Not Niceness

The scriptures referred to are 1 Corinthians 13 and Luke 4:21-30.

In Douglas Adams' sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the narrator says it takes place “nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.” In the TV version of Neil Gaiman's and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, a demon and an angel are at the crucifixion. The demon asks, “What has he said that made everyone so upset?” The angel replies, “Be kind to each other.” The demon says, “Oh yeah. That'll do it.” In Monty Python's Life of Brian, there is actually a scene of Jesus saying the Beatitudes. And then the camera pulls way back and we spend most of our time with people on the fringes of the crowd who can't quite hear what Jesus is saying. The film isn't about Jesus, though it had its start in a comment Eric Idle said to the press when asked what the next Python film would be. “Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory,” the comedian quipped. And the other members of the group thought about it. But upon studying Jesus they decided he wouldn't make a good subject for satire. Satire attacks what's bad. So they decided to focus instead on fanatical followers, both religious and political, in their story about a guy born in the next manger over from Jesus who gets mistaken for the Messiah.

But that's typical of how Jesus is treated in our culture. He is sidelined, dismissed as not interesting or terribly relevant to the main action of the story. This is glaringly obvious when you consider how many films are made about the Biblical apocalypse which conveniently leave out the return of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, to concentrate on the deaths and disasters. In the comedy Rapture-Palooza Jesus gets shot out of the sky as he comes to earth. This gets him out of the way so that there can be a karate battle between God and the Antichrist.

Try to recall an action movie where the hero tells the villain he loves him and forgives him. You probably can't. There may be one out there but I'll bet it did badly at the box office. We don't want to love or forgive our enemies. We want action and conflict and writers realize Jesus would put a damper on all that.

Which is why they also water down what Jesus said and make it into Hallmark card sentiments, like “Be nice.” Jesus never said, “Be nice.” Jesus himself wasn't always nice. Jesus said, “Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Forgive every wrong against you. Turn the other cheek. Go the extra mile. Disown yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” That's what people objected to. That's what got him killed.

It was not niceness but love that Jesus preached. And it wasn't just love of your family and friends and your own group. Jesus said we are to be like God our Father. And God loves the whole world, as it famously says in John 3:16. It is that radical love that goes beyond the people you already love, that extends even to those who hate you, that Jesus commands of us and which people refuse to do.

Though we don't want to love our enemies, we want to have them. Here in the US, when the cold war ended, and our enemy wasn't out there anymore, we felt we still needed an enemy. And so we turned to people in our country that dared to use their freedom of thought and speech and behavior to think and speak and behave differently. And the same thing was happening in Jesus' day. Jews would identify as Pharisees or Sadducees or Zealots or Essenes, all with quite different ideas of what their nation should be like and how to achieve that. And when they revolted against Rome, and the Zealots took Jerusalem, they found it was actually easy to defend against siege by Roman troops. They could have held out. But eventually the different Jewish parties within the city turned on each other and decimated their ranks. Which made it easier for Rome to defeat them. Forget loving their enemy; they couldn't even love their neighbor. Because they turned their neighbor into the enemy. The Pythons did their research on all the factionalism in first century Judea, with, of course, an eye to the contemporary world. Someone once said that if you want to destroy a group, give them power and they will do it themselves.

In today's gospel, which really should have not been cut off from last week's passage, we get the aftermath to Jesus reading from Isaiah in his hometown synagogue. If you remember the scripture he read said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” And afterwards, Jesus says, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” This week we learn of his townspeople's reactions. “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” But what Jesus says next is not so nice.

Luke only hints at what Jesus is reacting to. He says the people asked, “Is this not Joseph's son?” Mark in his account goes into more detail. He tells us, “Many who heard him were astonished, saying, 'Where did he get these ideas? And what is this wisdom that has been given to him? What are these miracles that are done through his hands? Isn't this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And aren't his sisters here with us?' and so they took offense at him.” (Mark 6:2-3) The Greek word translated “took offense” is skandalizo, the word from which we get scandalize. Literally it means “to put a snare or stumbling block in someone's way,” and thus “to hinder right thought or conduct.” And what was it that hindered their believing in him? The fact that they knew him and his family. In other words, they were thinking, “You're nothing special. We know where you came from. We know your mother got pregnant before your father married her. We knew you when you were a snot-nosed kid. How can you be the Messiah?” Oddly enough they echo Nathaniel who said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46) Mark also tells us of Jesus, “He was not able to do a miracle there, except to lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed because of their unbelief.” (Mark 6:5-6) Because they wouldn't trust him, he couldn't work with them. That true of any relationship and especially a relationship with God.

That's why Luke records Jesus saying, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things we have heard you did in Capernaum. Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.” And then he goes on to talk about how the prophets Elijah and Elisha had more success helping and healing 2 Gentiles. Probably they had no expectations of the prophets and were more open to trusting them. (Though Naaman had to be convinced by his servants to do as Elisha said.) But Jesus bringing up the idea that God might show love and mercy to people outside their group enraged them. And a mob grabbed him and tried to throw him off of the hill on which the village was built. Throwing someone from a height was often the first step in stoning them.

