Pastor Tom Johnson, February 20, 2022
Today we continue Jesus’ “Sermon on the Plain.” Our text features The Golden Rule or The Royal Law: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” or “Do unto others as you would have them to to you.” God teaches us to treat others with the same kind of treatment that we would want to receive—the same kind of kindness, understanding, putting the best construction on things, being patient, and imagining what it would be like to be in another’s shoes. This is no moral or ethical prescription to cure our relationship problems. In fact, Jesus complicates things further when he says we are to love our enemies, pray for our enemies, and do good to our enemies. This is no easy task. Jesus says that even unbelievers take the easy road of loving people that love them back.
This is the way of the Cross: to love our enemies with no expectation in return. This is a risky love—to love those who may never return the love we give but may even despise and trample all over it just as Jesus was despised, rejected, and crucified. At the very heart of this godly love is mercy. Mercy is rooted in the character of God. Mercy is God’s nature. You’ll remember that when Moses asked to see God, God put Moses in the cleft of a rock and revealed himself in self-descriptive words: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). The biblical idea of mercy is when God does not give us the judgment, condemnation, and punishment that we deserve.
Mercy is synonymous with pity, compassion, and empathy. God’s mercy is based in his full knowledge of who we are and our whole story. He is merciful because he knows that we are all born into a sinful and broken world. He is merciful because he knows our frame—that we are but dust and to dust we shall return. He is merciful because he knows the struggles we have inherited in our past. He is merciful because the work he began in us he will bring to completion. He is merciful because he is intimately acquainted with our failures, flaws, setbacks, the injustice we have suffered. He knows the wrong we have done and the wrongs that we have endured. He is merciful because he knows we are a work in progress. God is merciful because he is up to something greater than the sum of all our sins. He is at work in us to will and to do his good pleasure. In mercy, he sent his only Son to be tempted in every way yet without sin. In mercy, he sent Jesus as Savior so that we would not suffer judgment, condemnation, and punishment for our sins.
And so God asks us to be merciful. He is not asking us to do anything that he has not done for us. That is why Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Here is the catch: we cannot be merciful to others if we do not understand God’s mercy toward us. If we do not know God to be merciful—if we are not grateful for all the mercy he has extended toward us, we will not know how to extend it to others. We love because God first loved us. We are merciful because God was first merciful toward us. We cannot extend mercy or be merciful unless we are acquainted with God’s mercy.
The genius of Jesus telling us to love and pray for our enemies is this: we cannot and we will not love our enemies until we revisit our own experience in the Gospel. We need to see how God’s mercy transformed our lives first. We must go into the archives of our souls, dig into our memory banks, and bring to mind God’s mercy toward us. We remember how much understanding, how much undeserved grace, and how much forgiveness we have experienced. And if we have no recollection of such mercy, it’s time to have a come to Jesus moment! All that garbage from our past, all those skeletons in our closets, all the guilt, all the shame, all the regrets, all the pride, the feelings of unworthiness, all the anger, all the resentment in our lives has been nailed to the Cross of Calvary in the Body of Jesus. What you and I deserve for all our flaws and failures has been crucified with Christ. Scripture says that “if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old self has passed away. Behold the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). God has treated us with divine mercy. So we should extend this mercy toward others. That means that we must think before we act. We must be quick to listen and slow to speak. In the Gospel, all our enemies are potential objects of God’s mercy. God is up to something. He is about the business of mercy. He has a unlimited supply of mercy. He is working on his global supply chain of mercy. You and I are the wheelers and dealers of divine mercy. And God loves it most when we deliver that mercy to those we think deserve it the least. In order to participate in this divine supply chain of mercy, we need to get over our own self-imposed obstacles. But even more importantly, we need to believe that God is up to something. God is up to something even in the lives of our enemies.
In our Old Testament reading, Joseph remembers all the cruel and wicked things his brothers did to him including throwing him in a pit, leaving him for dead, and selling him as a slave to Egypt. Joseph had every right to be angry, resentful, and even vengeful. But Joseph knows the goodness of God. He believes God was up to something through slavery, prison, and now as governor of Egypt. Joseph recounts his own life story and considers himself blessed. So he is able to love his enemies—even the brothers who so wickedly betrayed him. Joseph knows that God is up to something in their lives too. God uses the good, bad, and the ugly to bring mercy, life, and salvation to the world. So he says, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.”
This is how God deals with evil—even the worst evil imaginable—even our collective sin as humanity when we crucified the Son of Glory. We killed Messiah who cried forgiveness from the Cross. We buried him. But God was up to something. What we buried in dishonor, God raised in glory, power, forgiveness, and eternal life. This is the story of what God is doing in the world. He loves his enemies with unfathomable mercy—mercy so powerful that it transforms them into friends of God.
How can your pardon reach and bless
the unforgiving heart,
that broods on wrongs and will not let
old bitterness depart?
Lord, cleanse the depths within our souls,
and bid resentment cease;
then, bound to all in bonds of love,
our lives will spread your peace.
(“Forgive Our Sins as We Forgive” LSB 843 vv. 2 & 4)
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