What If He MEANT It?, Part 2: Be Perfect

BY DR. KEN CAMACHO

Note: This script was used for a sermon delivered at Revolution Annapolis in March 2017

 

This week, we are continuing a new series called “What If He MEANT It?” by once again looking at some of the more difficult and radical words of Jesus–words that we often tend to “water down” or rationalize–and challenging ourselves to consider the possibility that Jesus actually meant just what He said…even if what He said can be difficult to accept.

Last week, I started the series off by looking at two statements from Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount,” which is one of the most complete accounts we have of an example Jesus’s teaching. Specifically, we looked at Jesus’s challenge in that sermon to “turn the other cheek” when we suffer an attack, as well as his instruction to “love our enemies.” We concluded that these instructions, although extremely difficult for us, are nonetheless intended to push us towards a love that is more like God’s love for us. By “turning the other cheek,” we are able to act out our trust in God’s control and in His justice, and by “loving our enemies,” we are able to imitate God’s patient and forgiving love for us. After all, we have also been His enemies–we have all disobeyed Him, and we have each certainly been guilty of standing in the way of the work God is doing in our lives and in our world–and nonetheless, God has been patient with us, He has loved us, and He has invited us, over and over again, to come alongside Him in His mission to restore the world to its designed purpose. Jesus’s words, then, are certainly challenging–but they are also reminders of who God is, and how God loves, and when we choose to accept them, and even follow them, we are, as the verses we quoted last week insist, being “sons and daughters of God.”

It would appear that 1st century wardrobe options were limited.

This week, we are going to focus on a single verse, also from the Sermon on the Mount and also recorded in the fifth chapter of the book of Matthew in the Bible, which presents an almost unimaginable challenge. It comes immediately after the verses we studied last week, and it goes like this: 

Matthew 5:43-48:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Sadly, after spending the last two weeks doing research for this sermon, I am afraid I have to tell you the truth: that last sentence is not a typo. There is no way around this one: not by putting it in “historical context;” not by looking for a loophole in the verses that come before or after it; not even by looking at the original Greek, or even reverse-translating things into Aramaic or Hebrew. There are only those five words, and they mean just what they seem to mean: You therefore must be perfect. Perfect. As in, “without error.” And “You,” as in…you. You therefore must be perfect.

But what does that mean?

Well, I think we can start by crossing off a few of the things we might wish it means. One of the purposes of this series is to push back at the ways we tend to minimize what Jesus says, and so I think it is a critical step to put our excuses out there, as clearly as we can, so we can hopefully see the ways we are all guilty of misinterpreting Jesus, before we get into how we can or even should interpret him.

So, I’ll go first: when I hear Jesus say, “be perfect,” here’s what I immediately think: I think what he’s saying is do your best. 

Now, I am 35 years old. I was born in the early 1980s, and I graduated high school in the year 2000. This means that, in terms of the ways we often talk about “generations,” I fall right into a gray area between “Generation X” and the “Millennials” we are all always hearing about. So, maybe I’m not completely connected to all of those “Millennial” stereotypes, but I can at least see them from where I’m standing. And one of the most irritating knocks on Millennials, I think, is this idea that folks from this generation were raised in the age of “participation trophies.”

I literally had dozens of these.

 I think the version of this complaint we see in popular media–the same version that showed up in a million memes during the 2016 election cycle–is pretty horrifically unfair. It generally posits some version of the following argument: because Millennials were raised in a touchy-feely, hippie-nonsense age of believing “everyone is a winner,” they are incapable of handling criticism or the so-called ‘harsh realities’ of adult life. Instead, they are arrogant and full of themselves, and they just can’t understand it when things don’t go their way. Now, I think this criticism is pretty off-the-mark, and even downright offensive: I don’t think getting a participation trophy when I was in Little League has ruined my ability to understand the harsh realities of life. In fact, I’m pretty sure that even when I was 8, I understood that the tiny participation trophy I got for playing right field, and the freakin’ boss MVP trophy the kid who played short stop and batted .750 got at the end of the year picnic were not equal, and I definitely knew then that nobody, including me and even my parents, believed that kid–Randy was his name–and I were equal.

But I did get another message from that trophy, which is one I value and one I want my kids to receive one day, too: just because Randy was better than me at baseball didn’t mean that I was worthless. That little trophy was meaningful because it encouraged me to keep playing, and not to give up, which, I think, is a pretty excellent message for kids. And as far as I’m concerned, if my city or my community is going to be filled up 20- and 30-somethings who understand how to be motivated and included, I am excited about that. So, way to go Millennials! If you any of you are out there this morning, good on you! I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you stay!

Studies suggest that at least 42% of MVP trophy recipients in the 1990s were named “Randy”

How does this relate to Jesus? I think one of the ways I misread Jesus’s instruction to “be perfect” is that I get confused about the difference between doing my best and thinking my best makes me an MVP. So, I tend to want to minimize Jesus’s challenging words–I tend to want to settle–by thinking that when he says “be perfect,” what he means is, “don’t worry; we’re not even having ‘MVPs’ this season–doing your best; trying to catch the occasional fly ball in right field, or batting .222, is all we are expecting.” And because I get this part of things wrong, it does the opposite of what that participation trophy was supposed to do when I was in Little League: it makes me not want to keep trying; it makes me content to simply stay right here, right where I’m at, more or less doing my best to be a decent human being, but still leaving a ton of room for slip ups, for doing what I want to do, regardless of whether or not it’s what God has called me to do. So, I try not to yell at my kids; I try to think of something nice to do for my wife from time to time; I try to call my friends, and check in with my mom and dad, from time to time; I try to be nice to my coworkers when I feel like it; and I try to be generous with my money whenever I have a few dollars in my pocket…but when I mess up? Well, oh well–nobody’s perfect.

