Love Your Enemies (Epiphany 7C)

 

Love Your Enemies; Pray for Them

Epiphany 7C

Parish Church of St Luke, Grants Pass Oregon

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SPC, Ph.D.

Genesis 45:3-11, 15; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50; Luke 6:27-38; Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42

23 February 2025

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

  

The best sermon I ever heard in my life was given at a house Church in Beijing China.  It was on the text “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

 

During a short-lived period of social openness in China prior to the June 4, 1989 crackdown, local Chinese had begun attending services with expatriates. After the Tian’anmen Massacre, the Chinese security apparatus was brought to bear on Beijing’s Christians. Old rules that had remained on the books forbidding Chinese nationals from attending “foreign” worship services started to be enforced with a vengeance: I remember seeing neat little rows of cigarette burn scars on the back of a fellow congregant just released after two weeks of interrogation by security agents who had arrested him leaving our Sunday service. We finally had no choice but to submit: the Chinese and foreigners in our congregation would have to go their separate ways. 

 

One of the Chinese members of our congregation spoke at the last service we held together. He started his sermon by noting that separate worship would be hard, since “gathering together each week is like drawing individual pieces of firewood together, to make a blaze that can warm us through the week.”  But we had to forgive and love those who were forcing us to break apart our community.    

 

He went on, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, Jesus says. I have always thought that this was a little over-dramatic, for why should Christians have enemies? But I see now that having enemies in life is how life is.  So why love them?  If I could be so bold (at this, he looked nervously at the walls, which we all knew contained listening devises), I think we find an answer to that in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.” 

 

“Solzhenitsyn was in a Soviet labor camp, tortured almost daily to denounce friends, more and more dehumanized by his torment.  But then he regains his Christian faith and begins the long road to true freedom, even within that system.  This was when he realized that no matter how tightly his interrogators constrained him, he always had a choice—though they always eventually could force him to say whatever they wanted, he could do so willingly or unwillingly, cheaply or expensively in terms of the suffering they gave him. 

 

“This made him realize that his tormentors too were constrained to do what they did--if they didn’t torture him, they’d be the ones being tortured.  But they too had a choice in how they did what they were forced to do, brutally or with some empathy. In a system where all were compromised victims, he realized this great truth:  the line between good and evil is not found between one country and another country, between one economic class and another, between one political party and another, between one religion or another, or one race and another.  The line between good and evil, he says, is fine but very definite, and runs down the middle of each and every human heart.  It is found in that space of the heart where we exert our choices, no matter how constrained our choices may be. 

 

“So Solzhenitsyn realized that he needed to pray for his torturer, and for all of God’s creatures, even Stalin. This was the turning point in Solzhenitsyn recovering his humanity.  And that is why I believe I too must pray for my enemies, even Premier Li Peng, who imposed martial law, and all who ordered and carried out the mass murders on the streets of Beijing. They, like us, are in God’s image, and have that line down the middle of their hearts, no matter what decisions they may have made before, no matter how distorted the image of God may have become in them or us. 

 

“We must pray not that they be like us, not that they come over to our side and choose what we wish they would, but that God help them to do not what I want them to, but simply to choose the good in their hearts and not the evil. We pray that they might become what God created them to be, not what we think they should be.  We do this because we share with them in our hearts the capacity to do great evil or great good.  Without such a belief in my solidarity with all my fellow creatures, even those who persecute me and what I believe is good, I would not have hope that God might work his miracles in my own wayward heart.” 

 

Again, the best sermon I ever heard. 

 

Is the call to love our enemies and pray for them, to not fight against them, a command that we be submissive victims and simply let evil pass without a response?  I think not.  Matthew’s version of this saying preserves many details that give a clue to what the historical Jesus meant here. 

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not fight back against an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. … Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on both the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”  (Matt 5:38-39)

 

Jesus here starts by quoting the Torah that vengeance or punishment for harm inflicted be just, that it never exceed the original harm. You could put out the eye of someone who had put someone else’s eye out (an "eye for an eye") but not take their life.  But Jesus says that in order to enjoy fullness of life, we should be more than merely just, but more like God, who blesses both the righteous and the wicked.

