This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 2/23/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Luke 6:27-38. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
In our Quakerism 101 class this week, Dorothy Kakimoto asked us: “What about the Bible scares you?” One of us answered that what scared her most about the Bible was the passage I’m going to be preaching on today.
I agree. This morning we’re listening to Jesus in his brief but powerful “Sermon on the Plain,” and he has laid out a deep challenge for us.
I find passages like this one to be the hardest to preach on, because Jesus is so straightforward in his message. You know, if we were reading a long passage from Isaiah, I’d give a lot of historical context and maybe dive into the meaning of certain Hebrew words. If we were reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, I could spend a long time picking apart Paul’s use of a certain word or phrase in Greek, and how it related to the wider world of classical philosophy. But when I read these words of Jesus, they cut me to my heart.
It’s so obvious what Jesus is saying to us here. I find myself resonating with the fact that Jesus gave this discourse on a plain – a clear, level place: In this passage, Jesus catches us out in the open. There is nowhere to hide from his message. We may not want to listen, but we know what he means when he speaks to us.
Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, to pray for those who mistreat us.
It’s interesting to me that Jesus begins this passage with the words, “But to you who are listening I say…” What is the “but” referring to? In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeatedly says, “you have heard it said… but I say to you.” In each of these cases Jesus is contrasting the law of Moses with an even more challenging call to love. But here in the Sermon on the Plain, it’s not clear to me what prior law or standard Jesus is contrasting his teaching with.
My best guess is that the “but I say to you” here is referring not to the law of Moses, but to basic common sense. Everybody knows you don’t love your enemies; they’re enemies! All of us know, from early childhood on, that we are supposed to treat our friends well, because we can count on them to treat us well in return. But for the people who treat us poorly, who do bad things, who are not trustworthy, we at the very least treat them with suspicion, if not with retribution.
That’s the way of the world. The way of nature. We might even say, the way of justice. When people do good things, they should receive good in return. But when they do evil things, they should be punished. That seems obvious.
But the way of the Kingdom of God breaks through our sense of what is obviously true and just. Here in his Sermon on the Plain, Jesus tells us: “You feel deep in your bones that enemies are to be crushed and friends are to be supported, but to you who are listening I say: Love everybody. Treat everybody well. Give your enemies your extra jacket on a cold day. Be kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Why? Because that’s how God is. He has been kind and generous to you, despite all the ways you’ve broken his heart and hurt other people.”
“Love your enemies,” Jesus teaches us. Pray for them. Give to them. Care for them. Forgive them. Don’t set yourself up as judge over them; don’t condemn them. Why? Because the same judgment that you use will be applied to you. And you don’t want that, because God knows the ways you’ve fallen short.
Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. If someone slaps you, turn the other cheek. If they rob you, offer them the stuff they forgot to steal. Give to beggars and don’t call the police on robbers. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
People always quote this last one. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s the Golden Rule. But in the context of Jesus’ whole discourse here, the Golden Rule sounds a lot more intense, doesn’t it?
So often we are told that the sum of true religion is to be nice to other people. But we rarely imagine being kind to the truly wicked. It’s hard to imagine running after someone who just burglarized your house, saying, “Wait! Stop! You forgot the TV!”
In context, the Golden Rule is a much more radical statement than it seems at first glance. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? Do unto your enemies as you would have them do unto you. Do unto the haters as you would have them do unto you. Do unto others better than you would expect them to do unto you. Be outrageous in your love, returning good for evil.
Jesus is very clear here. I really don’t see any other honest way to read it. And that’s a problem, because I really don’t want to do this!
Because I’ve got enemies. I’ve got people that I think the world would be a whole lot better off without. Of course there are people that I just don’t like, or people who have hurt me and that I’d like to take revenge on. But there are also people that, as far as I can tell, are objectively causing so much pain and evil in the world that it seems like it would be justice for them to be removed from it. I feel righteous anger towards them.
Can I get an amen?