And of course, that’s exactly the problem with seeing ‘my best’ as ‘good enough,’ at least as someone who identifies as a follower of Jesus:  I am follower of Jesus, which means that I believe somebody WAS perfect. In fact, it’s at the root of my entire belief system! Jesus won the giant MVP trophy! Jesus is “Randy,” the all-star shortstop! So how in the world have I–how in the world have we--slipped into a state of living, a state of belief, where we think that participation in holiness, participation in Godliness, can count as good enough?

Now that’s a question I think we can actually answer, but I don’t think we’re going to like what we find. My claim this morning is that we fall into this trap of believing that an honest effort is good enough to count as perfect because we don’t think Jesus is really anything like us at all. We fail–systematically and personally and completely–to hold on to what is perhaps the most important and beautiful thing about the guy who is supposedly at the very center of our religion and our very lives: that He is one of us.

There are two parts, I think, to this mistake, two reasons we trick ourselves into believing that Jesus isn’t on our “level”. The first is that we don’t want to believe that Jesus faced the same problems we face. 

Now, there are plenty of well-known verses in the Bible that contradict this belief, and they are a great place to start: in the book of Hebrews, the author writes, “For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted,” and then later: “For we do not have a high priest (meaning Jesus) who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet was without sin.” Similarly, we have Jesus’s own insistence on his humanity, both to his disciples in private and to the Roman and Jewish authorities who repeatedly interrogated him. We see it in Jesus’s actual birth and life, as well as in his submission to the ritual of baptism when he meets John the Baptist: whatever else–whoever else–Jesus might be, the Bible goes to great lengths to show us that he is definitely a real-life human being.

But, at least for me, the doubts I hold to, which complicate my belief that Jesus knows what I’m going through, are far less rational than all that. If I’m honest, they aren’t actually reasonable objections at all: if you forced me to admit, do I think Jesus understands my own life and difficulties? I would say “yes.” But I don’t live like it because I hate that Jesus makes it look so easy. I hate how petty that sounds, but maybe it rings true for you this morning, too: I don’t want to believe Jesus lived a human life because I know I’m constantly failing to live up to the standard of perfection, and when I think about Jesus pulling that trick off, I get mad. I get, frankly, jealous because I know I’m not measuring up, and the worst part is, I know that I’m trying. So, it’s easier for me to just throw in the towel.

Speaking of sports, one of the things that I most hated about playing sports when I was growing up was my ever-growing surety that everyone was lying to me about the importance of practice.

You should ALWAYS wear Game Day gear while chasing airballs into your neighbor’s bushes. 

For as long as I could remember, every adult in my life kept saying to me, “if you want to get better at catching a ball or making a free throw, you have to practice.” And so I would: I would practice shooting free throws in my driveway for hours. But you know what? I couldn’t practice my way out of being short and unathletic. I tried, and honestly, I got pretty good at free throws…but I still couldn’t compete, and the more I played sports, the more I started to get super mad at the people who were better than me. And you know what made me maddest of all? I knew I practiced more than them. Way more. But they had something I didn’t have: they were actually talented; like, God-given, #blessed talented. And I wasn’t. So I didn’t think comparing me to them was “fair.” And right there–right in that soft spot–bitterness grew in my heart. I don’t like when Jesus, of all people, tells me to be “perfect” because I want to believe that Jesus was talented when it came to perfection. Because it lets me off the hook. And the challenge of those verses in Hebrews–the things about them that should hit me, and my pride, like a sledgehammer?–is that I’m wrong. Jesus wasn’t supernatural. He lived a life, just like me. AND–not “but,” but AND–he did it perfectly. So, if I’ve been hoping to be graded on a curve–if I was hoping for a “participation trophy”–I’m about to have some tough luck. Why do I struggle to believe that Jesus was “one of us,” that he was really and truly like me? Because if that’s true…the only conclusion I feel like I can reach is that I’m not good enough.

The second part of our resistance to believing that Jesus was–is–”one of us” stems from the first. It is this: we don’t want to believe that we are really being held to the same standard as him. But again: we are wrong.

This time, I think the problem we have comes from a real confusion about what it means to “be perfect.” This time, let’s take a step away from the world of sports and head into the classroom. You guys remember those, right? Boring lectures, worksheets, and, from time to time, end of chapter tests? Let’s think back to those test: what would it mean to get a “perfect” grade? To earn an “A,” or 100%? Well, it would mean remembering all the answers. Being “perfect” isn’t about doing something superhuman–it’s not about having more than what is expected of you…it’s about fully living up to an expectation for you. For you. It’s about being 100% of what you are intended to be.

But what are we “intended” to be?

When I was a high school teacher, I shared a classroom with my friend Isaac, who was a Bible teacher. So, I ended up getting to sit in on hundreds of Bible classes over the years. One of Isaac’s “trademark” lessons was a unit he would do every spring on the imago Dei, which is Latin for “the image of God.” It’s a long-standing belief of fundamental Christianity, and it is pulled from the very first book in your Bible, the book of Genesis. In Genesis, chapter 1, God describes the creation of human beings in these terms: He says (to Himself, interestingly), 

Genesis 1:26-28

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Now, the key in these verses, as far as Isaac’s class was concerned, was this issue of “image”: the Bible says that human beings aren’t just the invention of God, they–we–are His image-bearers. That means that we look like God looks; we are copies, in a sense, of Him. Now, the point Isaac was trying to get at by looking at these verses was to challenge something that students, and, in fact, most people, say all the time: we say, when we do bad things, or when we feel drawn towards sin, or being selfish, or being cruel, or being greedy that these feelings are just “human nature.” And Isaac’s point is that we are exactly wrong: sin isn’t in our “human” nature at all–because we are image-bearers of God! Rather, the way we ought to think about sin is like this: when the Bible says sin entered the world and we “Fell” into it…it means what it says! The problem isn’t that sin is in our “human nature”…it’s that we aren’t living as fully human. Some translations of the Bible use the term “sin nature” as a way of referring to our nature after our desires shifted from a desire to be like God made us to be–a “human” nature–to a desire to be what WE want to be–a “sin” nature.” The point is that when we are drawn towards sin, when we are drawn towards selfishness, or greed, we are being pulled away from what we were designed to be. We were made in the image of God…but all too often, we fail to hold that image up.

