Last week we were asked to recognize that the starting point for our Christian life is our relationship with God. This week Jesus spells out what that relationship implies (Luke 6:27-38).
At present there are many people who claim to live a Christian life but there seem to be a very wide range of ideas about what that means. Today’s gospel lays it out as clearly as one could possibly ask for. To some who say “Let’s bring God back into our lives” we might be entitled to respond:
Stop judging and you will not be judged.
Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
The problem with this response is that it places us in same position as those we might wish to criticize – the position of telling others how they should behave. We are entitled to criticize actions that we believe are unjust, and indeed we are required by our faith to do so, but the judging, condemning and even forgiving is God’s business. So maybe we are better to focus on the first part of what Jesus says:
love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
To the person who strikes you on one cheek,
offer the other one as well,
and from the person who takes your cloak,
do not withhold even your tunic.
Again it is easy to weaponize this (to use a favorite word of the moment) against those that we see as failing to follow these instructions, but Jesus is calling on his disciples (us) to do this, ourselves. He is not providing a battle cry to use against others. And what he asks is not easy! So we might rather have sympathy for those that fail.
When those in power claim the mantle of Christianity but devise policies that run directly counter to these commands then we can cry hypocrisy, but our power lies more in living the life Jesus taught us to, than in criticizing those that fail to. As we stand with the poor, the distressed, the hated (the blessed, as Jesus called them in our reading last week) we can hope their blessings will spill over and we may attempt the impossible: to love our enemies.