Luke 6:27-38
“But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
“If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus, Christ amen. Today we are looking at one of the more famous pieces of Jesus' sermons, similar to the one recorded in Matthew, but this one in Luke where Jesus says some difficult things. He says, Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you, to the one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also and from one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic, either. He continues with difficult sayings about being generous and loving to everybody, but especially to the people who hate us. And I thought today, rather than going out and giving you examples of what you should do and talking about these things and explaining them, these words are relatively straightforward in their meaning, instead, what I would do is tell you four stories about God's love in action, where someone loved their enemies and what happened. So I've got four stories I'm going to tell you today. The first is the most important one, where Jesus himself loved his enemies. Then we're going to talk about Joseph and then Polycarp and finally, one from our era, Reverend Henry geragh key. So let's get started with the most important person who loved his enemies, our Savior, Jesus Christ, because Jesus really is someone who loved his enemies, because his whole life was about that he came down to love people who had turned away from him. That's all of us from the very beginning, Adam and Eve became enemies of God by their sin, and so Jesus left his throne to become one of us.
We think about the cross as the great sacrifice of Jesus, but can you imagine what it would be like to go from being solely spiritual and all powerful and like having no pain or discomfort in any way, to being a baby and your diaper gets full and you can't do anything about it. And your God. His whole life was like that, being one of us and not using his almighty power to make his life just a little bit easier. He didn't turn the stones into bread when he was hungry. He didn't feed his disciples by doing miracles. He only did that with the crowds. It doesn't record laying hands on himself when he got a cold. He only did that for others. Jesus came down not to be a judge, but to be a servant and to live amongst us and take on our pains and hurts and problems, and then at the end, he loved us by going to the cross, and what a way of love that is, so we could even forget about all the miracles and all the healings and the feeding of the 5000s and the rescuing the disciples from the storm and casting out demons, and all the stuff he did to Help people just the cross alone, what a way to love the entire world, to die on the cross for our sins, and to establish a way to be connected to our Father in heaven that we could gain Eternal life. What a way Jesus loved us when he gave his body and his blood to the disciples, who only moments later, would betray Him and abandon him and claim that they never even knew him, what a love he had for them. He.
And then he sat in front of the priests and the soldiers at the Sanhedrin who told him he was a blasphemer who lied about him, and he did nothing, no lightning from heaven, no fireballs. He or when he was before Pontius Pilate, and they accused him of being an armed rebel against the Caesar, and he refused to defend himself, all it would have taken was saying, No, I didn't do that. And Pilate would have let him off, but he didn't. He allowed them to beat him with him, put the crown of thorns on his head and nail Him to the cross. And when the people teased him, he told them, do you not know that I could call 12 legions of angels to come down, and yet he didn't. In fact, he prayed for them. He said, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. And then there's a thief right next to him, someone who, moments earlier, had just made fun of him, and he the thief, turns him and says, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And he doesn't sneer. He says, today you will be with Me in Paradise. What great love, what great mercy, and he did it for you.
St Paul tells us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. You were once his enemy. You were once about to be judged, but he came to die, to forgive your sins and mine. Christ is the great one who loved his enemies, who prayed for those who persecuted, who who gave up his whole life in a way that we could never pay him back. Isn't that an amazing kind of love that Christ gives to us when we were once enemies of him, set to be judged and cast into hell forever? He died for you to give you the love that you need, so that when he returns, you will be raised from the dead to live forever with him as a brother and sister, to inherit the great glory that He now has with His resurrected body. How amazing is Christ's love for his enemies and some of those Pharisees who judged him and and hated him and teased him and insulted him became Christians after Pentecost, brothers and sisters with us. How many times has that happened that God's love has gone out to enemies and made them one with us, just as it came to you and to me. Jesus is the one who loved his enemies and showed us the power of that love going to people who don't expect it.
Our Old Testament story, the story of Joseph, shows a foreshadowing of that love, too, the love that Joseph showed his enemies, his brothers. Is an amazing kind of love, too. Only the love of Christ can do something like that. You may know the Joseph story. You may not, but it's pretty cool. Joseph, one of 12 brothers, was the favorite of his father, and so the other brothers decided that they wanted to teach him a lesson, and they did it in a pretty dramatic way.
They beat him up, threw him down a well, and sold him as a slave. That makes a civil any sibling rivalry we know of now to seem like nothing. Then they took his bloody coat and brought it back to their father and said, Joseph is dead. If that weren't bad enough, Joseph ends up working in Egypt, where he is falsely accused. Rape, then he goes to jail, and he's in the deep, dark dungeons of Pharaoh. And I can imagine our prison system is not awesome, but you can imagine that Pharaoh's was much, much worse. There he is stuck in prison, and God grants him the gift of being able to interpret dreams, and that gift then pulls him out of prison and makes him second in command in Egypt.