Here’s where I’m hoping to go with all of this: when Jesus says, in Matthew 5, that we must be perfect, I know there’s a part of each and every one of us that recoils a bit–or, at least, there really should be! And maybe, there’s another part of us that tries to push back: maybe by saying, “I don’t know; maybe Jesus is just saying that we should work really hard, and do our best, and in the end, that will be good enough.” But then came Jesus: by showing us what perfect looks like, he becomes the “MVP,” the kid on your team when you were young who exposed that “your best” wasn’t, ultimately, good enough.

Or, maybe, you push back against what the Bible says, against its charge to “be perfect,” by believing that Jesus Himself is unrealistic: either he doesn’t really understand your struggle; or maybe he kind of “cheated, by also being God; or maybe the Bible is unrealistic to expect a human being to “be perfect” anyway, because our nature is to sin…but then came Jesus: a guy who lived a life with the same struggles as you; who knew what it was to be tempted, but in the midst of temptation, succeeded in living up to the standard of “humanity” that has always been God’s hope and intention for us as beings made in God’s image.

And so, here we are: we have to admit that

1. Perfect means “perfect”
2. Perfection is a reasonable expectation
3. We can’t do it

And that last realization–that we just can’t meet the expectation God has for us, that we can’t be “perfect”–is devastating. I know why we run from it; I know why I do, at least. I don’t want to look in a mirror; I don’t want to accept that I come up short, over and over and over and over, day after day…and that I know I will come up short again tomorrow, if it’s up to me: in my marriage; in my parenting; in my friendships; in my work; in my faith. I have to admit–I have to confess-that I’m not up to “perfect.” But then came Jesus. And with him, two promises that revolve around each other like twin suns at the gravitational center of my faith:

1. The first of those promises is this: If I’m willing to follow him, He will be my advocate. His perfection, his essential humanity, will be “added unto me,” is the way the Bible frequently puts it; in Christian theology, the word people usually use is “imputation.” But regardless of your terminology, the point the words recognize is this one: Jesus is on your team. He wants you to benefit from his perfection; he wants what that perfection enables, which is a restoration of what it means to even be human, to be offered to you, too. It doesn’t have to continue to matter that you have been imperfect in the past because Jesus isn’t in competition with you; he loves you, he knows you, he understands how this is difficult for you, and he is on your side.
2. The second promise is this: If I am willing to follow him, He will fix me. He will repair me, or restore me, back to what I was made to be. I have not been perfect, God knows…but I can be perfected. The first 20 minutes of our talk this morning can feel devastating: the point was to recognize-to realize-that we are out of excuses for why we should be LESS than God made us to be. But maybe we don’t need to be devastated by that realization. Because there is a better side to what I just said: We are out of excuses for why we should be LESS than God made us to be. What we are isn’t good enough because what we are isn’t good enough: we are meant to be more. This isn’t something I “kind of” believe–it is the beating heart of the entire Gospel of Jesus Christ, it is the core Truth of the entirety of the Christian faith: We can be what we were made to be.

The apostle Paul, whose influence on the first 100 years of the Christian church is unparalleled, puts it this way: 

2 Corinthians 5:17-21

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Paul is explaining to the early church just how big of a deal what Christ did is for us: by being perfect, Jesus wasn’t showing off; by dying on the cross, he wasn’t just being a “martyr”…in all things, he was “reconciling us to God.” He has shared his perfection with those who follow him, and he has initiated the “ongoing work” of making those same followers into his image. Paul says, “in him we might become the righteousness of God,” and we do this by first admitting that we aren’t going to hit the target of perfection on our own, and then following step-by-step in the footprints of the one guy who ever lived and HIT IT. It’s truly not about how much we have messed up in the past–it’s not about carrying guilt for all the times we didn’t measure up–just like in the metaphor of the classroom or the test, the point is learning everything we are meant to know. It’s about getting to 100%; not having always been there.

There is an interesting translation issue at work in our central verse this morning that I think has the potential to give hands and feet, so to speak, to what Jesus is doing in the lives of those who follow him. It actually comes from the book of Luke, where Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is recounted from the perspective of another listener. In Luke’s account of the sermon, the word Jesus is using when he says “perfect” is better translated “merciful.” So, Luke 6:36 records the moment like this:

Luke 6:36

“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

Mercy is a pretty “churchy” word, I know, so we often use it without taking the time to explain precisely what it means. But this morning, it seems like a good idea to dig for a definition. Here’s how Merriam-Webster sums it up: “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” When I was a kid, my Sunday school teacher helped me remember it this way: she said, “mercy starts with ‘m,’ which is only one letter away from ‘n’, so you can remember it like this: mercy is NOT getting what you deserve.” Okay, that might be a little too clunky to be helpful for you all, but it has long worked for me: mercy is NOT getting what you deserve.

So, what does Jesus mean, when he tells us to be “merciful,” and if we combine the two records of his words, to be “merciful perfectly”? Well, I think we can go back to the verses from just before this exhortation, which we talked about last week: being “merciful” means loving others-loving our enemies-in the same way that God loves us. And how does God love us? He loves us enough to make a way for our relationship to be repaired. He loves us in a way that not only forgives, but advocates; He loves us in a way that changes us into being more like how we were designed to be. He loves us in a way that perfects. Sure, expecting us to love others like that is asking a lot…but if we’re following in the footsteps of Jesus, He will lead us there. Remember that second promise, the second of those “twin suns” circling one another at the center of the system of Christian faith: God is doing this work. In a letter to the 1st century Christian churches in the city of Philippi, the apostle Paul puts it this way:

Philippians 1:6

“And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”

There may be no sweeter verse in the Bible, as far as I am concerned: “I am sure of this: that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.” Sure, you are not perfect; sure, your best is not good enough; you know how far you are from earning a 100%…but if you are following Jesus, you are on your way there. The “good work” has begun…and it is God’s promise to us that He will “bring it to completion.”

