Like Father, Like Son
Introduction: Last week on TV I saw a man talking about a criminal who had brutalized a relative of his. “I would like to beat him to a pulp,” he said, “then tie him to the back of my truck and drag him through the streets.” Recently I read about a woman whose relatives were exterminated by the Nazis in a concentration camp. She said, “I hate them with a profound hatred. I will never forgive them, ever.”
You know something? There’s a part of me that understands that kind of hatred. I know myself well enough to know that I have the capacity to feel that way. And some of you here this morning have known that kind of anger and bitterness. In fact, I suspect there are some here this morning who right now have deep and abiding resentment inside of you because of something someone has done to you, perhaps many years ago, or maybe just this past week. And the bitterness is eating your lunch. Hebrews 12:15 offers us a critical warning: “See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root (“root of bitterness” in the KJV) grows up to cause trouble and defile many.”
Bitterness always causes trouble and always defiles. You show me a bitter, resentful person, and I’ll show you someone who has lots of relationship problems—with parents, with spouse, with children, and probably with brothers and sisters in Christ.
You say, “But I have good reason to be bitter!” Stop. Do you know what you’re really saying? You’re saying, “I have good reason to sin,” or “I have good reason to destroy my life and the lives of those around me.” Because that’s exactly what you’re doing. Oh, there is such a thing as righteous anger, but when anger lingers and develops into bitterness and resentment, it is no longer righteous. It is self-destructive.
Jesus offers a different way—a way that is almost mind-boggling, so contrary is it to the natural inclination of the human heart. He challenges us, he convicts us, and he stretches us almost to the breaking point. Today’s text from the Sermon on the Mount, Luke 6:27-36, almost pushes us over the edge:
“But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ lend to ‘sinners,’ expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
As we noted last Sunday, this is from Luke’s condensed version of the Sermon on the Mount. Whereas Matthew devotes three chapters to the sermon, Luke covers it in just one. Last week we examined the Beatitudes and some Bad Attitudes, blessings and woes. The people Jesus blesses and condemns in this sermon are not the obvious saints and sinners we would think of. He seems more focused on heart attitude than he does about specific good deeds or evil deeds. Blessed are those who acknowledge their spiritual bankruptcy, who hunger for righteousness, who sorrow over sin, and who are persecuted for the sake of Jesus. Woe to those whose priorities are wealth, food, fun, and reputation, leaving God out.
If it’s possible, our text today is even more shocking that last Sunday’s. I have divided it into four simple parts so that we can try to get a handle on it: The appropriate objects of love, the guiding principle of love, the inadequate expression of love, and the motivation for love.
The appropriate objects of love: Our enemies
In Matthew’s version Jesus gives us a little more background. In his well-known style of contrasting the religious teaching common in his day with God’s view, he says in Matthew 5:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:43-45).
The Pharisees were actually pretty proud of their teaching that people should love their neighbors and hate their enemies. After all, loving your neighbor (which they interpreted as meaning any fellow-Jew) was hard enough, and lots of people didn’t even do that, so they felt they were definitely ahead of the crowd. Hating their enemies was justified on the basis that their enemies (mostly Gentiles, of course) were enemies of God. It was a small step from there to the proposition that “any enemy of God is an appropriate enemy of mine.”
But Jesus tells them they have it all wrong. They should love their enemies. And to make sure He isn’t misinterpreted Jesus mentions eight different categories of evil people, along with instruction about how love will react to each:
1. Enemies – Love them.
2. Haters – Do good to them.
3. Cursers – Bless them.
4. Mistreaters – Pray for them.
5. Strikers – Turn the other cheek.
6. Those who sue – Do not contest their efforts.
7. Beggars – Give to them.
8. Thieves – Do not demand your property back.
Wow! We are to love these kinds of scoundrels with our words, our deeds, and our prayers?!? If they curse us, we are to bless them? When a guy rolls his window down and calls you a stupid idiot for taking a parking place you didn’t even know he had his eye on, does it come to your mind to say in a kind voice, “Bless you, brother?” I must admit that’s not the first thing that comes to my mind.
Three questions plague me as I read these words: Is Jesus really serious? Is this practical, or is this even possible? Are there no limits?