I don't know about you, but as I was being trundled off to Egypt, I would be thinking about my brothers a lot. As I was sitting in chains in a wet dungeon, I would probably be thinking about my brothers a lot, and when they finally came in front of me, and I am wearing Pharaoh's regalia, in charge of all of Egypt, and they stepped in front of me, I might remember all of that thinking that I had done, but not Joseph.
How crazy is that? How crazy is it that when they step foot in front of him, he remembers that he is not the judge, only God is, and he sees that God has used him to preserve Abraham's family, to keep the promise he made to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, that he would be with that family, so that during the seven years of famine, Jacob and his kids would be provided for, so that they too could Then leave for the promised land and take it over in the book of Exodus and what follows. And so Joseph forgives the brothers. He loves them with only the kind of love that can be there for people connected with Jesus, Christ and Joseph becomes a beautiful foreshadowing of the love that we receive in Christ, and he helps us to see the way that love functions when we live it up, when we forgive the people who hurt us, just as we have been forgiven in Christ.
Another great show of the love we can See in Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp was alive in the first and second century. It said that he was a disciple of the apostle John, and he was killed when he was 86 years old. Pretty old guy in the ancient world. We're not exactly sure what date that was. People suggest somewhere around 156 ad or 162 AD. The story goes that the people get all excited about the Christians. They hated us because we wouldn't worship the false gods of the Roman Empire, and what they really wanted us to do was to offer up a little bit of incense on the altar to the Caesar and say a simple phrase, Caesar is Lord, but we know that Jesus is Lord and the false gods, we cannot worship them. And so they called us atheists, and they would get all excited, because we did not worship the gods that protected the Roman Empire. And every once in a while, that would break out into a riot or a persecution, and that what was, what was going on with Polycarp.
And so the martyrdom of Polycarp records this it says the Mounted Police and horsemen set out armed with their usual weapons, as though chasing after an armed rebel and closing in on him. Late in the evening, they found him in bed in an upstairs room in a small cottage, and though he still could have escaped from there to another place, he refused, saying, may God's will be done. So when he heard that they had arrived, he went and talked with them, while those who were present marveled at his age and his. Composure and wondered why there was so much eagerness for the arrest of an old man like him. Then he immediately ordered that a table be set for them to eat and drink as much as they wished in that hour, and he asked them to grant him an hour or so that he might pray undisturbed. When they consented, he stood and prayed so full of the grace of God that for two hours he was unable to stop speaking. Those who heard Him were amazed, and many regretted that they had come after such a godly old man.
Now that's not what I would do if someone broke into my house with sword and shield and spear and said, Come with me, old man. Would you set up a table and be like, Oh, eat, eat, eat like an Eastern European grandmother, right? You haven't had enough food. There's more wine, if I can go get some if you want. What kind of crazy love is that for the soldiers that are going to drag him off to be killed in the arena? It's the kind of love that would make a soldier wonder what's going on here, the kind of love that would make a soldier think I shouldn't be doing this. This is a good man.
and as St Paul says, he burning coals on their head, and maybe even the kind of love that might plant a seed or so to wonder what makes this guy different from the ones who would fight, what kind of love is That that would make them marvel at this generosity. How many wondered at the grace of God seen in Polycarp when he loved his enemies? How many seeds were planted for the growth of the church through this man's love for his enemies?
The last story I want to tell is the story of Henry Gerecke. He's relatively famous. You may know him, but you may not also, because he's not really famous. Henry geragh was a pastor in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and a chaplain in the military during World War Two. He was chosen because, like many of our pastors, he could speak German, and so they sent him to Nuremberg during the trials. Now, those you've heard of where all the Nazi war criminals were gathered together to be tried, many of them executed. These men were bad, right? We all know how bad they are. They were responsible for the deaths of millions of people, civilians, massacred, holocausts committed the Can you imagine what it be like for Pastor Gerecke going into that prison, not only did he know the statistics and the war crimes and all the things that were in the News, as a military chaplain, he would have known individuals who were killed because of these, men, friends, compatriots, people from his home, church, nearly everybody knew someone who had died in World War Two. Can you imagine walking into that prison and wondering whether their evil would just sort of ooze off of them onto you?
If anyone deserved judgment, if anyone deserved to be outside of God's love, it was these men, if anyone could be called an enemy, it was these men. And the amazing thing is that despite his reservations and his disgust, he ministered to them faithfully, he showed them God's love. Because the amazing thing about God's love is that no one is outside of it. Every enemy can become a friend in Christ, even. Those guys, and through his work, several of them ended up taking communion, receiving absolution before they were executed. And Henry Gerecke will get up on the last day and see the Nazi war criminals rise with him as brothers in Christ. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you, to the one who strikes you on the cheek. Offer the other also and from the one who takes away your cloak. Do not withhold your tunic, either in Jesus name Amen. You. Amen.
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