 

Theologian Walter Wink notes a crucial detail in Matthew’s text—“if someone strikes you on the right cheek.”  In that society, you interacted with others only with your right hand. So mentioning the fact that it is the right cheek that is being struck implies a haughty overlord giving a brutal but dismissive backhanded blow to a social inferior.  Jesus says “Don’t strike them back.  Instead, stand up tall and turn, forcing them to use their open palm on your left cheek, a much less demeaning blow than the backhanded one they started with.”  In Chinese terms, we would have added—“thus making them lose face.” 

 

Like the Mahatma Ghandi’s idea of Satyagraha, or Truth Force, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful resistance, both developed from this very saying of Jesus, the goal of this offering the right cheek is to overwhelm the evildoer by exposing evil through a show of goodness. 

 

Matthew’s Jesus uses a second example. “If a creditor sues you for your outer garment, give him your inner garment as well.”  The outer garment was used for warmth and as a cover at night.  The inner garment could be worn without shame in public, though there were no underclothes beneath it.   By saying “throw in your tunic as well,” Jesus was saying to strip naked before the creditor, shaming him before all and revealing the true dynamic of the exploitative system of the uber-wealthy forcing small farmers off their land.  

 

The third example Jesus gives is being compelled to carry baggage for the Roman Army.  The Roman legion had the legal right to require local people to carry their substantial baggage. But this had touched off anti-Roman riots when large groups of people thus impressed found themselves far from home at the end of the day.  So standing orders were issued limiting the length of impressment to only one mile.  “If they force you to carry baggage a mile, walk on another mile as well.”  One can imagine the incongruous situation of soldiers, afraid of breaking regulations and being punished, begging with a head-strong follower of Jesus to please lay down his load after the allowed 1,000 steps.  

 

Jesus did not teach his followers to be docile and submissive victims of abuse.  If that were so, one of the few historical facts that we actually know with certainty about his life—his execution at the hands of the Roman authorities—makes little sense.  If he taught gentle submission to all authority, even abusive authority working against God’s purposes, it is highly unlikely the Romans would have crucified him:  this death was reserved for those found guilty of sedition and rebellion, a charge implied by the title they fixed over Jesus on the cross, “King of the Jews.”   Had Jesus simply taught submission, the Romans would have let him pass him as useful fool who unwittingly helped them in rural pacification programs. But they didn’t!  They put him to death for disturbing the order of things, for subverting the Empire in sayings just like these. 

 

Jesus says love your enemies in complete honesty about them and us. We are all God’s creatures and all bear God’s image, no matter how we may have twisted it. This includes our enemies. He says we are all in this together even if they don’t recognize this. God loves us, each and every one. So we must learn to love each other.  Not pretend to love each other.  Not be passive aggressive as we shame and despise each other.  Not silently disengage and passively submit, detached, from the abuses others subject us to.  But love.  And love as God loves, which means sometimes being a pain in the neck and almost always means  challenging the beloved enemy in ways that allows them to choose the right that is there in their heart.  Loving our enemies means treating them as we would be treated, cutting them the slack we would want them to cut us, being as honest about our own faults as we want them to be about theirs. 

 

It is not an easy path.  Some of our own may judge us for loving our enemies, for not openly confronting and shaming them, or even violently fighting them.  You are enabling the wicked, they say. But Jesus says you are just trying to emulate God’s compassion.  Suffering from such in-house abuse is what it means whewn Jesus says we will be persecuted for sake of Jesus’ name.

 

In a world of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, however just, we all just may end up blind and toothless.  That is why we must learn to forgive, even as we must hold each other to account.  This is why we must learn not to judge, not to label, lest the other side do the same thing to us.    This is what Jesus taught, and still teaches today. 

 

Thanks be to God.  Amen. 

 

God at Work where We Least Expect (Epiphany 6C)

 

God at Work where We Least Expect

Homily delivered for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
16 February 2025

8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)

Jeremiah 17:5-10; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26; Psalm 1

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

What would the Beatitudes look like if they were written to reflect the values we see in the popular culture around us?

 

"Blessed are the wealthy; whoever dies with the most toys wins. 

Blessed are the young; dying young beats rusting and growing old. 

Blessed are the fashionable, for they can look down on others. 

Blessed are celebrities; they are the beautiful people.