This is exactly what Jesus is warning against in the Sermon on the Plain. Jesus closes the door on righteous anger; he closes the door on judgement of other people. Because God is the ultimate judge, and God has chosen to forgive. The kingdom of God is about us becoming like God, taking on his character. Because God has forgiven us, despite all our bad decisions and selfishness, if we want to be like him, we must forgive the unforgivable.
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” I’m reminded of a parallel passage from Matthew, in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, when he says, “But I say to 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 the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”
What does it mean to be like God? It means to have the ability to judge others, but to refrain from doing so. It means to return love for hate, to return kindness for brutality.
What does that feel like, in your bones? What does it feel like to dwell in that space of non-judgement? What does it feel like to hold loving-compassion for everyone, especially those you think are the absolute worst? What does it mean to be a tree that bears the fruit of love and mercy at all times, even in the presence of those who do not deserve it?
This is hard. I have a primal rejection of Jesus’ words. There’s a part of me that says, “No! If someone is mean to me, I will be mean to them! It’s not fair that they can be mean and I have to be nice.” I can recognize this objection as being immature. It may not be easy to move past this emotionally, but intellectually I can see that I am wrong in this reaction.
I have a slightly more sophisticated way of rejecting Jesus’ call to love enemies, in which I tell myself, “No. If someone is mean to me, that’s OK. I can handle it. But I see people being cruel and violent and destructive to other people. To innocent people. To my friends and family and neighbors. I could forgive their evil to me, but this evil against others cannot stand.” In the previous case, maybe I was just being petty and self-centered, but now I am being altruistic. I must judge the evildoer, because they are hurting others!
This is a more subtle way of resisting Jesus’ words, because there is more truth in it. Our God is one of justice; he stands against the evil being done to his children. God’s intention is to transform the world and overcome evil, so that there are no more tears and no more suffering – so that we can live in peace and justice forever. So if we are to be like God, we can’t be passive in the face of evil. That’s true.
But we have to ask ourselves: how does God deal with evil? What is God’s plan of redemption? How will God make all things new and restore justice to the world? We have an answer in the life of Jesus. Jesus is the beachhead; he’s the entry point of the kingdom of God. What does his life look like? What do we learn about God’s strategy from observing Jesus?
We see that Jesus came in weakness, as a little baby born to obscure parents in an unimportant town in an unimportant region in an unimportant country. We see that he associated with people on the margins, people who were hungry for change but powerless to make it reality. We see that Jesus spoke the truth, challenged corrupt authorities, and called people into a whole new way of living. And we see that people responded to his message with violence. We became his enemies when he came to us with God’s love and truth. Jesus was a good tree, bearing good fruit, and we chopped him down.
But God vindicated Jesus by raising him from the dead, and God returned him to us, so that through his Spirit he could guide and teach us always. Why? So that we can learn to be like him. So that we can become his friends. After everything we did, after all the ways we hurt him, Jesus returns to bear more good fruit. Jesus returns to bless those who cursed him, to bring life to those who killed him.
This is the radical love that Jesus is inviting us into in his Sermon on the Plain. The call to love our enemies is not a call to passivity. It’s not a command to accept the evil that is being done in our world today. Rather, it is a call to be a consistent source of goodness, mercy, and loving-kindness. It’s a call to speak the truth without fear of the consequences. It’s a call to upset people who are evil, because the truth is against evil – but always loving them, never presuming that we are the judge.
The spirit of love and the spirit of truth are the same Spirit. The spirit that gives us the power to love our enemies is the same one that guides us to work for justice. The 20th-century prophet, Martin Luther King, knew this power when he said, “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
God has a strategy for healing the world, and it is exemplified in the cross of Jesus – God’s self-sacrificing love for enemies. This is the power of forgiveness that transforms the world, turns enemies into friends, and will free all of us from the power of hatred, violence, and selfishness.
The self-denying way of the cross, the way of enemy-love, is the entry point to the kingdom. It is the narrow gate. It is the way to life; not just for us, but for all those who suffer under the yoke of tyranny. And not just for them, but for the tyrant too. When we love our enemies, the witness of God in us speaks to the witness of God in them – even through all the layers of cruelty and delusion and hatred.
Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you.
This is the way to life.