All Manner of Thing Shall Be Well (February 23, 2025)
Genesis 45:3-11, 15; Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50; Luke 6:27-38
Jesus looked up at his disciples and said: “Love your enemies, do good, lend expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great. Because you will be children of the Most High, who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”
I was chatting the other day with a friend who was having a real hard time with one of her co-workers. The co-worker was blaming a problem on my friend, which my friend thought was uncalled for and the confrontation left her feeling unsettled and upset. The next day, she casually mentioned the incident to another co-worker who said, “Oh yes, she does that to me too, all the time.” Turns out everybody had had the same experience with being blamed unfairly for something by this same co-worker.
Has something like that ever happened to you? Someone says or does something hurtful to you and it really bothers you, it gnaws at you, it takes over your life. And then you find out – oh, I’m not the one with a problem – she is obviously the one with issues. She’s trying to drag me into her issues. And when I ruminate all day long about it – how dare she blame me for that! why is she trying to throw me under the bus? what did I do to deserve such unfair accusations? – I’m choosing to let her drag me into her issues.
And I have the power to make a different choice. I can choose not to allow myself to be drawn into somebody else’s issues. I can say: I’m sorry you have issues, but that’s between you and the Almighty, I’m not letting you drag me down with you. And my experience is that this is the healthier choice – for me, certainly, but for the other person too. If they just keep lashing out at others without pushback, they’ll never have to confront whatever it is that makes them do what they’re doing and they’ll never find peace either.
That is part of what Jesus is getting at with his teaching to love and to forgive our enemies. True, it’s not good for us to pretend that bad things people have done to us aren’t that bad, are no big deal. But it’s also not good for us to dwell on the harms that have been done to us. It’s good for us to say – yes, what you did was wrong and it hurt me, but I choose not to let your problem become the story of my life. I am worth more than that, and frankly you are worth more than that. I choose to be free of what you’ve done to me.
There is much wisdom in this approach … it’s something that we could all probably do better at. There is so much to be angry about in the world today, so much to be outraged about, and so many people encouraging us to feel outraged because it serves their narrow purposes. It is worth remembering those times when we’ve been able to rise above those feelings of hurt and anger and to free ourselves from them – and to try to do that more and more. And this is, I think, part of what Jesus is getting at with his advice to his disciples to forgive and love even our enemies. And even this part of his teaching is wise and helpful advice for all of us.
But there is another dimension to this teaching of Jesus, which I think becomes apparent in the (at first glance) unrelated Scripture text today from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Today’s second reading is simply the third week we’ve been reading from chapter 15 of First Corinthians, where Paul addresses the topic of the resurrection. Which seems like a completely different topic from the love of enemies – but it really isn’t, and let me explain why.
Paul writes this chapter to the church in Corinth because some people in that congregation are having trouble believing that Jesus is risen from the dead. For them it was simply logical – the dead do not come back to life – and if they do, if their heart stops and they seem dead for a little while but then they come back – well, that means they weren’t really dead after all. Eventually we all die and that’s it. So, they figured, when Paul talks about Jesus being alive again, Paul must be speaking metaphorically. Jesus lives on in our memories, in our good deeds as we put his teachings into practice, he lives on in our hearts, something like that. But he can’t really be alive again after dying. These members of the Corinthian community have asked Paul to confirm their understanding.
And Paul says, no, wrong, absolutely not. In the two readings from the start of this chapter we had the last two weeks, Paul insists that the resurrection of Jesus totally, absolutely, for sure, really happened. Two weeks ago, Paul said, take it from me, I saw the risen Christ myself, and so did many others before me, so if you don’t want to take it from me, take it from them. And if Jesus isn’t actually really risen from the dead, Paul said in last Sunday’s reading, this whole Christian faith thing is pointless and makes no sense.
But in this week’s reading, Paul says, we also shouldn’t think that when Jesus rose from the dead he simply went back to the same mortal life that he lived for 33 years until the day of his crucifixion and just picked up where he left off. Paul says that our mortal physical life is to resurrection life as the seed is to the mature tree – yes, it is the “same thing” that lives and grows and evolves and every tree starts out as a seed, but in a sense the seed has to give up its life as a seed if it is ever going to become the tree that it was always meant to become.
The risen Jesus is the same Jesus who walked and breathed and lived a finite existence in the Middle East for 33 years back in the first century, but the risen Jesus now lives fully in the Kingdom of God. The risen Jesus now lives fully the life that God intends all humanity to share one day, beyond death, where all wrongs have been made right and all relationships have been restored. On this side of death we have a hard time imagining what that might be like, how it is possible for all wrongs to be made right – including the wrongs I have done and the wrongs that have been done to me.
But, Paul insists, Jesus lives that life now, and just as in Jesus God came to share our mortal life of pain and suffering, our world of broken relationships where people do terrible things to one another, just as Jesus shared this finite life with us, so we are destined to share infinite and immortal life with him. “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust,” Paul wrote, “we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.” We will be changed, and although it is as unimaginable to us now as life as a mature tree is unimaginable to the seed, we were made for a world where all relationships are restored, all sufferings are redeemed, all wrongs are made right, and the resurrection of Jesus is our assurance that God will really do this and is in fact beginning to make this promise real right here and now.
After all, is there any teaching of Jesus more fundamental and central than this: The Kingdom of God is at hand, change your ways and trust this good news. The earthly Jesus taught people that, if only we have the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it and the faith to trust, the Kingdom of God is not only a future reality awaiting us after death, but is already something we can live and experience right now. And Paul – who did not know the earthly Jesus – experienced the risen Jesus as confirmation of this message.
For those of us who are “in Christ,” Paul insists, resurrection life has already begun. We are already by baptism joined to Christ’s death and Christ’s resurrection. We already eat and drink at the table as redeemed and forgiven people. We already see in our community broken relationships restored, joys and sorrows freely shared, the love which “keeps no record of wrongs” embodied. We have this not as our own achievement but as a gift from God, the beginnings of what God intends to make fully real for all people and indeed all creation, as much of it right now as our faith enables us to receive.
And so loving and forgiving others, even our enemies, is not simply advice from Jesus about how to live with freedom in an imperfect and often outrageously unjust world. It is simply what it looks like to start living into the reality of the reign of God where God “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” in order that they might become grateful and reconciled. It is not something we have to do, but something we get to do – to already start living the life of the risen Jesus, a life where all relationships are restored and all wrongs made right. And all it takes is faith – faith that Jesus truly is risen, faith that we are already being taken up into the risen life of Jesus, faith to live with the same mercy that God has shown to us.