Blessed are the hip; they can be ironic without losers getting the joke.

Blessed are the thin; they are never the butt of fat jokes,

Blessed are the powerful, for they can totally have their own their way.  

Blessed are the well armed, for they can stand their ground.

Blessed are the violent, because no one messes with them."  

 

Jesus’ beatitudes suffer from our familiarity with them.  We hear their first words and quickly lapse into a warm feeling of devotion and stop listening.   Like the people at the back of the crowd in the Monty Python film, we hear only bits and pieces, and at the end smile and say, “oh, that’s nice … blessed are the cheesemakers. Good chaps, they.”

 

We think the beatitudes are moral targets, the way Jesus wants us to be: be-attitudes.  Not so!  Beatus in Latin means “blessed.”  A beatitude is just a phrase that starts with the word “blessed.”  Another word is macarism, because in Greek they begin with the word makarios, blissful or happy. 

 

Jesus’ society, like ours, praised certain things, and called certain people happy or blessed.  But Jesus turns these on their head.  “It’s a good thing to be hungry, it’s a good thing to be poor, it’s a good thing to mourn, a good thing to be excluded.”  Really?

 

The beatitudes are in both the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  We are more familiar with them as they appear in Matthew, given the fact that it is the first of the gospels in our modern Bibles.  The ones in Luke’s Gospel that we read today are less familiar. As a result, they jump to us out more clearly: 

 

“Blissful are you who are destitute,
    for the reign of God belongs to you.
Blissful are you who are now starving,
    for you will be fully fed.
Blissful are you who are now sobbing,
    for you will once again roar in laughter.
Blissful are you when people hate you,
    and when they exclude and insult you,
    and cast out as evil on account of all that I am,
    because you stood with this Human Child…

But wretched are you who are rich,
    for you are already receiving your consolation.
But wretched are you who are fully sated now,
    for you will go starving.
Wretched are you who now laugh,
    for you will grieve and sob. 
Wretched are you when everyone speaks well of you,
    for it was just in this way that their ancestors treated false prophets.”

(Luke 6:20-26, The Ashland Bible)

 

Obviously, whatever it was that the historical Jesus said, it troubled his followers.  Both Matthew and Luke interpret these sayings in very different ways.

 

Matthew “spiritualizes” them, turning “hungry” into “hungry for righteousness,” and “poor” to “poor in spirit.”  Jesus just can’t be talking about the literally poor or hungry can he?  The sayings become a series of moral prescriptions, part of a New Law announced by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount:  a New Moses coming down from Sinai.

 

In contrast, Luke adds a “now” to each misfortune marked as “blessed,” and adds a “then” phrase of how God will turn it around in the future.  These are not moral nostrums, but affirmations of how God will straighten things out.  Luke also adds woes to counterbalance the macarisms.  He puts all in the second person, “blessed are (or woe to) you,” aiming them at us, part of Luke’s story of faith and grace in everyday life.  Appropriately, in Luke they are not part of a Sermon on the Mount (of God) as in Matthew, but of a Sermon on the Plain (of ordinary life). 

 

This is more than a simple “Happy are they who,” or “How blessed are they who…”   The idea is more like “How favored by God (or honored) are the ones who.”  “Woe to those who” is more like “Shame on those who,” or “How outside God’s grace are those who…” 

 

Jesus turns conventional views on their head.  Some things, let’s admit it, are just bad:  starvation, hardship, sorrow at a loved one’s death, social exclusion.   Some things are just good: having enough food and money to provide for yourself and family, being well.  But Jesus is not so sure. 

 

It’s easy to think that God blesses good people with good things and punishes bad people with bad things.  But Jesus knows that bad things can happen to the good and that the evil can prosper.  He says, “You misunderstand what a blessing or a curse is. Things are not as they appear.” 

 

Announcing the coming of God’s reign, Jesus sees God at work exactly where we expect not to find him: hunger, yearning, dependence, and vulnerability are all signs of God’s active presence and saving work, not marks of God’s curse or punishment.

 

It is important, profound theology.  He is not making light of suffering, or saying, “it’s not all that bad.”   He knows that hunger, grinding poverty, misery, deprivation, grief, and deadly exclusion inflicted on marginalized people are all truly intolerable and not what God wants.   He is not trivializing suffering, but magnifying grace.   God is the answer to, not the source, of horror.