So, as we wrap up today, I want all of us to leave with two very specific questions that we can wrestle with in the week ahead. The first is this: 

Do you believe it? 

Do you believe that, first of all, perfection matters to God? Are you still convinced that “doing your best” is good enough? If so, is it possible that your reasons for believing that look a lot like mine, particularly that I struggle to believe that it’s fair to compare me to Jesus? If that is where you are this morning, can I ask you to think about something this week? Think about this question: if the ‘line’ for ‘good enough’ isn’t at ‘perfect’…where is it? At the end of the day, which belief is harder to accept: that God expects perfection…or that he doesn’t?

Secondly, do you believe that perfection is possible for you? If your answer to that is ‘yes,’ that’s okay! I’m not going to shout you down, or tell you that you are wrong–it’s okay to hold that belief. But I will challenge you not to hold it in the abstract. So, this week, if you’re not sure that perfection is impossible, give it a shot: for a week, or even for a day, strive intentionally for just one aspect of perfection: strive to be unfailingly kind. Do this towards everyone: friends, family, co-workers, strangers, politicians–be unfailingly kind. Hey, if you’re right–if this is possible for you–then the world is a better place with you being kind to everyone! But if it’s not possible–if even your best effort isn’t good enough–I want to challenge you to come back to this spot: if perfection matters, but you can’t do it, what are you going to do? And, if I might be so bold, can I challenge you, just one more time? Is there room inside of you to consider that perhaps “perfection” isn’t something you start with–you come into this life with a full and perfect cup, and you spend your life trying not to spill any of it–but instead something you are brought to? In Jesus’s words, what He offers is not a handful of patches for your leaky cup but living water, overflowing in abundance. Jesus is trying to fill you up…would you consider letting him?

The second big question I want you to wrestle with this week is this one:

Are you moving? 

Gandalf the Grey shows up precisely when he means to.

One of my wife, Meredith’s, least favorite things in movies or TV shows is when an urgent situation arises, and a character spends precious seconds talking about it or explaining it before they actually act. A classic example of this, for her, is the scene in the first Lord of the Rings movie when the “fellowship” is in the Mines of Moria, and the goblins have them surrounded, but then they begin to hear this deep, rumbling noise, and all the goblins and orcs scatter away.  There’s this moment, after the fellowship is alone, where Gandalf, the wizard, closes his eyes, and listens carefully, and then he begins to see the red light coming from the other end of the giant hall, and he explains that the monster they are about to encounter is a “Balrog;” shadow wreathed in flame; an enemy far too dangerous for them…and then, after all that talking, he shouts “RUN!” When Meredith and I rewatch that movie, she loses it, every time; she shouts at me (or maybe it’s at the TV?), “what are you doing?! SHUT UP AND RUN ALREADY!!” It’s that ten-second pause, when Gandalf is talking, that just kills her: “if you know it’s a giant monster, don’t just talk about it…get moving!”

The last challenge for you this morning comes out of precisely this same anxiety: are you moving? God has set a goal, an expectation, a target for you: it is perfection. AND he has promised that, if you will follow him and trust him, he will remake you into that goal. He will bring to completion the work he has begun in you! But are you moving? Are you taking steps in the footprints Jesus leaves behind? Specifically, if you know your goal is to “be merciful, as your Father is merciful,” or to love your enemies as your Father loves you, what are you doing to pursue it? How are you seeking to know God’s love more? Are you looking for it in your own life? Are you reading about it, praying about it, keeping notes on it, when you see it at work in your life, or in the lives of other people? Are you working to love like God loves? Are you seeking out chances to show mercy, are you racing to ask for forgiveness, and to forgive others, as fast as you can? Are you setting an expectation for yourself, to work to bring God’s kingdom, his love, his Truth, his hope, to bear here, in your life, right now?

If not…what are you waiting for?

What if that same fear that kept you from wanting to looking in the metaphorical mirror earlier–that fear that what you would find wouldn’t be perfect–what if that fear could be replaced by an eagerness to look in the mirror, in order to see what God has done in your life? 

One of the greatest comforts and securities I have in my life and in my faith comes from very intentionally looking backwards: although, in the day-to-day experience of my life, I often fail to see God at work in me, or the ways that following Jesus is transforming the person I am into the person I was made to be, when I look backwards–when I look at my life 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 15 years ago–it is amazing to me what God has done. I am not the person I used to be, and it’s not because I worked really hard to be better…it’s because God is at work in me. When I say that you need to go, that you need to run; that you need to stop waiting; I’m not saying that you can go make yourself perfect. But I am saying that if you run towards the model of Jesus–if you seek, with all of your mind and heart and soul, to know Him more, and to care about the things he cares about, and to do the kinds of things he spent his whole life doing…God will make you unrecognizable to yourself. But recognizable–perfectly recognizable–to Him.

Let’s pray.

What If Jesus MEANT It?, Part 1: Turning the Other Cheek

BY DR. KEN CAMACHO

Note: This script was used for a sermon delivered at Revolution Annapolis in March 2017

This week, Revolution Annapolis kicked off a series that I have been looking forward to for a very, very long time. It’s called “What If He MEANT It?” and it’s about the difficult words of Jesus. I think this series is useful because I believe that we often fall victim, as Christians, to a tendency to minimize the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s words. Many of his most resonant moments as a teacher-the Sermon on the Mount, his “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem the week before his death-are tremendously radical in their instructions. After all, it is Jesus who tells us that we are to leave the temple mid-prayer in order to make peace with a brother; it is Jesus who tells us that that we are to give to all who have need without reservation or judgment; and, in a verse that caused my adolescent self a pretty intense amount of stress growing up, it is Jesus who says that we are to pluck out the eye that causes us to sin. It is also Jesus who tells us that when we are assaulted, we are to turn the other cheek rather than retaliate in kind; and again, it is Jesus who tells us that we are to die to ourselves by picking up a cross, an instrument of torture and murder, daily if we hope to follow him.

