MattGlover.com

Lot’s of things have been happening around the place lately, none of which promote a regular opportunity for blogging. However the college semester starts soon and I now have a laptop…not that I would dare blog in the middle of a class…

Anyway, circumstances have worked out in a way that means I’m now doing the boss’ job as well as my own for a while. This happened at short notice, so I’ve got a couple of extra speaking gigs that I didn’t plan for. So it’s time to dust of the sermon archive and see what I can revive or build on.

As it turns out, the one I’m doing this coming Sunday is one from Romans that I never quite got around to blogging about, but caused quite a bit of discussion amongst those that heard it.

It has to do with subversive love, and in particular, how we love our enemies. The passage is Romans 12:9-21.

Up until this point, Paul has taken his time to lay some careful theological foundations for living the Christian life in a hostile setting. Here he lets fly with a string of short, sharp instructions that are all based around love. It could be summarised by picking out four phrases like this:

Show sincere love

Bless those who persecute you

Don’t repay evil with evil

Live at peace with everyone

This is perhaps the first time we see Paul using very similar language to Jesus. The love your enemies/turn the other cheek stuff must have seemed outrageous, almost impossible, for the disciples. Obviously it hasn’t got any easier in the few years to when Paul was writing.

Paul calls this love sincere. That’s probably an unfortunate term in that we often associate it with being warm and fuzzy. But love for enemies can’t be that - nobody feels any sort of warmth for their enemies. You don’t ‘fall in love’ with somebody that hates your guts, but have to make a deliberate choice that intentionally sees you act with compassion to those that want to hurt you.

What does that look like? Sometimes I’ve heard people wonder if it means you simply lay down and let people walk all over you. At first glance this seems to be what Jesus did when he allowed himself to be arrested.

The deeper you look though, the more to it there seems to be. Another term for the love that Jesus displayed and that Paul talks about is subversive love. This is the sort of love that causes a persecutor to stop their actions for a moment and consider an alternative that is being held in front of them.

When Jesus told his disciples to turn the other cheek, it wasn’t simply an invitation to be hit again. Read in it’s cultural setting with an appreciation for the significance of the subtleties of the story, it actually becomes a challenge to the authority of the Romans. It’s not laying down to be walked over, nor is it retaliating. Instead it is living an alternative that promotes equality and compassion between all.

Ghandi displayed this sort of subversive love when he lead the push for Indian independence form the British Empire. Rosa Parks displayed this sort of subversive love when she refused to give up her seat as segregation laws demanded she do. Jesus displayed this sort of love by giving his life so that all may be given life.

This type of thinking confronts us with all sorts of hard questions (none of which I can answer very well).

Firstly, how can so called Christian countries justify bombing the crap out of Muslim countries and call that an act of subversive love? The weapons of mass destruction never existed; the dictator is long executed; the body count on both sides rises everyday; and nobody can really say why it is still happening? To me, this is not love at all.

But what do we do, then, with those stories of the Old Testament in which God sends his people to war? What do we do when a Hitler starts executing people just because of their race? Getting more personal, if I saw anybody assaulting one of my kids or my wife, there would be no act of subversive love that I could think of - my only reaction would be to pound the snot out of anyone who trying to hurt those I love. And if that meant killing them, so be it.

In the 300’s an Egyptian theologian by the name of Augustine came up with a “Just War” theory in an effort to try and work out when it was acceptable to use violence in conflict. His motivation was to try and work out how far love for enemies really extended. Interestingly, no war that has ever been fought in the history of the world has ever met all the criteria for being classified as a ‘just war’. That’s the reality of how hard this teaching is.

In the end, the only things that I could conclude were these:

We are called to be people of peace.

We are also called to be people of integrity.

We are called to be subversive, even radical, in the way we show love to our enemies.

And we should only use violence as a very, very last resort.

For me, this was a sobering way to finished the message:

As people persecute us, may our prayer be the
same as Jesus on the Cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what
they do.”

And even more urgently, as we live in a country
that oppresses others, pray, “God forgive us, for we know what we do, but
keep doing it anyway.”