This coming Sunday is the 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time and our gospel is the second part of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Today we offer a final thought on this gospel from David Lose: “So after setting out his crazy – at least according to our experience in the world – vision for the Christian life, he does two things. First, he assails the logic of the kingdom of the world. How can we honor things we do out of our own self interest? Doing good to those who do good to us, loving those who love us, may be the norm, but it is essentially self-centered and nothing to be admired or emulated. And following in that pattern won’t move us beyond the violence-saturated and scarcity-driven history of the world. We have to find a new way forward.

“Second, he offers the only motivation strong enough to withstand the pull of the culture to look out first and foremost for our own interests and invite us to take that new path. He point us, that is, to the very nature of God – the one who is merciful and loving even to those who don’t deserve it.

“And that includes us.

This coming Sunday is the 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time and our gospel is the second part of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. In a previous post we noted the range of meaning of one’s enemies, the most subtle of meanings pointed, not to oppressors or opponents, but to those not in your circle of friends and acquaintances. Or put another way, outside your sphere of the demands of patronage. 

As previously mentioned, the world often (mostly?) operates on a system of patronage. The hallmarks of which are consistency and reciprocity: act in such-and-such a way so that you will be treated the same. And depending on where you are in the social or economic strata, you can establish obligations and dependence by others (or to others). It seems to describe lives marked by the calculations of balanced reciprocity—that is, by a circle of exchange that turns gifts into debts that must be repaid. To that worldly equilibrium, Jesus says:

This coming Sunday is the 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time and our gospel is the second part of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. In a previous post we noted the radicalness of Jesus’ preaching – perhaps not to our ears – but certainly to the listeners in the first century whose norm was lex talionis or “law of retaliation,” a familiar ethic from the Old Testament or at least how it was understood. In our reading Jesus is commanding a different ethic: “But to you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” (Luke 6:27)

Culpepper [147] notes that the “imperative to love one’s enemies an have a range of meanings, depending on its context: Win over your opponent by kindness; take the moral high road; shame our enemy by your superior goodness; deflect hostility or prevent further abuse by offering no resistance; rise above pettiness; or demonstrate a Christ-like character as a Christian witness. These interpretations are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, but they do suggest the range of means the command can have. Especially when taken individually, the exhortations in this section can be applied widely and virtually indiscriminately. The problems for interpretation concern the source of these teachings, their settings in the ministry of Jesus and in Luke, and the determination of contemporary contexts in which their application would be appropriate.”