 

Isaiah 45:15 says “Truly you are a God who hides himself, the God and Savior of Israel.”  St. Thomas Aquinas draws from this to develop his doctrine of Deus Absconditus, the Hidden God.   God by definition is hidden, but if you have faith in God, it is God whom you must wholly trust. Martin Luther later places this in the context of a larger doctrine of Grace.  The basic idea is “God’s nature is to be at loving work where we least expect.”

 

Horror, Evil, in the world is not evidence that God does not exist.  Rather, the fact that we revolt against it and find it intolerable is one of the strongest evidences of God.  Our idea of justice and right cannot grow merely from this messed up world we live in.  Rather, it comes from God himself, imprinted in the creation of God bearing God’s image, written in our hearts.  Immanuel Kant expresses this when he says that he finds evidence for God not just in how the stars are moved above, but also in how our hearts and minds are moved.  

 

Buddhism teaches that all suffering comes from attachment; getting rid of all desire will end suffering.   Christianity teaches that while we must learn acceptance and patience, it is all right to feel the discomfort and pain caused by need and dissatisfaction with wrong.  In fact, it is essential because God is at work in such need and discomfort.  

 

Each of the macarisms includes dissatisfaction: hunger, grief, need.  Mourning is unhappiness at the loss of a loved one, not a state of relief or acceptance.  Neediness and hunger do not describe satisfaction, but desire for something beyond what we now have. 

 

Reinhold Niebuhr's great "Serenity Prayer" is misnamed.  It is not a prayer only for serenity to accept the things we cannot change.  It also prays for courage to change the things we can.  It also asks for wisdom to know to distinguish between the two.  

God at work in the day-to-day things of life, even its horrors, is a key idea in Jesus’ preaching, his announcement that “God’s Reign is in your midst.” 

 

If we put the idea into modern words and references, we see the point.  It should shock us into recognition of God at work in all sorts of situations where we normally only see horror: 

 

God favors those with AIDS; he is at their bedside and in their prayers.   

God favors outcasts, because he was an outcast.    

God favors the homeless, because he himself is shelter. 

God favors the abused, because he himself was abused.

God favors undocumented aliens, because he was one of them.

God favors trans people, because few recognized him for his true self. 

God favors “losers” because he turns tables on everyone.

God favors the addicted, because he relieves them of cravings and obsessions.

God favors the solitary, because he brings them into community and family. 

God favors “nobodies,” because he knows them each by name. 

God favors women, because she knows what they go through. 

 

Shame on you who have big houses, because you mistake them for your true home. 

Shame on you celebrities, because you are already being forgotten.

Shame on you powerful, because you must struggle to maintain power, and your fall will be great. 

Shame on you Empires, because you are going bankrupt fighting your wars.

Shame on you righteous, because everyone knows your secret sins. 

Shame on you fashion plates, because you will have to go naked.

Shame on you brilliant minds, because senility awaits us all. 

Shame on you beautiful people, because you will grow ugly and die like everyone else.

 

So what applies here to us?  First, God expects us to be dissatisfied with things that are just plain wrong.  We should be part of the social and moral conscience of our peer group, our colleagues, and our age.  Next, God expects us to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.  God’s grace must work through us.  Third, in our prayer life and meditation, we must more fully empathize with those suffering, and redouble our efforts at the corporeal acts of mercy and organizing for social justice to alleviate hunger, poverty, persecution, and disease. 

 

“You think I’ve gotten things upside down?” Jesus says.  “Look around you and tell me who is getting things backward.”  Notice the work of God exactly where we least expect, blissfulness in the settings we are taught are least to be desired.  Then help bring blissfulness for those we are least inclined to help.   