And yet, although many of us know these teachings of Christ by memory, we far too often fail to know them by heart. But why is this? Why is it that we tend to negotiate with the “all-in” philosophy that seems so apparent in the teachings of Jesus? Why do we sometimes reconstruct Jesus into a Savior who is less radical than the one he appears to be?

The goal of this series is to investigate these questions by looking at 4 central teachings from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and candidly asking ourselves: what if he MEANT it? What if Jesus meant the words he said, even if they seem overwhelming? What if he meant for us to be overwhelmed by them? What would this mean for us? And what would it mean about Him?

Today, we are going to start things off with perhaps the most well-known and often-quoted words of Jesus’s entire ministry. There are two groups of verses we will be looking at, both recorded in Matthew, chapter 5. The first is:

“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 resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

And the second is: 

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”

It’s hard to dodge the power of these words; in fact, their simple power is probably the main reason they are so well known! But when was the last time you-and that’s not a hypothetical, general “you”; I mean you-when was the last time you really stopped to think them over? What do you think Jesus means when he says to love your enemies? When he says to turn the other cheek? Does he truly mean that we ought to love the people who hate us? The people who envy us, or seek to undermine us? The wicked? The evil? The monstrous? Is he sincerely instructing us to never retaliate when we are attacked? How do these words square with what we also take to be righteous and honorable behaviors, like standing up for the weak? Resisting oppression or violence in our community or our home? Or fighting for what we believe in? And how do these words play out when the context is bigger than ourselves? Are they true of my family? Of my city? Of my nation? Would Jesus really have us refuse a fight, even when it is brought to us?

Look, I’ll be the first person to say that I don’t know the answers to all of those questions, at least not with certainty. I will acknowledge, right here at the outset, that it is absolutely true that particular situations can be confusing, and the right thing to do in one circumstance might not always be the right thing to do in another one.

But what I want us to do-what I want you to do-is to try to still, or quiet, that voice inside you that might want to squirm away from these verses-or that might even be angry about them-and instead use this morning to pause, reflect, and consider: what if He meant exactly what He said here? What if-what if-these aren’t just idealized maxims or inspirational quotes; what if they aren’t “Jesus” things, which might be good for the son of God, but which are obviously absurd for everyone else, but actual, meaningful words, for you-and for me-right now?

In order to give this possibility a fair shot, I want to start things off today by making you all a deal: you can pick your objections, your rationalizations, your fair and legitimate concerns, back up when you finish this in a little while with no judgment, either from me or from anyone else. I promise you-I promise you!-that I will not be hounding all of you on Facebook tomorrow, seeing who made a radical life decision, or sending big group text messages all week asking which of you had the faith or courage to start loving your enemies. I mean it when I say that I don’t think any of this is easy…but I also can’t deny that it’s here. I can’t deny that Jesus did say these hard words. So, for now, I want to ask you to open yourself up to that core, challenging, possibility: what if He MEANT it?

This is not my front yard, but it’s pretty close.

If you are new to Revolution, one thing you should know about me is that I’m not from around here. Although I’ve been living in Maryland now for about 7 years, I spent the first 28 years of my life in the rural South. Specifically, I grew up in rural South Carolina, about a half hour from the town of Spartanburg, in the northwest corner of the state. Have you heard of Greenville? Well, it’s not Greenville.

Now, I still have a lot of affection for my home town, but I do have to admit that, honestly, whatever stereotypes you are forming in your mind right now about me and where I come from, they’re all true. I grew up with cows in my front yard; my dad always kept at least one non-functioning vehicle on our property to harvest for “spare parts”; we dried our laundry on a clothesline; the lives of the folks in my community revolved around watching and playing football; and I even went to high school most days wearing overalls (although at the time I believed I was doing this to show ‘school spirit’). In addition to all that, I also grew up spending at least two days of every single week at the medium-sized, rural Southern Baptist church around the corner from my house. It’s name was (and still is) Poplar Springs Baptist Church. My first pastor was Pastor Avant, who I remember started every sermon with a joke. My family could walk to the church from our house, and when I was six years old, after a sermon with a joke about buying shoes for a centipede, I accepted Christ and was baptized there. All of these things-the farms, the school, the family, the church-they weren’t just punchlines to me; they were the anchors of my childhood. 

Now, I’m not going to talk politics today, and I’m not interested in being partisan or insulting or divisive. However, it’s hard for me to imagine talking about the series we are starting without sharing the story of how many of my defenses against some of the most challenging words in Scripture got started. And those defenses, in some ways, began with the way I grew up: woven through my Southern, Christian upbringing was a thread of not just political but more importantly spiritual conservatism that I accepted as normal. That I still often think of as normal. But which doesn’t always align with who I have come to believe Jesus to be.

One example: I have known the verses we are studying today by heart for as long as I can remember. I know that I’m supposed to “love my enemies.” I know that I’m supposed to “turn the other cheek.” But one of the very first lessons I remembering learning as a boy-as early as first grade-was that I had to stand up for myself. I remember once at recess, I got in an argument with another boy and he punched me, right in the face. And then, right as I got back to my feet, the bell rang. So, torn between my desire to punch this kid back and my desire to stay out of trouble, I went with the institutional authority, and I went back inside. That Sunday, in Sunday school, I remember my teacher-a good man who I know loved Jesus-telling me that I made the wrong call: I should have hit that boy back. Now, even then, I knew that didn’t square with what Jesus said about “turning the other cheek”-I mean, it seemed like an obvious way to miss an obvious point!-but I believed him, and I understood what he was trying to say: if I want people to respect me, I have to show them that I have self-respect first.