Is Jesus really serious? Before we can answer these questions, I think we need to establish up front that Jesus is not talking about ordinary human “love” here. As we have noted before, there are at least four words for love in the Greek language. There is eros, which is romantic love. There is storge, which refers to natural affection or family love. There is philia, which is the love of deep friendship. And there is agape, which is love of the will. Agape is a genuine concern for someone irrespective of his or her attractiveness or of the likelihood of any reciprocation in kind. It is an attitude that says, “no matter what another person does to us we will never allow ourselves to seek anything but his highest good.” It is agape that Jesus uses here in this text.
You know, the emotional love we have for certain special people we cannot help. In fact, we speak of falling in love, by which we mean that it is something which just happens to us. But all of us who have been married any length of time know that love of that variety does not continue unabated. We wake up one morning and say, “What happened? I’ve fallen out of love!” But then, if we are believers, we move from that level of emotional love to agape love and we commit ourselves anew to seek our spouse’s highest good. Often in the process we discover that emotional love is rekindled.
Unfortunately, with our enemies we are not starting from a basis of emotional love; in fact, we may be starting from emotional hate. But we don’t have to stay there. We can dig deep into the spiritual resources provided by the Holy Spirit and allow God to love them through us. You see, Jesus is not asking us to love our enemies as we love our spouse, our children, or our dearest friend. Jesus is not asking us to enjoy being around our enemies, or to feel warmly toward them, or even to like them. To do so would be unnatural and impossible. But it is possible for us to seek anyone’s highest good, even if that person insults, mistreats, and injures us; it is possible for us to forgive them, as God has forgiven us. And if we do, we will almost always discover that our anger toward them dissipates.
So we must recognize that Jesus is asking here for a love of the will. Once we understand that, I think we can answer the question, “Is Jesus really serious?” with a firm “Yes.”
Is this practical? No, it’s not practical; in fact, it’s not even possible without the power of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. It is simply not human nature to treat one’s enemies kindly. It is human nature to hate them and to seek revenge on them. But with the Holy Spirit’s power, it can be done. Consider the following account offered by James Boice:
The black evangelist Tom Skinner was converted to Christ while the leader of the largest, toughest, teenage gang in New York City – the Harlem Lords. His conversion was so real that he left the gang the next day, turning from a life of fighting and violence to preach the Gospel. There was an immediate victory over crime and cruelty. Soon there was victory over hate and bigotry also.
Several weeks after his conversion he was playing a football game in which, as his assignment on one play, he blocked the defensive end while his own halfback scored a touchdown. As he got up from the ground to head back to the huddle, the man whom he had blocked jumped in front of him in a rage and slammed him in the stomach. As he bent over from the blow he was hacked across the back. When Skinner fell the man kicked him, shouting, “You dirty black n-word! I’ll teach you a thing or two.”
Skinner said that under normal circumstances the old Tom Skinner would have jumped up from the ground and pulverized the white man, if not actually kill him! But, instead, he got up from the ground and found himself looking the man in the face and saying, “You know, because of Jesus Christ, I love you anyway.”
Later Skinner said he even surprised himself, but he knew that what the Bible had promised was true. He was a new creature in Christ, and it was no longer necessary for him to operate on the old level of tit for tat, hate for hate, revenge and retaliation. Moreover, when the game was over and the opposing end had had some time to think about it, he came to Skinner and said, “Tom, you’ve done more to knock prejudice out of me by telling me that you loved me than you would have if you’d socked my jaw in.” [i]
I saw an amazing example of this same spirit of loving one’s enemy in our church two weeks ago. I can’t share with you the details or the individuals, and I will disguise the story slightly to protect them, but I think it should be a great encouragement to you to know that there are individuals in your midst who are living out the words of Christ in a very practical way.
I got a call from a man in our church, deeply troubled by the fact that another man in the church, whose name was not revealed to me, had stolen a significant amount of property from him. We’re talking blatant felony theft–a chargeable crime. He wanted to know what he should do about it. The situation was complicated by the fact that the perpetrator’s marriage was in deep trouble. If his spouse learned of the incident, that might spell the end of the marriage. My advice was that instead of calling the police or confronting the person in anger, he should quietly confront the other man and promise that if he returned the property nothing would be said, not even to his wife. The implication, of course, was that if you don’t, you’re in big trouble.