In the name of Christ.  Amen

 

Glory in Creation (Epiphany 5C)

 

Marc Chagall, The Calling of Isaiah

Glory in Creation

Homily delivered for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
9 February 2025

11:00 a.m. Holy Eucharist
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)

Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11; Psalm 138

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

We all know the song of the seraphs around God’s throne recounted in today’s Hebrew Scriptures lesson, because it echoes in the Sanctus, part of the canon of the Mass we celebrate each week: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts.  Heaven and earth are full of your glory.”  The Hebrew’s stately rhythms resonate with the scene of the Holy of Holies of the Temple with its shaken pillars and clouds of incense smoke: Qadosh, qadosh, qadosh, Adonai tsebaoth.  Melo’ kol ha’arets kevodo.  Robert Alter, in his magisterial translation of the whole Hebrew Scripture, renders the verse, accurately, as follows:  “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Armies, the fullness of all the earth is His glory.” 

 

Qadosh:  separate, special, holy.  Kavod: weightiness, gravitas, honor, or brilliant light.   The idea is that God is separate, unique, and apart, holy, and that thrice over. What makes God noticeable, resplendent, and brilliant, however, is God’s creation itself.  The idea is not that God’s glory is apart from all creation, invading it somehow and filling it.   The idea is that the whole of creation, the handiwork of God, itself is God’s glory.  

 

Blessed Ireneaus of Lyons, the great second century theologian who was one of the first Church fathers to write in Latin as well as Greek, said “Gloria Dei est vivens homo” “God’s glory is a living human being.”  We often hear this expressed “The glory of God is a human being, fully alive.”  Irenaeus means that God’s brilliance is not ultimately found out there, in the angel choirs or seraphic dance, but here, in that part of creation made in God’s image, a living breathing human being. 

 

Seeing the glory of God in our human lives should not be an alien idea for us, since we affirm the incarnation of God, God taking on flesh and becoming truly human in Jesus, as part of our creeds. Seeing the glory of God as all of creation itself is also not foreign:  most of us have experienced awe and wonder at the beauty, complexity, and balance of the natural world around us.    This is the idea behind the great canticle from the Greek Additions to Daniel, Benedicite Omnia Opera Domini, which is chanted every Saturday in Morning Prayer, whose verses on the winter cold are particularly apt this morning:  "Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, drops of dew and flakes of snow.  Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, praise him, and highly exalt him forever."  

 

What becomes tricky is this:  when we look to see the glory of God in our cranky, bothersome, and worried selves, in us when we are not our best, not our loveliest.  It is harder still, I think, when we seek to see the image of God in us and in those about us when what we see before us is clearly broken, twisted, and lame.  

 

That is where all the other passages in today’s lectionary come in:  Isaiah sees the splendor of God, and immediately bewails his failings, his shortcomings, where he does not measure up.  Paul recounts the wonder preached by those who went before him—Christ died for our sins, was raised, and appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, then to James and the apostles, then to more than 500 at a single event.  When he comes to the risen Lord’s appearance to Paul himself, all he can talk about is how monstrous it was, how untimely, given his own failings, “the least of the apostles,” indeed!   In today’s Gospel, after the miraculous draft of fish, Peter recoils, “Get away from me, Jesus!  I am a sinful man!”    It is hard to see God in us when we note how far we are from the splendor of God.  

 

But that is where the Psalm teaches us: it is gratitude and thankfulness for God’s gracious acts to us that give us eyes to see we indeed are in God’s image, we are indeed God’s glory:  

 

“I will give thanks to You, Yahweh, with all my heart;

It is Your praise that I will sing even before other gods.

Toward Your Holy Temple I will bow down;

Your name I will praise.  

All because of Your love and steadfastness.

For You live up to Your name, Being Itself,

and You do what you say no matter what.  

I called You, and You answered me;

You strengthened me from within…

Though Yahweh is over all, God looks after the lowly.

And from afar God sees the haughty for what they are.  

Though I walk through troubles all about, You keep me safe;

You stretch forth Your hand against my raging enemies.  

Your right hand shall save me.

Yahweh will come through for me;

Yahweh, your love lasts forever.  

You do not abandon us, the works of your hands.” (The Ashland Bible)

 

Accepting our limitations, confessing our brokenness, is key in seeing the image of God in us, in perceiving glory here where we did not think it was.  Not that the brokenness is the image of God, but that such honesty, coupled with grateful hearts, helps us distinguish between flaws and pain and the underlying goodness.  We thus perceive the glorious brightness of the Creator in us and all about us.  