Years later, in January of 1991, I remember distinctly being at a church social when the United States invaded Kuwait as part of Operation Desert Storm. My whole church family gathered around a tiny portable television to cheer on the green-and-yellow images of bombs exploding in Baghdad. I was there; we felt patriotic: we felt like we were cheering on the “good”.

Anti-aircraft fire lights up the sky over Baghdad as bombs fall on the city in January 1991

But were we loving our enemies? Honestly, by that point-at age 9-I had already become pretty numb to that conflict. 

Many years later, when I first came here to Maryland with Meredith to visit her family-this was while we were dating-we went over on a Sunday afternoon to visit her best friend, Amy. It was 2003, and as a nation, we had recently re-invaded Iraq. Again, I’m not interested in arguing this morning about whether or not that was a good decision or a bad decision; I’m not even interested in taking a stand on whether or not it was a moral decision. But I will say that at the age of 21, having grown up where and how I did, it was a decision that I, personally, supported. It was even one that I was excited about, as I remember it. So, when Meredith and I pulled up to her friend’s house, I remember exactly what my reaction was to her friend’s mother’s bumper sticker, which read: “When Jesus Said, ‘Love Your Enemies,’ I Don’t Think He Meant ‘Kill Them.’” I laughed out loud. I thought, “this is the dumbest and most naive thing I have ever seen.” In fact, I made a joke to Meredith about how silly it was, and then I even made fun of it to Amy when we were inside. If I could paraphrase the way that sticker made me feel about Amy’s mother in two words, I would say “Hippie Fool.”

But here’s the part of the story that matters for what I want us to think about today: from that day in 2003 until this one in 2017, I haven’t been able to get that stupid sticker out of my head. 

“When Jesus Said, ‘Love Your Enemies,’ I Don’t Think He Meant ‘Kill Them.’”

“When Jesus Said, ‘Love Your Enemies,’ I Don’t Think He Meant ‘Kill Them.’”

It was haunting to me. Why not? Then what did He mean? How could He-how could Jesus-be so naive? How could He be so foolish? If good people don’t stand up and even fight and even kill for what they believe to be right, how can they call themselves good? Didn’t God send armies to war in the Old Testament? Didn’t Jesus say that he came to bring the sword? How could Jesus–how could God–leave such an overwhelming, all-encompassing, blanket statement out there in the world for us? LOVE YOUR ENEMIES. How could doing that succeed in accomplishing anything other than being disrespected, or getting yourself hurt, or getting people you love and are responsible for killed? At the end of the day, that sticker confronted me with something true not necessarily about violence, but about me: somehow, I had reached a point where what I believed Jesus meant sounded a lot like the opposite of what He said. And the terrible part wasn’t just that I had perhaps watered down or rationalized what Jesus said-it was that I had stopped feeling any tension in myself about these words at all. It took that sticker to make me care about whether I was right about Jesus, and once I had started to do that again, it meant that, eventually-in fact, not all that long ago-I had to make a choice: was Jesus wrong? Or was I? 

Once again, I’m not here to tell you how to feel about the military, or about politics, or about the war in Iraq in 2003. I’m just here to put those words back in front of you, and then ask you to wrestle with them, too. And, in the case that it might be helpful, I’m here to share what my journey with them has looked like.

I think the best place for us to start-for me to start-is with the problem in us that Jesus’s words set out to address:

“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 resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

A few things that we can notice right away. The first has to do with the concept of justice: Jesus does not question whether or not other people are capable of acting out evil or acting in ways that require punishment. He begins by reminding his audience of an Old Testament maxim: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” The point of the maxim is to insist on balance and retribution. This is a deeply Biblical value, and it’s rooted in one of the core attributes of who God even is: Justice Matters. So, when someone takes your eye…they owe an eye! When someone hurts or injures someone else, physically, verbally, or emotionally, they incur a debt which must be paid. Jesus does not reject that idea; in fact, he begins with it.

But then he gives that curious and challenging and frustrating and clear instruction: Do not resist the one who is evil. Two important notes on this sentence: first, and again, Jesus doesn’t let anyone off the hook: somebody is “evil”–wrongdoing must be acknowledged. But second, Jesus says to you, the person who follows Him: YOU are not to RESIST. YOU.  If someone takes an eye, they owe an eye!…but they don’t owe it to you.

I think much of our frustration with Jesus’s radical teachings, and certainly my difficulty, personally, with this verse, stems from a single mistake in my reading: I think that I am at the center of the story. I think that when wrongs must be addressed, it is my job to address them. I think that the agent of retribution, the enactor of vengeance, must be me.

And I think the core of what Jesus wants from us-the reason we are instructed not to resist-is because He wants us to remember that we’re not the ones who have to. That we’re not the ones who are responsible for retribution. That the God of the entire universe has promised us that He will handle it: 

“It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” He tells Israel (Deuteronomy 32:35) 

“Do not say, I’ll pay you back for this wrong!’ Wait for the LORD, and he will avenge you.”, He writes in Proverbs (Proverbs 20:22) 

“Do not say, ‘I’ll do to them as they have done to me; I’ll pay them back for what they did.’” He says again, just a few chapters later! (Proverbs 24:29)

God sees, and He knows, and He is in control, and He is just. Sin and evil don’t escape him!

And at the root of our resistance to Jesus is our lack of faith in God. I just don’t have a nicer way of putting that. We seek retribution when we are wronged ourselves because we doubt two things: 

The first is that God will actually hold everyone accountable for what they have done. We worry that God is too nice; that He is too forgiving, and because He’s a softie, someone will “get away” with how they have hurt us. We want to “step in” because we don’t see God getting the job done, and, perhaps with good intentions, we act. Or, perhaps we believe that God is using us to carry out His justice; after all, we are His followers, right? Can’t we step in and help Him with these small offenses? I mean, He’s undoubtedly pretty busy with more important things than this petty grievance!