But Jesus just turned and walked through the crowd. I imagine it was his sheer presence and sense of authority that allowed him to do that. He turned and looked at them and they moved out of his way. And then he moved his base of operations to Capernaum.

It is odd that some people take less offense at a God of judgment than a God of love and forgiveness. And it is easier to get folks upset over and energized against other people than to stir up compassion for them. It is easy to rally folks against, say, refugees trying to get to the US than to show empathy for people who are, after all, fleeing warring drug cartels. In a recent episode of Trafficked with Mariana Van Zeller, the journalist did something different. Rather than following criminals smuggling things like drugs into the US, she followed criminals smuggling firearms out of the US to Mexico, at the rate of 2000 weapons a day. That enables the cartels to fight over territory, which in turn causes the people caught in the crossfire to leave and seek the safety of our country. Van Zeller points out that the criminals aren't the ones coming here; they are staying put and staking their claims to various parts of our neighbor Mexico. And they are being supplied weapons by a network of American criminals in exchange for drugs. Blaming the refugees is blaming the victims.

In the same episode, Van Zeller does something else she rarely does. Rather than just following and talking to police and criminals, she follows some victims, a group of Mexican mothers who every weekend go into the wilderness and look for disturbed ground. Then they dig, hoping to find the remains of their children whom the cartels have “disappeared.” The leader of these mothers is a woman whose son was a decorated police officer, who had been kidnapped from his home one night by cartel thugs. He has not been seen since. She and these other women are trying to at least recover the bodies of their children. It moves Van Zeller, herself a mother, to hug the woman as she cries.

A mother's love for her own flesh and blood is natural. Jesus said that if we only love those who love us, there is nothing special about that. We are to go beyond that. We are to love as God loves, with no exemptions. (Matthew 5:43-48) Jesus raises the bar on love.

In the act for which he is known worldwide, even by non-Christians, Jesus goes further. He not only preaches love; he not only heals all who ask him, including Gentiles; he dies on the cross for the whole world. And he doesn't just die for the “good” people. Paul reminds us that “God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) It is rare for someone to die for a good person, he points out. But God Incarnate died for the ungodly. Why in the world would he do that? Because he loves us.

While Paul's chapter on love is traditionally read at weddings, the Greek word he uses is not eros, which means romantic love, but agape, divine love. So Paul is describing the love God has for us, which we in turn should have for each other. You could translate this passage, “Divine love is patient; divine love is kind; divine love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” And just to emphasize what we are talking about, let's replace the pronouns. “Divine love does not insist on its own way; divine love is not irritable or resentful; divine love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Divine love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Divine love never ends.” Or as J.B. Phillips paraphrased it: “[Divine] Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.” That's true of God's love. That's true of real Christian love as well.

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus told his disciples, “I give you a new commandment—to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:34) We are not simply to love each other in an ordinary way, but to love each other as Jesus loves us. And the very next day, he died for us. Jesus calls us to self-sacrificial love. Parents love their children that way. Couples should love that way. Paul said, “Each of you should be concerned not only about your own interests but about the interests of others as well. You should have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had, who though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be clung to, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing human nature. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death—even death on the cross!” (Philippians 2:4-8) Jesus gave up more than we can imagine for us. That is the kind of love to which he calls us.

But isn't that naive? Especially loving one's enemies. What will you accomplish by that? Using non-violent protests Martin Luther King got the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968 passed. Gandhi got independence from Britain for India the same way. And of course, with no retaliation on his part, Jesus Christ saved us from our sins. There aren't a lot of examples of this because we don't do things that way very often. Instead we fight, for ourselves or for our group. And to hell with everyone else. And then we wonder why our world is the way it is, full of conflict and exploitation and pain and trauma.

G.K. Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” He understates our situation. It is in fact impossible for human beings to live out that ideal. But with God all things are possible.

And the Christian ideal is not merely to be nice. Evil people can be nice to lull their victims into a false sense of security. The Christian ideal isn't even to simply treat others as we would like to be treated. Every religion has some form of the Golden Rule. The Christian ideal is to love others as Jesus Christ loves us, with no exceptions.

Will we fail? Of course! All efforts to do something supremely difficult, let alone impossible, fail at first. You must persist, getting incrementally better, day by day.

And if we only had this lifetime to master divine love we would fail. And if we only had our natural capacity to love we would fail. But we have all eternity and we have the Spirit of the God who is love within us, transforming us into new creations in Christ. And we are told that, one day, “we will be like him.” (1 John 3:2) The image of the God who is love so clearly seen in Jesus will at last be seen in all its beauty and goodness in us. Isn't that worth it? Then why wait? Let's get started. Let us love one another as Jesus loves us.