 

At the end of the Priestly story of creation in Genesis 1, we read: “God saw everything God had made: how very good it was!”  We are part of that.  Scripture here teaches clearly: we are God’s beautiful and good creatures.  We are in the image and likeness of God.  The Psalter teaches we are but a little lower than the gods.  Original Blessing—the basic goodness at the heart of humanity—is scriptural teaching. God’s image is woven throughout our nature, no matter how we may have broken or twisted it.  If it were somehow pulled out of the warp and woof of our beings, we would, simply, unravel.  The whole of creation is the Glory of God.  A Human Being, alive, is the Glory of God.  Original blessing is scriptural.  

 

But then so is the seeming universal tendency we all have toward brokenness.   Genesis chapter 2 is often called “the Fall of Adam and Eve” but it is most definitely NOT history.  Modern biblical scholarship and theology are unanimous that when we read scripture paying due attention to the literary forms it uses, it is clear that Genesis 1-11 contains origin myths and legends.  Genesis 2 is about ha’adam, Hebrew for “the Human Being,” or Every Man and Every Woman, on occasion translated as "Adam."  It is about each and every one of us, and the predicament we find ourselves in regarding evil, sin, and knowing the difference between good and bad.  The sin of Adam and Eve is not a historical event, but an image for how things are for each one of us.  To see evidence for it, don't look into fossils or old books.  Look into a mirror.  

 

We often lose sight of this because of the historicized way these stories are commonly read, a process helped along by the rhetorical flourishes you can see in such places as Romans 5. But even here, note that Paul says Adam passed sin to his descendants “because all have sinned,” not “so that they all sin,” or “be punished for a sin not theirs.”   Augustine and Calvin’s doctrine of Original Sin, a permanent condition of being in rebellion against God that is sexually transmitted from one generation to another, is just wrong.  It makes the error of denying the underlying goodness and glory in creation, in the human person.  They compound the error when they couple their doctrine of universal human depravity with a twisted idea of an angry God thirsty for blood and the Cross as God’s intentional infliction of pain on Jesus as a transferred punishment.  This is not scriptural at all.  But the idea of gratitude opening our eyes to God’s glory in us is scriptural.  And it is all the more powerful when our gratitude is for the love of God shown in God becoming truly human, human enough to suffer along with us unjust death on the cross at the hands of Empire.  

 

Other scriptures try to account for a glorious and good creation, including us, that still harbors brokenness.  The story of the flood in Genesis 9 says that every human heart mysteriously seems to have an urge to be bad, a yetser hara‘, despite our being in God’s image.    In Genesis 1, not all the commands of God in creation are perfectly reflected in the nature that results, especially if you read this in the original Hebrew.  “‘Let light be,’ commands God; ‘Light there was,” comes back the report.  This is not ham-fisted editing: whoever put this story together knew exactly what they were doing.  ‘Let the grass be grass,’ God tells the earth.  But the earth does not.  It ‘puts forth’ grass.  The created order is slightly disobedient from the start.”  Of the eight “let there be” orders in creation, only “Let there be light” is implemented exactly (Charles Foster, The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin [Hodder & Stoughton, 2009] pp. 132-33). 

 

Seeing the glory of God in ourselves as we get older is a special challenge: we often let regret for lost abilities and health make us deaf to that call of God in our hearts. But here too gratitude is the key.  Thanks for the good we have been and seen, and thanks for what we are still able to enjoy. 

 

Teillard de Chardin was one of the great anthropologists and theologians of the early 20thcentury.  He was one of the discoverers of the Peking Man pre-human fossils and the author of The Phenomenon of Man, one of the great progressive theological efforts to place Christian faith in the context of modern science.  Teilhard died in 1955 at the Jesuit House in New York City.  He died after a long degenerative dementia.  When he first encountered its early signs and knew that he was going to lose the intellectual skills that he so valued, he wrote the following prayer.  It expresses very well the interplay of fear and trust, of hope and faith in old age’s illness.  

