Luke 6:36-42
Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful
- In our gospel reading today, Jesus tells us to show mercy to our neighbours, as God has shown mercy to us, by doing 3 things:
- Not judging or condemning
- Forgiving our neighbours
- Helping those in need
- Jesus tells us to do these things out of faith and gratitude, so that we can be the blessing to our neighbours that God has called us to be.
In our gospel text Luke tells us that Jesus is addressing and teaching his disciples. He is preparing them to preach the gospel as his representatives. He warns them that the world will be offended by their message and will treat them as enemies, that the gospel will be looked upon as an affront by most people. In verse 22 of this chapter, he says:
22 “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man!”
And how true that is today as we share the gospel with others. So how does Jesus tell his disciples, and us, to respond to this hostile world?
There are 3 things:
First, we are not to judge or condemn.
Second, we are to forgive our neighbour.
Third, we are to help those in need.
… and we are to do these things unconditionally, with no strings attached. Let’s look at the first if these commands:
We are not to judge or condemn
According to a recent study of people aged 16–29 in the United States, nearly 90 percent of respondents think Christians are judgemental. But here in our gospel text for today Jesus explicitly says that we shouldn’t judge or condemn others. 37j“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned”
And our secular society seems to agree with Jesus’ teaching.
Don’t judge, just affirm. Affirm everyone else’s lifestyle, no matter how wrong or self-destructive they seem. Same sex marriage, abortion, assisted suicide, all good, right?
The slogans #BeKind, “Love is Love” and “Love Not Hate”, that often appear next to rainbow flags, at first sight seem to simply be 21st century versions of Jesus’ commands. After all, “God is love”.
And they are correct, God is love. We should love and not hate people, we should be kinder.
As 2 Timothy 2:24 tells us:
24 And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone,
But these simplistic slogans entirely ignore the majority of Scripture, or twist it to fit a “be nice” well intended, but utterly flawed, narrative. They miss the most important element of God’s love.
… God’s holiness.
The creator of everything, the infinite, omnipresent Holy God is perfect, hates and abhors sin, His Holiness demands perfection, but we are very far from perfect.
So out of His incredible love for us, He gave His Son as the atonement, the payment for our sin, so that we can be reconciled to God and inherit eternal life.
Our sin demands a payment, and that payment was the humiliation and death of His only Son.
That is true Love with a capital ‘L’. God’s love isn’t a “be nice to each other” love. It isn’t a love that condones immorality and sin. It’s the love that Paul describes in Romans 5:8:
“but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Simply equating God with love, without acknowledging His holiness and his justice, results in a weak, insipid form of Christianity that doesn’t understand the true cost of our sin and is a very poor shadow of the true gospel.
But remember, the “while we were still sinners” bit … and we still are!
We know how true the saying is that “people who live in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones”, we know this, but we often trip over the log, the mighty oak tree of our sins, that is in our own eye and look for specks of sawdust in our neighbours to distract from our own failings. So who are we to judge?
And how quickly we judge. How quickly we condemn. And often times those we are closest to are the ones of whom we are most judgmental and critical.
Consider what you are doing when judging. You hear or see what someone did. Rather than investigate, seek them out, give them a hearing, allow them to make a defence, you make a determination and come to a conclusion without knowing the details of the case.
This is where listening to gossip and jumping to conclusions hurt and destroy. Many an innocent person has been judged because others did not take the time to listen and try and understand.
But don’t misunderstand what Jesus is saying. He is not saying that you as a Christian can never tell anyone that they are doing something wrong. Consider how Jesus concludes this section of teaching. He says, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.”
So how do we take the log out of our eye? Jesus addresses this with the second thing he tells us to do:
We are to forgive our neighbour. It can be really difficult to forgive, truly forgive, especially when your neighbour is neither sorry nor understands the hurt they’ve caused.
Do you withhold forgiveness from your neighbour in this circumstance? Do you begrudgingly forgive someone so that you can take the moral high ground? Do you keep a mental note that you’re now one up and that your neighbour now owes you because you forgave them? Do you give a short measure of forgiveness that is neither pressed down, shaken together nor running over?
Immediately after teaching his disciples to pray the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus says in Matthew 6:14-15:
14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15 but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch Christian who survived Ravensbruck concentration camp during the Second World War wrote a book, “The Hiding Place”, about her experiences. She and her sister, Betsie, received brutal and humiliating treatment. Betsie did not survive.
In “The Hiding Place”, Corrie wrote: “Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.”
Through the Lord’s Supper, and through the Confession in our liturgy, we are reminded of our Baptism, we are reminded that we are forgiven. And knowing that, we are then freed from the bitterness, guilt, regret and power that sin and death holds over us.
And remember that we pray for the strength to forgive others in the Lord’s Prayer, and here’s the wonderful thing …
when we, the poor broken sinners that we are, forgive our neighbour their sins or failings, it shows that we truly know that our sins are also forgiven. It is the stamp and seal of the redemption we have in Jesus Christ. It shows we believe that Jesus has paid the price for us, and removes that great log of sin that covers our eyes, so we can be a blessing to our neighbour.
We need these reminders that we are truly forgiven for, as 2 Peter 1:5-10 tells us:
5 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. 10 Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall.
You are blind if you forget that you have been cleansed from sin, and if blind to the saving message of the gospel, how can you lead your neighbour to the saving Word?
Thirdly, Jesus tells us that we are to come to the help of those in need.
“give, and it will be given to you”, isn’t a prosperity gospel promise, it isn’t saying that if you give more to charity, or to the church, then God will give you prosperity.
It also doesn’t mean giving a couple of pounds to a beggar, then walking on. That is often not what people need.
Listen to your neighbour. Take time to find out what your neighbour is truly in need of, so you can go about fulfilling that need in the best way you can. Jesus regularly stopped in his ministry to spend time with a sinner who was in need, think of the Samaritan woman at the well or how he called Zacchaeus.
And that can be the hard bit, taking a break from our busy lives to stop and give your neighbour your time. Stopping to notice them, to properly listen and show them God’s love, show them He cares. That He cares enough about them that he wants them to have eternal life, He wants them to be reconciled to Him. That He gave His Son for them.
Earlier this week we had the pleasure of leading a group of Wisconsin Lutheran High School students in evangelism in the area around our sister church, St George’s, in London. They went off in pairs to survey people about their faith and religion, or lack of it. One of the pairs had a conversation with a man who had grown up Muslim, become a Christian but had gone back to Islam because:
“Family is really important to me, so I cannot understand how a Father could allow His Son to suffer, be crucified and die in the way God allowed Jesus to be. How cruel! I can’t understand that.”
But that is exactly the point, and he must have had some poor teaching in the Christian church he attended. God wants us to show the world that there is something radically different about His love.
And just as Jesus sent his disciples out to be his representatives so we are his agents and representatives now. He wants us to seek those lost souls who need salvation, who need God’s grace, who need His Word, Just like that Muslim man who has been blinded to the gospel’s true message.
So “Be merciful, as your Father is merciful.” not because you want to be thought of as a nice person, or be loved by others, but because you know the incredible mercy that the Father has shown to you.
Not being judgmental, not condemning but forgiving as God forgives us, and helping those in need, are acts of worship and gratitude for the grace that God has poured out on us. These are not works that we do to earn God’s favour, or things we do begrudgingly, but come from the overflowing of our hearts to glorify God in the knowledge that we are forgiven.
And the more we do these things, the more we grow in faith.
And through that faith we are liberated to be shining lights in the world so we can be the blessing to our neighbours that God has called us to be.
Amen