Imagination and the Reign of God

Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C
23 February 2025

Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
Luke 6:27-38

To love one’s enemies is likely the hardest command. It runs against our inclination. At the very least, we have been conditioned to defend what we have, while our culture expects us to ever accumulate more.
Our sense of justice is increasingly shaped by retaliatory leanings, leaving behind Christian notions of penance (thus penitentiary) and restoration, certainly in the public debate. We talk less about rehabilitation and more about judgments we deem appropriate to the severity of the crime, assuming that “too lenient” a sentence constitutes a miscarriage of justice, forgetting that for all cases (except perhaps financial crimes) severe judgments do not undo the consequences of the crime.
In the Russia-Ukraine war we are not only incensed by the rhetoric coming from the new American administration, but also believe that the only just outcome is the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity from January of 2014.
When we drive and someone tailgates, cuts us off, or offends in some other way, we may not be able to tell them what we think of them, but the same territorial defensiveness applies. We know that we are right – not only in a technical sense but morally, which must mean that they are wrong.

It is as people who operate on the assumption that retaliatory violence equates justice that we encounter Jesus’s instructions to his disciples to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, and to pray for those who abuse us.
This has always been a hard command. At times the Church has tried to lessen its demand by saying that it was for people in religious orders only, or by saying that this is God’s vision for the Kingdom, and since we do not yet live in the reign of God, Jesus’s demand to love our enemies has no purchase for us today. Of course, the problem with that argument is that Jesus tells us over and over that the Kingdom has come near, because it has come near in him.

I have never been comfortable with these ways to avoid the demands of Jesus because they are avoidance. They do not make for a convincing argument, unless the objective is to ensure we can live unencumbered by the demands of Jesus while still calling ourselves disciples. This is not to say that we will necessarily succeed but that we should try.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that we lack the imagination to envision a world without war because war is the only way we know to tell our story. Having had grandparents who lived through two world wars, parents who lived through one, and our general telling of history, I believe this to be true.
Hauerwas says that this inability to tell our story without invoking war is as true of the pacifist as it is for the just warrior. He says, “What would the pacifists do if they actually got the world they say they want? In an odd way pacifists can be as dependent on the existence of war to make their world intelligible as those who think war must be tragically accepted.”¹
Hauerwas argues that peace is a deeper reality than war. Yet how is it that peace does not animate our imaginations in the way that war does?

Of course, when Jesus calls on us to love our enemies, Jesus is not only speaking of war. There was a time when I naively thought I had no enemies. But what about the bullies in elementary school who waited for me on my way home? There were always four of them yet I was alone. How about the dysfunctional neighbour or colleague who tries to undermine you or destroy your reputation? And how about those who are working to undermine the foundations of our democracy?

Even though Jesus says to us to offer the other cheek, that from anyone who takes away our coat we are not withhold our shirt, that we are to give to everyone who begs from us, that if anyone takes away our goods, we are not to ask for their return, I do not believe that Jesus instructs us to live a passive life. The life of the followers of Jesus is to be an active life, a life that lives into the reign of God. Passivity is the problem with words like non-violence. Non-violence is the rejection of violence but it does not articulate what to put in the place of violence. Jesus, however, gives us instructions as to what our lives are to emulate.

When I was young a friend’s mother gave me a book on St Francis of Assisi. It was a modern telling of his life. I loved the book and proceeded to read the ancient stories and legends of St Francis. After I had graduated from high school I visited Assisi.

What I did not know then, or maybe I did and forgot, was that during the fifth crusade, in the year 1219 St. Francis travelled to the Holy Land to meet Sultan al-Kamil. Francis had begun his ministry after recovering from the trauma of a horrific battlefield experience and imprisonment, and grounded in this experience, he hoped to end the violence of the Crusade by winning over the sultan.
While Francis did not end the violence, he showed respect to his Muslim host and presented a different vision of the world and of the Christian faith than the crusaders did.
Paul Moses researched the event in depth. He writes, “In their rough, patched tunics, Francis and [sc. his companion] Illuminato would even have looked like Sufis: the very name of the Muslim holy men came from the Arab word for wool, the scratchy material used to make their robes. Like Francis, they also wore a cord rather than a belt.
(…)
For several days Francis and Illuminato were treated as honored guests in the Muslim camp. According to James of Vitry, they were even permitted to preach to the Muslim soldiers. He mentions this in passing, but it is astonishing. While Cardinal Pelagius and the Christian military leaders a few miles to the north were busy building weapons of war for the next assault – and while Muslim troops prepared their own attacks on the Christian camp to which the two friars would return – Francis and the enemy soldiers were treating one another like friends.
(…)
… before leaving, Francis told the sultan that while he would not accept his gold, silver, or silk, he would take a meal. It is a remarkable request coming from a man who often went hungry, who never ate much and always ate simply. Perhaps Francis had something besides hunger in mind. He had always tried to imitate Jesus, who sought to realize the kingdom of heaven on earth through table fellowship – by dining with people society despised. (…) The sultan likely took part in the meal instead of merely catering it. Such hospitality is traditional in Egypt. (…) one should not be surprised that other Christian accounts failed to mention this meal. Years later, Pope Gregory IX castigated Emperor Frederick II for the offense of eating sociably with Muslim leaders. (…) Their meal together ought to have been the enduring image of their encounter, painted in bright colors on cathedral walls.”²

While the story does not show success in the sense of the cessation of hostilities, it shows us a different imagination, an imagination the world, and the followers of Jesus, often lack.

Another story comes from Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper and together with Peter Maurin the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Day was a socialist convert to Catholicism. Biographer Jim Forest, who had worked with Day as a young man, writes, “Perhaps all would have gone quite well between Dorothy and the Roman Catholic hierarchy had it not been for the stand she took in failing to support Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War. Practically all Dorothy’s friends, being people on the left, whole-heartedly supported the republican side, but Dorothy couldn’t support a force that was murdering priests and nuns and destroying churches. Similarly she could not in any way support the fascism that Franco represented, no matter how many bishops regarded him as their hero and protector. In fact there was a still deeper problem for Dorothy, for she could not imagine Christ blessing anyone to kill. She wrote essays about Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, who has chosen to live in a society suffering military occupation by the Romans but had sent none of his disciples to join the Zealots, the national group undertaking violent resistance. He had responded mercifully to people on every side, even the Roman centurion who sought his help. She recalled the witness of Christians in the first three centuries, when it was regarded as far better to lay down one’s own life than to shed anyone’s blood.”³

In the way that it is important to consider a passage in its larger context and in conversation with other parts of the Christian scriptures, it is important for us to not only use our own context to judge the relevance or truth of the words of Jesus but to consider the witness of the church and the witness of Jesus.
The life that Jesus invites us into is the life that Jesus lived. Both Luther and C.S. Lewis speak of discipleship as becoming little Christs, that is people who are so rooted in God that they live like Jesus. Stephen, the first martyr of the church died speaking as Jesus did, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” (Acts 7:60)

It is then not about doing the impossible but about more and more becoming like Jesus. Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
And so our focus should not be on a task that seems too great but on a God who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, (v.35) who makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. (Matthew 5)

Our reward, says Jesus, shall be great even while we shall expect nothing in return. Our reward is that we are children of the Most High.

Amen.