Now I was pretty proud of that advice—no retaliation. But I learned a few days later that the man didn’t take my advice. He decided to take Jesus’ advice instead. He called up the other guy and just asked how things were going. When his friend seemed hesitant to talk and expressed that things weren’t going too well, he asked if he could pray for him, right there on the phone. This expression of love and concern put the other man under such conviction that he broke down right on the phone and confessed to the theft. He returned everything that was stolen, and a friendship was saved, perhaps even a marriage.
That was the Sermon on the Mount acted out before my very eyes. Yes, friends, it is practical. I asked a third question:
Are there no limits to the instruction Jesus gives? I would respond by saying that while there are no limits to love, the loving response may differ from one situation to another. Sometimes it may be non-resistance; at other times it may be resistance, though never revenge. Jesus himself did not always respond to violence with absolute passivity. Perhaps you will recall that when he was on trial before the high priest, He refused to respond to the false accusations that were heaped upon Him. But, on the other hand, when He was struck by one of the soldiers for allegedly showing a lack of respect to the high priest, He objected, “If I said something wrong, testify as to what is wrong. But if I spoke the truth, why did you strike me?” (John 18:23) But Jesus did not slug the soldier back, nor did he curse at him or vow revenge, though he certainly had the power to just speak the man into oblivion.
Further, I do not believe Jesus is saying there is no point at which the Christian can use the courts (the Apostle Paul appealed his case all the way to Rome) or that we must give our hard-earned money to the professional beggar, who may well spend whatever we give him on booze or gambling. He is not encouraging a weak, complacent attitude toward evil, whereby the wicked are confirmed in their wickedness. But even when we take firm action against those who do evil, it should not be primarily to secure our own rights, our own property, or our own personal benefit; rather it should be for the sake of the honor of God plus the highest well-being of others, including the sinning one himself.
Now let’s turn out attention to verse 31, where we find the following:
The guiding principle of love: The Golden Rule
Jesus sums up his teaching on loving one’s enemy by offering what has come to be known as The Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” The Golden Rule is found in one form or another in many ancient ethical creeds, but always in a negative form. Hillel, for example, one of the great Jewish Rabbis, was asked by a man to teach him the whole law while he stood on one leg. He answered, “What is hateful to thee, do not to another. That is the whole law and all else is explanation.” When Confucius was asked, “Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?” he reportedly answered, “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” In other words, if you do not enjoy being robbed, don’t rob others. If you do not like being cursed, don’t curse others. If you do not care to be clubbed over the head, don’t club others over the head.
Now there’s nothing wrong with that as an ethical principle, and society would be a lot better than it is if everyone lived by it. But the guiding principle of love which Jesus gave is positive and goes much further. If you like being loved, love others. If you like to receive things, give to others. If you like being appreciated, appreciate others. The difference is this: it is not unduly difficult to keep oneself from hurting others, for after all, there is often the fear of their revenge to discourage us. But when we go out of our way to do to others what we would want them to do to us, there is no guarantee that they will respond in kind. It is possible that we could end up wasting some good deeds.
But Jesus is not saying that we are to do to others what we would like for them to do to us in order that they will do it to us. Rather we are to do it because it’s the right thing to do. And if it’s the right thing to do, it can’t be wasted. God will take notice even if no one else does.
In verse 32, Jesus advances his argument a step further.
The inadequate expressions of love: loving the lovely
Here he describes the ethical conduct of a great many people who call themselves Christians. They love those who love them; they repay good deeds done to them; they lend to those in need if they can be sure of getting their money back (with interest, of course). These are not bad people. These are the kind of people you would be happy to have as your neighbors. But frankly, their conduct is not uniquely “Christian” at all. In fact, it is at heart just another form of retaliation. When we retaliate for evil it is called revenge. When we retaliate for good it is called payback: “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” The evil in revenge is obvious, but the evil in payback is more subtle. Either way, retaliation is the way of the world—paying back injuries or paying back favors.