 

When the signs of age begin to mark my body

(and still more when they touch my mind);

 

when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off

strikes from without or is born within me;

 

when the painful moment comes

in which I suddenly awaken

to the fact that I am ill or growing old;

 

and above all at that last moment

when I feel I am losing hold of myself

and am absolutely passive within the hands

of the great unknown forces that have formed me;

 

in all those dark moments, O God,

grant that I may understand that it is you

(provided only my faith is strong enough)

who are painfully parting the fibres of my being

in order to penetrate to the very marrow

of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

 

 Siblings in Christ, the whole of creation, including us, is the Glory of God.  When we call upon God, when we recognize out brokenness, God hears us and calls back.  And when God calls us, we hear God.  We see the glory.  We perceive the beauty and the love.  Gratitude and thanks are what opens our ears and eyes.  

 

Thanks be to God.

 

Love's Near Enemy (Epiphany 4C)

 

Love’s Near Enemy
Homily delivered for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Feast of the Presentation

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
2 February 2025

9:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist 
Parish Church of St Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

“Love is not jealous.”

 

This line at the beginning of the Hymn to Love, today’s epistle, is part of a joke, a pun, by St. Paul.  Paul introduces the hymn by using the very same word "jealous," when he says “Earnestly desire (literally, “be jealous for”) the higher gifts” (1 Cor 12:31). He repeats the verb in resuming his letter after the hymn with the words, “Make love your aim, earnestly desire (or: be jealous for) the spiritual gifts” (1 Cor 14:1).    

 

So which is it Paul, should we be jealous or not? 

 

The problem of course, is that the word zelo’o means both zealous and jealous.  Its root meaning is deep attachment, connection, or engagement.  It means a sharp desire.  If this is a desire to take on something or someone that is not yet ours, it often is translated as “strive for,” or “earnestly seek.”  This can slide into “envy” if the thing desired already belongs to someone else.  If this desire is to keep something or someone that is already ours, it often is translated as “jealous.” 

 

The Hebrew word we often translate as “jealous” has a similar semantic range.  Thus “The Lord your God is a jealous God” does not mean so much “is overly touchy about his privileges and status, and domineering in the extreme” but rather, “is passionately engaged and committed.” 

 

Paul with this little pun is saying strong desire is a good thing, except when it isn’t.  His hymn to love tries to give us an idea of where the lines are drawn.  I translate the core of this passage as follows:

 

“What is love?  When you love someone, you are patient and kind with that person.  You are not jealous of those you love, and you don’t try to show them up.  You don’t talk down to them, or act rudely toward them.  You don’t try to have your own way at their expense, nor do you get annoyed or resentful at them.  … When you love someone, you put up with whatever they do, you trust whatever they say, you hold every hope for them, and you are willing to endure anything for them.  When you love, you never stop loving.” 

 

Buddhist teaching is very clear about the issues raised here.  It sees each virtue as having a polar opposite, as well as a closely related opposite that mimics but falsifies the virtue.  The polar opposite is called a “Far Enemy” of the virtue, while the distortion that mimics the virtue is called its “Near Enemy.” 

 

In standard Dharma teaching, the divine emotions all have polar opposites as well as false imitations. 

 

Loving-kindness is selfless good will and love for others.  Its polar opposite, obviously, is hatred or ill-will.  Its near enemy looks like love, but is distorted and sick:  it is selfish attachment or the so-called “love” that seeks to control exclusively and establish dependence. 

 

Compassion is empathy and sympathy for others.  Its far enemy is cruelty.  Its near enemy is pity.  Where compassion looks on a suffering person as an equal, pity looks down on the sufferers, sees them as inferiors. 

 

Joy in others is opposed by resentment or envy, while its near enemy is mere exuberance in social settings. 

 

Equanimity is the ability to see and feel about yourself as you see and feel about others, and is what I would call humility.  Its polar opposite is envy or jealousy while its near enemy is simple indifference, not caring about yourself or others. 

Paul argues here that true love is not possessive and centered on one’s own desires, but rather the desires of the beloved. 

For Paul, it is a grievous error to say that Othello killed Desdemona because he loved her too much.  What drove Othello was not love, but a desire to possess, a desire further twisted into murderous jealousy by Iago.  Iago himself is driven by envy and thwarted desire: at the opening of the play he swears revenge on Othello for promoting an Army colleague to a position for which he had hoped.  He poisons Othello with his own venom of envy and jealousy.
 