But that’s exactly where those Old Testament verses ought to convict us, just as they would have convicted Jesus’s listeners in the first century. Because they are written to Israel-God’s holy and chosen people. The very same people God did use to carry out His judgment on other societies, including the Egyptians and the Canaanites. So, if anyone could feel entitled to “act on God’s behalf,” it would be them! And what does God say, even to them? He says, “don’t say, “I will do to them as they have done to me;” it is mine to avenge, mine to repay.”

Jesus’s instructions echo the Jewish Old Testament, and He reiterates the lesson God’s people so frequently ignored or forgot: trust God to hold His Creation accountable. Trust Him to see even more than you see!

The second thing we doubt is that God’s punishment will be sufficient in our eyes. We act out violence towards our enemies, towards those who wound us, because we want them to feel the way we felt; and who else could possibly know how we felt more than we do? There’s a doubt, I think, in God’s ability to truly get what we are going through. Let me give you an example of what I mean:

Dinosaur space ninja, in my house.

The following story is a common one in our house. My son, Graham, is 2 ½ years old. This means that he’s old enough to cause a pretty significant amount of trouble, but not old enough to have a very clear sense of consequences. So, he’s at an age that can be pretty difficult to parent! Graham has 2 sisters: Evangeline, who is 8, and Cecilia, who is 7. It is not uncommon for Evangeline and Cecilia to treat Graham poorly: they take his toys; they accidentally knock him down; sometimes, they even shove or push him when he’s bothering them.

In any case, a few months ago, the 7 year old, Cecilia, got in trouble for knocking Graham down after he wrecked a puzzle she was building; she just flat out, two-hand shoved him in the chest, and he fell down and hit his head and cried. Once Meredith and I got back to the kids’ room to deal with the situation, we got the stories from everyone, figured out what happened, and punished Cecilia: we took away her screen time for the day and sat her down in time out. Now, for Cecilia, this is a pretty major punishment: screen time is her favorite thing, and time out is nigh on insufferable. But no sooner did she sit down in the hallway for time out than Graham came out of his room, walked up to her, and whacked her right on the head with one of his toys. She went crazy.

Here’s the point: Graham hit Cecilia for 2 reasons, and they were 1) because he wanted her to hurt the way he was hurting, and 2) because he didn’t trust that Meredith and I had punished her enough.

I think what Jesus is getting at with the hard words he speaks in Matthew 5 is this: the reason we cannot seek retribution ourselves is because when we do, we are expressing fundamental doubts about who God is. Specifically, we’re distrusting that he will hold hurtful people accountable, and that if He does, his punishments will be good enough in our eyes.

To boil all of that down, what these verses, what these words, expose in us is this: when we seek our own retribution, we’re not doing it because we care about justice: we’re doing it because we’re afraid we’re on our own.

But here’s the thing about what Jesus is instructing us to do: turning the other cheek is a discipline that forces us to lean on God. It’s one of the ways that we reach out for him, like a person walking in the dark: we’re saying, in the face of something horrible and painful and unfair, “God, I need you to be better than I can be.”

For the last part of this talk today, I want to focus in on exactly that prayer: “God, I need you to be better than I can be.” When we “turn the other cheek,” we are doing two notable things, neither of which are easy, and both of which are important:

1. We are recognizing the limits of our own understanding. One of the temptations of retribution is arrogance. It is easy for us to believe, when we have been attacked, that we fully understand why something happened. We fall into this trap all the time: “so and so did this because they have always had it out for me;” “my friend stabbed me in the back because they have always been jealous of my success;” “my spouse cheated because they’ve always been afraid of commitment;” “my teenager yells at me because their friends are a bad influence.” But the uncomfortable truth is that our decisions, even when they are hurtful, are made for a complex set of conscious and subconscious reasons, few of which tend to be malicious. One of the most profound truths, as far as I’m concerned, in social science is the law of unintended consequences, which is a way of talking about the limitations of human knowledge and agency. In brief, we understand that even the most deliberate and careful actions we take unavoidably carry with them a set of consequences which we cannot predict. One reason it is so crucial not just to “turn the other cheek,” but to lean on God when we are wounded is because we are not capable judges of one another. We need a higher authority in order to even see the conditions of justice; it’s simply not something we can do ourselves. To go back to Graham and Cecilia, Graham thought Cecilia pushed him because she was just being mean; but her actual reasons go much deeper than that, even to the root of what it’s like to grow up with a younger sibling. I’m not even sure Cecilia understood just why she pushed her brother down; I’m confident Graham didn’t know! Although justice still absolutely matters, what Jesus is challenging us to do here is to recognize that we don’t have the vantage point necessary to determine it.
2. The second thing we are doing is surrendering ourselves to God. In light of the limits of our own understanding, and our insufficiency as judges, we are forced to process our decision not to strike back in one of two ways: either A) we are trusting an almighty and all-knowing and all-powerful and relational God to set the situation to rights, or B) there is no claim to justice at all. The world is fundamentally not unjust but ajust, which would mean that our problem is not that things are evil and opposed to justice, but that there is no such thing. There is only…people, holding power over one another, and abusing one another, and clinging to whatever most benefits them. If the second thing is true-there is no justice-then there is no reason to pay someone back. And if the first is true-that God is out there and committed to balancing the scales of this world-then there is reassurance and relief. Either way, the scales are not yours to balance. That burden has no place on your shoulders. Frankly, you’re not meant for it. Your enemies are not your enemies; they are your siblings, in the same metaphorical “boat” as you: you are either under the authority of a God greater than you, or you under your own authority, which is no authority at all.

So, how should you treat one another?

