The Sixth Sunday after Trinity

“I say to you that listen, Love your enemies”

 As I’ve been announcing on Sundays the last little while, a handful of us are reading through the short but jam-packed Epistle of St. James for the last five Thursdays, and thankfully we’ve been reading through it very slowly.

It’s a sign, I think, of the importance and timelessness of what James has to tell us in the Epistle, but also maybe a sign of our interest and even our need to hear them. We aren’t lingering on passages, we are taking bites and ruminating on them, talking our way through the challenges and difficulties of what James is telling us is our faith.

What James sees as faith is this, summed up sternly at the end of chapter one, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” In brief: the sign of there being true faith or religion within us is that we love our neighbours (and thereby God, in whose image they are created), and keep ourselves unstained, or maybe uninfluenced, by the world.

The world has such a grip on us, our minds, and our hearts, it speaks to us through social media, the news, friends, various movements and ideologies that want our allegiance: remember I spoke about how we don’t live in an age marked by compassion but by cancellation, ‘cancel culture’, the fundamental undergirding idea of which is that there is no such thing as redemption, that people cannot change, that people cannot be forgiven – or worse, they’re unworthy of it.

We likewise get stained by the world when we turn away from the beggar, when we tacitly support or fail to see that so much of our own wealth and luxuries come at the cost of others who must suffer. No, we’re not enslaving the people suffering horrible conditions who make our cell phones, Nikes, or lithium batteries, but then again – we’re not complaining about their treatment from our iPhone either, are we?

The point with all of this, the point that James is getting to, is that faith must also have legs. Faith is not inert, it’s transformative and if we say we have faith but aren’t being transformed both inwardly and outwardly by our relationship with the Father through Jesus, then it’s a relationship we may need to work on. James hammers home the point that it is by our works that the genuineness of our faith is shown, “Faith without works is dead,” he says.

Now, I don’t think when James talks about good works he just means boy-scout good deeds, he means all of the outward ways that faith changes us.

If our faith is like a seed planted within, then our good works, our love, our living out the principles of God’s Kingdom are the like the plant and the fruit that spring up from the seed: we know the seed is there, and healthy, and rooted not because we see the seed, but we see the plant laden with fruit.

If we say we have faith – the seed – but dry, barren soil above, if we still harbour hate or prejudice in our hearts, if we struggle to love our neighbours, if we are still holding on to anger and bitterness, unforgiving and unrepentant…then how would we say that seed is doing? Our faith does not simply make us want to do good and loving works, but when faith is in us like a healthy planted seed it cannot help but bring forth the fruit of good works; your ability to love, forgive, give, and pray is a sign that the seed is growing.

Faith also demands a lot, and none of it is easy, but they are the target for which we’re aiming. Jesus’ words in Luke’s Gospel today are just such an example, “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.”

We cannot, cannot, miss or gloss over how radical a call on our lives this is especially now in 2023, in an era marked by revelations of the abuse of people or institutions in positions of power or influence, and by the total rejection of the possibility of forgiveness or redemption for them.

The call on our lives is not to be like the world and cast off those who hurt us or others, but to plunge into the very heart of the darkness of human sin, suffering, and misery itself and bring love and forgiveness. This is God’s love, and this is what Jesus did when he plunged into the darkness of this world to bring the light of forgiveness.

To pray for our abusers, love our enemies, and forgive our oppressors is not saying that the wrongs committed against us are okay or that people get a pass from them, but it is to proclaim what the world rejects: that there is another and a better way, that God can mend all and God can redeem all, even the worst of what our human hearts of capable of.

Now no doubt you read and hear this and think in your head, “Ha, that’s a nice thought but I can’t do it.” That person you’re thinking of right now, that one whom you cannot seem to forgive even though your anger has been burning a hole in your heart for years, probably hurting you more than them – you think to yourself that you cannot possibly forgive them, love them, pray for them.

 And you’re right. You can’t, I can’t, your neighbour can’t. It is an entirely impossible task. But…as with most things when it comes to Jesus, there’s good news.

In the Epistle today Paul is saying that through our baptisms and through our faith in Jesus we become a part of his life and a part of his death and a part of his resurrection. “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that…we might no longer be enslaved to sin,” in Him and through Him we are new people, like prisoners whose shackles have been cut free, people who now, “walk in newness of life.”

Just as he died and rose, so have we already died and rose to a new kind of life, “you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ.” All it means, simply, is not that we are never going to sin again or fail to love, but now we have forgiveness, now we know and can walk that better and more virtuous way.

So no, you can never love your neighbour, you can never love your enemy, nor forgive your abuser, nor do good to people who hate you…but God can and indeed he is doing these things in you and through you as signs of your faith, right now.

And if you feel He’s not, if that bitterness remains and forgiveness still seems impossible – then ask for faith, and ask for grace and it will be given you.

“I say to you that listen, Love your enemies”