But payback will not do in the Kingdom of God! Jesus dismisses such conduct with the question, “What is the credit is such behavior?” If Christians do these things, they are doing no more than the world does. Even sinners love those who love them. Even sinners do good to those who are good to them. Even sinners lend to sinners if they can be sure they will be repaid in full. No, God expects more. “Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.” Alfred Plummer sums up the alternatives with admirable simplicity:
To return evil for good is devilish;
to return good for good is human;
to return good for evil is divine.[ii]
Finally, Jesus asks us to consider …
The motivation of love: that’s how God is.
“But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful”(Luke 6:35-36).
There is mention of reward here, as there often is in the Bible, but it is not the controlling idea. We are never urged to serve for the sake of reward, but God lets us know that reward for godly behavior is part of His plan.
The more prominent motivation is that “you will be sons of the Most High.” At first glance that almost seems to be saying that you will become sons of God by loving your enemies. But Jesus is not teaching that one earns sonship. Rather he is saying that by living out this philosophy of life the world will recognize God’s children. In other words, by loving your enemies you will demonstrateconclusively whose sons you are—sons of God, members of the heavenly family.
After all, that’s how God is: “He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.” Jesus refers here to what we call God’s common grace. He sends the rain on the just and the unjust. He grants health to the godly and the ungodly. He allows all men to enjoy nature, family life, work, success, and retirement. He does so because that’s His nature. But he also does it to draw men to Himself. He desires that they will respond to His goodness by freely entrusting their lives and their souls to Him.
If that’s how God is, Jesus argues, it’s how God’s children should be. “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” What an assignment! To imitate God! I think most of us would be tempted to throw our hands up and say, “I can’t do it.” But Jesus not only gave us instructions; He also gave us an example. This is how He lived. In 1 Peter 2:21-23, Jesus’ own lifestyle is described, preceded by this challenge:
To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.
If His Father were not trustworthy, Jesus’ refusal to retaliate would be foolish. But because His Father is trustworthy, and because His Father has promised to balance the books at the end of time, Jesus’ refusal to retaliate makes eternal sense.
The issue for all of us is eternity. God desires that all men come to Him through His Son Jesus Christ. He wants His enemies to see His Son in the loving, good, generous lives of His sons and daughters. What is at stake is not our rights, but their eternal destiny. It was the love of Christ extended to us when we were His enemies that brought us into the kingdom of God. Now that we are in, we must not forget how we got in!
Conclusion: I would like to return to a theme I have hinted at several times in this message, and that is, “I can’t do it. I’m just not able to live by this kind of standard.” And in a sense that is true. You cannot do it; but when God enters your life at the moment of conversion, a new life is created by which the new you – fed and nourished by the Spirit of God—is made capable of attaining increasingly to all God requires.
In his classic book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis offers an illustration to which all of us can relate:
When I was a child I often had a toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go to my mother—at least, not till the pain became very bad. And the reason I did not go was this: I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want. I wanted immediate relief from pain: But I could not get it without having my teeth set permanently right. And I knew those dentists; I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache. They would not let sleeping dogs lie; if you gave them an inch they took (a mile).
Now, if I may put it that way, Our Lord is like the dentist. If you give him an inch, he will take (a mile).… That is why he warned people to “count the cost” before becoming Christians. “Make no mistake,” he says. “If you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in my hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push me away. But if you do not push me away, understand that I am going to see this job through .… I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect—until my Father can say without reservation that he is well pleased with you, as he said he was well pleased with me.”[iii]
Paul agrees in Philippians 1:6: “He who hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (KJV). This Sermon on the Mount is not a human standard, it is a divine one. You can choose a human one and be judged by it. Or you can surrender to Christ, letting God enter your life and allowing him to turn you into the kind of being who really will think first of others—one who imitates Christ and reflects back to God, like a pure mirror, some of his own limitless glory, power, love, and goodness.[iv]
Like Father, like Son, like son.
Tags:
Enemies
Love
Golden Rule
[i]. James Montgomery Boice, https://olneybaptist.org/wp-content/uploads/sermons/2021/02/Matthew5.38.42.pdf.
[ii]. Alfred Plummer, https://us.langham.org/bible_studies/5-nov-2017/.
[iii]. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.
[iv]. Boice, The Sermon on the Mount, 285.