The second passage we wanted to look at today has to do with loving our enemies, and despite the fact that this passage is at the heart of the world’s most haunting and unforgettable bumper sticker (at least, in my view), I don’t have a lot to say about it. I think, in some ways, it works best as a thorn or a splinter that gets stuck in you, and irritates you, and pesters you until you have had enough and you figure out how to deal with it.

But, on that note, I will at least share a bit about how it’s working on me. For my money, the crux of the challenge-the instruction-Jesus presents is in the second half of the second verse: “pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” Our love for neighbors, perhaps oddly, comes with an ulterior motive: we love others so that we may be counted as sons of God. What is up with that?

Here’s my theory: we’re already sons of God. God is our dad. When we make the decision to follow after Jesus, Jesus-and the rest of the Bible-are pretty clear: we become his children, and our place in eternity is our inheritance. So, why talk about loving our enemies in this way?

I think the idea is one of modeling.

SO adorable…

Have any of you ever watched one of those nature documentaries about great cats, or polar bears? One of those species where a mother only has one or two babies, and then she has to raise them for a year or two, before they can go off and hunt on their own? I’m thinking of lion cubs and wolf pups. Whenever the kids can knock off the wrestling and fighting for two seconds, what does the mother in these documentaries do? She takes them on a hunt. Why? Because she’s starving? Even because her cubs or pups are starving? Not usually. She does it because they need to know what to do as adults. When a baby polar bear can snag a seal or a penguin all on its own, it signals to the mother: “They are my child. They are growing. They are learning. They are following my lead. They will be okay.”

…maybe not as adorable.

Before I made the decision to follow after the example of Jesus, I was his enemy. I was God’s enemy: I denied and resisted him; I lifted myself up as my own chief authority. So did you! If you are a follower of Jesus now, there was certainly a time when you weren’t, and that made you an enemy of God! But even when you were in that state, even when you were against him…he loved you. He delayed judgment for you, giving you time to see him for who he is: your rightful father, desperate for you to come home.

When we love others-when we love our enemies-we are emulating our Dad. We are letting go of our perceived right to retribution, we are trusting in His goodness and in His justice, and we are choosing to love those who are boldly antagonistic to us personally, or even corporately, or even nationally. And when we act out this discipline, we are being “sons and daughters of our Father, who is in heaven.” It is not easy…but it is godly.

And another thing? I think, if we are truly honest with ourselves, we might see that it actually works, too. I know it goes against the conventional wisdom: I know that “turning the other cheek” can sound like “hippie” nonsense. But ask yourself: when you haven’t turned the other cheek-when you’ve acted out your anger and your frustration and your hurt-has it ever actually improved you? Have you ever left that situation looking more like God, more like your “Father”? If not, why not? And what might happen if you gave what Jesus said a try?

I don’t even need to get into the historical examples of folks who have adopted Christ’s words here as part of their philosophies of protest and resistance; certainly, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi come to mind as obvious examples of folks who have sought to “turn the other cheek,” and whose followers have attempted to do likewise. But even beyond the examples, how might Jesus’s words work?

I think an obvious answer is that loving an enemy-praying for someone who persecutes you-short circuits the cycle of antagonism that violence creates. You put an end to the back-and-forth that a violent ideology constructs. And second, I think that it replaces the cynicism that drove your desire for retribution-that belief that God could not be trusted and you were on your own-with a sense of trust in the power, sovereignty, and goodness of God. I want to be clear: I don’t think God’s desire for you is to be struck, any more than my desire for Graham and Cecilia was for Graham to be struck: and if you are in a situation where you are being struck, physically or verbally or emotionally, repeatedly, I think the most loving thing you can do is to create a boundary that keeps you safe and allows you to bring other people into a joint process of reconciliation. But I do think that Jesus’s instructions have a bearing on all of our hearts when we are struck: they challenge us to think critically about our own motivations in the ways we respond, and they push on our desire for retaliation by questioning the scope of our wisdom or ability. That’s where we should feel uncomfortable; that’s where we can begin to wrestle.

So, what are our action steps for this? I have a few for us:

1. Seek to understand your own tendencies: identify 5 times in your life when you have been subjected to an unjustified attack. This can be verbal, emotional, or physical. How did you respond in each case? What events followed your response? Did your response ultimately benefit not just you, but everyone involved? If you could live things over again, how would you respond differently?
2. Deliberately evaluate your current trust in God (Mark 9:24): in what areas/issues would you rate your trust in God’s sovereignty and control as “high”? In what areas/issues would you rate it as “low”? Don’t work through this in isolation! Meet with someone to talk through your answers, and challenge yourself to release control of the “low” trust areas!
3. Make a plan to react well: are there areas of tension in your life where antagonism is common? How can you work to defuse or deescalate tensions before they erupt in harmful ways? Do others know that you are not interested in unhealthy antagonism or competition? How can you take steps to inform them?
4. “Love your enemies,” Part I: Do you recognize the humanity of those who you might call your “enemies”? If you did, how would that affect the way you treat them? Perform an act of real kindness this week for someone who is not always on your side!
5. “Love your enemies,” Part II: are you an advocate, even for people who might be perceived as your “enemies”? In either small-scale or large-scale ways, pray for an opportunity to insist on the right treatment of someone who is not always on your side!

To return to where we started, what I most hope for for each of you during this series is that you will find your bumper sticker: 

find that core Truth in God’s word-in Jesus’s words-that sticks in you and won’t let go…and then dig at it. Don’t brush it off; instead, pray for the Holy Spirit to grant you discernment, pray for God to speak clearly to you about what He would have you do about it, and then open your life up to change. If there is one thing I know about following Jesus, it’s that you never stop moving; He doesn’t let your feet (or your heart) rest very often! But following Jesus is also all that really matters; it’s what we, as a church, HAVE to be about. So, go, friends: wrestle.

Let’s pray.