Paul is saying we must keep a clear distinction in our minds between love and its near enemies: envy or jealousy, and conditional, demanding, and self-centered sexual and emotional attachment. 
 
The boundary between love and its near enemies is implicit in today’s Gospel reading.  Jesus preaches at Nazareth, his home town.  One would expect him to be welcomed warmly, due to the affection, a minor type of love, we tend to have for one “of our own.” 

The villagers start out with affection, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”  But they expect Jesus to bring honor to the group, fame (and perhaps commerce) to the community.  So when he is unwilling to perform in his own home, they turn against him.  They know, perhaps, of his irregular conception and quickly turn the reference to Joseph into an accusation of illegitimacy.

Jesus’ teaching of mission—of going out to strange places and people to do God’s acts of love—is coupled with his view that the great prophets worked some of their greatest miracles with strangers and foreigners.  He notes that Elijah gave miraculous food not to good Israelites, but a woman in a pagan village.  It was not good Jews that Elisha cured, but the Syrian leper Na’aman. 

The Nazareth villagers’ familiarity with this native son does not grow into attachment and loyalty, but breeds contempt. Affection for a home-boy turns to murderous rage when it doesn’t deliver the goods they earnestly desire.   Like Othello for Desdemona or Frankie for Johnnie, their emotion is not love, but its near enemy:  a will to possess and dominate based in desire-fulfilment. 

Philosopher Rene Girard identified most of our socially generated evils with what he called mimetic desire: the urge to acquire what others have, or be what others are.  Our tendency to scapegoat is one expression of this:  we try to bond and become one with those we envy by defining others out, laying on them the fault of our not having what we envy, often blaming them with our own faults, especially those we can’t admit to ourselves, driving them outside of our “community” thus created, and then assaulting them with the very things we fear, the reasons for our wanting to imitate others. 

In Aesop’s fables, there is the story of a wild donkey who envied the pasture and care given a tame donkey until, one day, she happened to come upon the tame donkey pulling a heavily loaded cart and being whipped. The wild donkey, on second thought, preferred freedom.  There are two morals that usually go with the story.  The first is wildly known:  The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, that is, something that is not ours makes us want it, regardless of whether it is actually preferable.  The second, less common is this:  Between envy and ingratitude, we make ourselves doubly miserable:  we think either that our neighbor has too much, or that we ourselves have too little.  The Chinese proverb describing the human rat race says it clearly 患得患失 huàndéhuànshī “You worry about getting stuff, then you worry about losing it.” 

Note here the hallmark of corrupt mimetic desire:  it’s a zero sum game where someone else’s gain is our loss, and our gain their loss.  It’s all about comparison for competition, not for growing together.

Even Girard admits that there is one kind of mimetic desire that is good and healthy:  when we emulate those whom we admire.  Such a desire does not seek to deprive them of that good, but simply enjoy along with them.  In “How it Works,” the introduction to the Twelve Steps of Recovery taught by AA, NA, and Alanon, we read:  “If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it – then you are ready to take certain steps: (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 58).  This is what is at heart of 12 step programs’ policy of “attraction, not promotion.”  Madeleine L’Engle described Christian evangelism in similar terms: “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”   This is the basic reason for the Church, I think:  to provide us with community in which we can see close up and personal not perfect people or unattainable good, but rather real good lived out in real lives, the blessing of opening our hearts and lives to Christ and his teaching.

 

Again, as Paul teaches, strong desire is a good thing except when it is not.  Love of our own family, tribe, nation, and community is good, except when it is at the expense of others, of outsiders.  In a world where we are all in this together, there is little room for exclusion and stingy hoarding of resources.  There is absolutely no room for demonizing and dehumanizing others.  The solidarity Jesus calls us to fosters the common good, equal opportunity, welcoming of diversity and equity among people and nations, and peace in the world.  It is at the heart of what it means to be human, since we humans are essentially social beings, not isolated monads.  It is more than a vague feeling of compassion, common cause, or shallow sympathy.   It is in fact a commitment to our common life, a sign that we accept responsibility for each other. 

 

We should earnestly desire, strive for, the spiritual gifts of faith, hope, and love even while we confess that love is not jealous or envious.  We should desire and strive for the authentic good, the real thing.  “And the greatest of these is love.”  

In the name of God, Amen.