This passage occurs in the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, 7th Sunday of Epiphany, most recently February 20, 2022.
Summary: Books and books have been written about Jesus words here. I unpack how Jesus uses the verb "love" here, which I think may open up some new preaching directions for those who feel they've been down this road before. At the end of the day, I think Jesus is challenging the individuals and the whole community to love, I mean really...truly love, even those we don't want to love.
Words
αγαπάτε ("love", verses 6:27, 6:32, 6:35) Most people reading this blog will be familiar with the various words for "love" in Greek and know that αγαπη refers to a "higher" love, the sustained and sacrificial love embodied by Jesus Christ. If you want to preach on this word, consider at least two other points
1) This word is used as a verb throughout this section. In English "love" is the same word whether a verb or noun. We likely miss the fact that Jesus offers "love" here as an action, not a concept. Furthermore, αγαπάτε is a present tense verb, indicating the action is on-going. So a better translation would be "Constantly engaging in the act of loving to your neighbors." Love is not a concept here, love is an action. The entire structure of Jesus mini sermon is verbs in command form, unpacking what it means to love:
Pray
Offer (cheek; metaphorically, vulnerability)
Do not stop (again, vulnerability)
Give
Lend & Do not ask for return
Do good
2) The verb is in the second person plural. This means it is not necessarily directed to individuals but to the community. In fact, this whole section is generally in the plural
* Back in verse 20 Luke indicates that Jesus is speaking to his disciples.
* More importantly, nearly all of the other nouns and pronouns in this section are plural.
In short, a more analytic translation of Jesus famous dictums would be:
"You all, keep loving, totally and sacrificially, your enemies, and likewise you all keep doing to those who keep hating you all."
"Just as you all are wishing that the people will keep doing to you all, you all are to keep doing to them likewise."
This is not to say that there isn't an individual component to this command. Linguistically, 2nd person plural can refer to each individual in a group or the group as a whole. Furthermore, Jesus switches to the 2nd person singular when talking about having your check hit.
I think this 2nd point, that the verb "love" is in the plural can be put into a sermon in two ways. First, loving enemies is really hard. Don't do it alone. Second, Jesus isn't just calling us as individuals to think about our actions, but think about how we act as a whole body of disciples.
χαρις ("credit", 6:32, 33, 34) This word is normally translated as "grace" or "gift." Those words would make for very awkward English: "What grace is that to you?" But that is literally the translation! This is brought home in verse 35, when Jesus talks about how God is good to the ungrateful and wicked. The word for ungrateful is αχαριςτος, literally, without grace. How haunting!
What to make of this? Perhaps Jesus just uses the word grace to mean credit. But that seems odd, especially given the repeated use of the word. I would offer that Jesus is suggesting that the root of love is grace, namely, God's grace to us. As he concludes his argument, be merciful as God is merciful.
PS An an aside, I did some research on the use of prohibitions and negative commands. I had always learned that a present tense negative imperative meant "to cease from current action." But I am reading that in the last 20 years (the date of the texts I was using in Seminary) they've done more research and no longer think this is a helpful distinction.
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