Leviticus is usually ignored by Christians as a book of ritual. Not only does Jesus quote from it to form what we call the golden rule, it serves as a model for other Christian writing such as the book of James. This morning, we see it making a vital point: God wants us to keep our lives together, church and work, worship and family. As we said recently, we are to look at the our lives through stained glass. Worship, including the reading of Scripture allows us to gain a heavenly perspective on life. Our passage this morning  links worship life and social l.fie into a seamless whole.

 

Jesus takes the injunction to love our neighbor, and even Leviticus includes in its parameters the stranger in our midst, and makes it even more radical. Jesus calls us to love the enemy. For 2000 years the Christian church has known this passage from the Sermon on the Mount.and seems to have disregarded it for most of our history. Jesus describes social reality, where his hearers were on the receiving end of insult. A blow to the face as an insult with back of the hand. The insulted party is saying:  I do not have to follow your rules. Even the mile marker is taken from Roman usage, not the word that usually applies in the gospels. (This is like learning to say liter for us oldsters). I am a human being who makes choices. I will not, in the wrods of paul, repay evil for evil.

 

Do not take on the attitudes and actions of evil directed at us, not an individual expose the system-not coerced, we can still choose to respond in a new way. Walter Wink argues that Jesus is against violence but also passivity. Jesus here is subversive. By refusing to take the role of the victim, we open the doors to claim self-respect but also put the enemy in the position of seeing us as human beings worthy of respect, not as a thing to be manipulated. We have seen this at the public level of the civil rights mvoement in our country and inother palces around the world. If Christians adopt the work of the enemy, and violence is at the top of the list, what distinguishes us from the enemy. So many old spy movies follow the descent of the shadow world where the work of the good guys and the bad guys become utterly blurred.

 

Walter Wink has done some good work on our Matthew passage, where he insists that Jesus provides a third way in rejecting both violence and being a victim. The enemy allows us to project our evil on to someone else. The enemy allows us to sharpen our skills at hating and revenge. Jesus insists that we look at the enemy as a neighbor, as a human being. I can think of few things that demand as much discipline as that, as much moral courage as that.. it is so easy to hate, to dismiss a person or a whole group of people. I have to swallow hard not to lump Muslims into a group, or more specifically see no possibility for change, no redemption for the violent purveyors of radical Islam. (Sports is a harmless way of doing this)

 

Wink goes further and asks us to consider using the enemy as a spiritual guide into ourselves. What we hate in the enemy is what we may well most hate within ourselves. Does God look at us as enemies? Paul says that even with our enmity toward God, we are given Jesus Christ. God sees the enemy as someone still capable of being redeemed, still getting a second chance for them to do right by others and to receive that consideration. In the end, all of us deal with human beings. made in the image and likeness of God, we are at our best when we treat people we accord each other in worship.