Luke 6:27-38, from the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany .
“Gospel” means “good news,” but the Lectionary has some especially bad news for us this week, straight from Jesus’ lips.
Got enemies? You must love them. Every time they hate, curse and abuse you, you must respond by doing good to them, blessing them, and praying for them. If one of them slaps you in the face, you must invite them to do it again. If one of them steals your coat, you must add your shirt to the thief’s haul. You may not ask for either one back, either. And if a beggar wants something from you, you have to give it up, no questions, no receipts, no IOUs. Escape judgement by not judging and condemnation by not condemning. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Treat others – all others, not just the deserving ones – the way you want to be treated. Give goodness in the same measure you want to receive it.
If that’s good news, who needs bad news, or even terrible news? Because the news here sure seems to boil down to this: I’m never going to get anywhere near heaven. If someone hates, curses, abuses, smacks or steals from me, they can expect to get the same treatment back in spades. Sure, I’ve let people off the hook now and then. But not every time. Not even most of the time. Whoever Jesus is talking to, here, he’s not talking to me, or even to someone I could become.
In fact, this whole Gospel thing – is this some kind of bait and switch? Sure, Paul scribbled all that stuff about our being made righteous by faith alone. But here’s Jesus, himself – Paul’s boss, so to speak – going on about a moral code that’s impossible for me, or, really, anyone, to live by.
And since I’m asking hard questions, here’s another: How come this high moral code Jesus is describing never seems to come up when Christians get all enthused about denouncing sin? They’ll work themselves into a lather about sex, drugs, booze, rock ‘n’ roll, uppity women, rebellious kids, and baking wedding cakes for gay couples. But they never seem to denounce being armed to the teeth against thieves and attackers, reducing to rubble countries that threaten ours, making poor people work for their SNAP benefits, or wiring death row inmates into the power grid long enough to fry the life out of them. How do these glaring omissions square with Jesus’ commands to turn the other cheek, to give beggars what they ask for and thieves even more than they steal, and to neither judge nor condemn?
In sum, the “good news” looks like bad news and probably a swindle as well, and the people pushing it usually seem more hypocritical than holy.
Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve got this Gospel all jumbled up.
Maybe Jesus is describing God-level morality to disabuse us of the idea that we’re at all capable of practicing it. Maybe Jesus’ point is that even the most uptight Pharisee (or Family Research Council acolyte) still comes up short and would do well to remember it. Maybe Jesus knew that yet another moral code wasn’t going to fix the world, and maybe that explains his determination to fix the world by dying for it on a cross.
And maybe Paul’s great insight was that Jesus’s death somehow made it possible for God to just dismiss all charges against the world and everyone in it – possible for God to offer righteousness “given though faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe” (Rom. 3:22), righteousness so complete and permanent that there remains “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1), and that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).
Now that right there is some actual good news. Not coincidentally, it’s also some actual Gospel.
