pray for those who abuse you.” Now, there is long Christian tradition that has gone to great lengths to finesse these words. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, suggested that we love our enemies by killing them sorrowfully, by not taking delight or pleasure in perpetrating the violence against our enemies that is necessary. But King took Jesus’ words a little more seriously than that. And what Augustine missed, it seems to me, is that, for Jesus, love was not an ideal or an interior state of soul that could coexist with violent acts—love wasn’t something in the heart that had nothing to do with what we do with our hands. Instead, love was a way of life that was to be directly embodied in our actions. Love was not just some kind of vague end goal that we hope we can somehow get to someday. No, love was a means. It was a practice. It was a strategy.
One of the things about our text from Luke that we may miss amid all the striking language about loving our enemy is Jesus’ concern over “reward” and “credit.” Traditionally, we have taken this as relating to some kind of afterlife. Love your enemies, because even though that will get you nowhere on earth, God is going to make heaven a little sweeter for you if you do. But the word “heaven” doesn’t appear here, nor is there any reference to an afterlife. I suggest, in fact, that “credit” and “reward” should be taken as something that occurs here and now. In the cultural context of Jesus, honor and shame were tremendously important. How much power or influence you have had a lot to do with how much honor you accumulated with others around you and how much shame you avoided. Throughout the gospels, Jesus calls this honor and shame system into question and often turns it on its head—when he calls us to honor those whom society throws away. But, here, it seems to me that “credit” and “reward” have everything to do with honor and prestige. There’s nothing noteworthy, Jesus says, about loving the people you are expected to love. There’s nothing special about acts of kindness to people who are already your friends. That’s what you would be expected to do because your friends are those who have already shown kindness to you. It doesn’t move the ball down the field, if you will, it doesn’t change anything to keep up these normal transactional relationships in which you do something nice for me, and then I do something nice for you.
What really changes the game is when we offer respect, and even love, toward those who haven’t shown any inclination to love us in return. But here’s an interesting piece of that. When Jesus says to turn the other cheek, we tend to hear that as “don’t resist someone’s meanness toward you. Be a doormat.” We may occasionally give lip service to “turning the other cheek,” but of course very few of us find that an attractive way to live, so it remains an empty ideal. But here’s the thing: think about what turning the other cheek must mean. It means insisting on being struck another way—by a different hand. In Jesus’ context, it mattered which cheek you were struck on. If someone struck you on the right cheek (assuming that they were right-handed), it meant that they struck you with the back of their hand. That’s the way a master would strike a slave. Now, let’s assume the person who would do such a thing at least “outranks” the other person in terms of prestige or honor. If the person who is struck turns the other cheek, what they are saying is, “No, it’s not ok to strike me that way. I refuse to be your inferior. That’s not the relationship that I want to have with you. Strike me with an open hand, as an equal.” What would that do? It puts the relationship back on equal footing. It is way, without violence, to insist on your dignity and respect.
Martin Luther King was a pioneer in the strategy of what he called “nonviolent resistance,” and it was very much like the love strategy we find in Luke six. Of course, there’s nothing “easy” about that. We can not only get slapped but stolen from, abused, persecuted, threatened. It’s not a question of not resisting—there’s no call and no value in being a doormat. The question is how we resist. And the question is not just, what’s the most moral way to resist or the “nicest” way to resist. Instead, it’s, what’s the most powerful way to resist? How do we resist in such a way that we might actually move the ball down the field, change the game? And the most powerful way to resist—the way that will actually increase our power to change human relationships for the better—is to resist with the force of love: love of self and love of the other. The most powerful way to resist evil is with the ironclad affirmation of one’s own dignity and the dignity of the other because in that way, we can show those who are watching what is possible and what is the most compelling way to live human life.
Well, what can you and I learn from Dr. King’s strategy? In what way can love be a practical strategy for us? You and I probably don’t have to resist evils that affect us as systematically as King and many of his followers did. We do have to deal with people who are being jerks, though. We have to find ways to get along in a world in which there are people who are abusive, who manipulate or control, or who simply make us mad. And, if we are followers of the one who tells us to love our enemies, we have to find ways to stand up for ourselves that honor the humanity of those we must oppose. Can love be a strategy for us? I think we’ll find that it can.
And, can love be a strategy for the church? I’m going to say something that I’ve said before though maybe not in this way: the churches descending from Europe, the white churches, have been flirting with a heresy, a basic betray of Christian faith for a long time. We have become used to being the ones in power or at least with access to power, and that experience has taken us a long way from the original experience of Christianity because it has taken us a long way from the experience of Jesus. We have gotten ourselves caught up in defending structures of inequality from which we benefit, including those that not only marginalize but materially harm those who do not look like us or who do not share our culture. And this has hurt us, too, because we have acquiesced in a system that isolates everyone and locks us into a cycle of brutal and alienating competition. No wonder, living in and accepting a world like this, we are forced to think of Jesus as a lofty idealist who has lost touch with reality?
But here’s the gospel: love your enemies. It’s really possible. Not only is it possible, in fact, but it is the only way to be fully attuned to reality. Here’s the good word: pray for those who threaten and do harm. Turn the other cheek. In other words, there is a way out of the brutalities and the artificialities of a coldly transactional world. There’s a way to get beyond the tit-for-tat, mutually accusing, permanently litigious, forever suspicious way of life that we have created for ourselves. The church can repent of its heresy of accepting race privilege as its birthright. We can break through the alienation and suspicion that imprisons and we can create community and friendship through the power of the Spirit who makes all things new. In the name of God our creator and redeemer. Amen.
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