“When Expected Norms are Reversed”
February 23, 2025
Luke 6:27–38
“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
“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. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” ***
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. The book
is set in the1930’s in a small Alabama town. It is the coming-of-age story about a young girl named Scout Finch who witnesses her father Atticus defend a Black man accused of rape. The story challenges racism and prejudice while promoting empathy, understanding and how good and evil can coexist in people and communities.
In a dramatic part of the story, Atticus’ children are watching as a group of white men surround him while one threatens him if he does not stop defending the Black man.
Later Atticus explains to his children that the man who threatened him was a product of what he has encountered in this world. Atticus teaches them not to judge the man for his behavior, but to see that turning the other cheek is the answer.
Luke’s account of the “Sermon on the Plain” presents a vision of life in which new ethics are to mark individual and communal life — all under the reign of God come in Jesus.
The ethics of the new reign come in Jesus are: Love your enemies. Pray for them. Do not judge. Forgive. Give to everyone. Lend and expect nothing in return. These are not transactional ethics.
In transactional ethics. what you do dictates what I do. When we return hate with hate, the original hate has won. It inspires and directs our actions. In the reign of God what we do is not directed by what others do to us. What we do is a response to the God who alone fills us, the God who “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”
Jesus offers his ethic as a way for the community of his followers to resist the tit-for-tat of the present age, not to be passive in the face of it. When we live the ethic of the Sermon on the Plain in the face of this world’s violence, we are collectively saying to those who hate, abuse, strike, judge, and condemn, “You are not the boss of me.” We are demonstrating that bad behavior cannot goad us into reacting in kind. We are resisting the evils we deplore.
In our day, imagine what this would be like? For God’s people, loving, lending, and doing good are all about generosity that does not draw boundaries based on the recipients’ responses. It is good to keep in mind that love in this passage is about willing good for another and acting on that will.
Roy Cohn (1927–1986) was an American lawyer and unrepentant political hitman who gained a reputation as a ruthless prosecutor for his contribution to the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union in 1951 and executed by electric chair in 1953.
He came to prominence as chief counsel for Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy who chaired a Senate subcommittee in 1954 which led the mass interrogation and purging of federal employees who were accused of being communists, known as the Second Red Scare.
Cohn was indicted four times for stock-swindling, obstructing justice, lying under oath, bribery, conspiracy, extortion, blackmail and filing false reports. He didn’t pay his taxes, racking up millions of dollars in liens. Taxes, he believed, went to “welfare recipients” and “political hacks” and “bloated bureaucrats” and “countries whose people hate our guts.” Three times he was acquitted — the fourth ended in a mistrial. “I decided long ago,” Cohn once told Penthouse, “to make my own rules.” (Politico, Michael Kruse, September 19, 2019)
In 1978, Ken Auletta wrote an Esquire profile of the then disbarred Cohn: “He fights his cases as if they were his own. It is war. If he feels his adversary has been unfair, it is war to the death. No white flags. No Mr. Nice Guy.” To the end, Cohn lived his motto that when you get hit, you hit back harder.
Jesus comes into this world of sin and division and brings a new order, where expected norms are radically reversed. He says, “But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return… Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Love your enemies. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.
I confess to being perplexed about these practices for today. How does the faithful Christian striving to live out the ways of Jesus respond to the wrongs and meanness that seem so prevalent? Retribution and revenge are delicious for some people when they feel wronged. Turning the other cheek appears unrealistic in such a cruel and violent world. The angry with power often run over those who do not retaliate.
Luke tells us of God’s new order come in Jesus for a weary, angry world. His ethic makes all the difference in the way we respond to other people. Loving and praying for our enemies, going the extra mile even in the face of adversity, means living in hope and acting toward the possibility that even the hardest parts of life can be transformed by the upside down, radically reversed nature of God in our world.
Prayer: Reform our deformed lives Excerpted from Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.
The words are familiar to us and we are filled with yearning.
So we say them, passionately, filled with hope — liberty, mercy, freedom, release, grace, peace.
We have some fleeting notion of what we must have in order to live our lives fully.
We dare ask for the middle wall of hostility to be broken down, between liberals and conservatives in the church, between haves and have-nots, between victims and perpetrators, and in all those arenas infatuated with violence, rage, and hate. We know we are not meant for abusiveness, but we stutter before our vocation as peacemakers.
Transform us beyond our fearfulness, our timidity, our excessive certitude, that we may be vulnerable enough to be peacemakers, and so to be called your very own children.
Our world grows weary of the battering and the vicious cycles that devour us. We seem to have no capacity to break those vicious cycles of anti-neighborliness and self-hate. We turn, like our people always have, to you, single source of newness. Make us, altogether, new.
Form us in freedom, wholeness and gentleness. Reform our deformed lives toward obedience, which is our only freedom, praise which is our only poetry, and love which is our only option.
Our confidence matches our need, so we pray to you. Amen.
