“Joseph Reveals Himself to His Brothers” -Peter von Cornelius 1816/1817.
How on earth are we really supposed to love our enemies?
When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he is not telling us to passively submit to abuse or to hatred, or to lie down and to be the proverbial doormat that receives all the dirt and filth from the feet of the enemy.
For Jesus, love is the active response to hatred.
And Jesus spells out this active love with his three commands—“Do good, bless, and pray.” Jesus asks us to do these things because these very things—doing good, blessing, and praying—are the very things that God does for us.
God does good for us by loving us in our worst, most evil moments. God returns not just our shortcomings, but our active hatred toward God and toward one another, with love. God blesses us even when we obviously could not possibly deserve any blessing at all from God’s hand.
And had you ever thought that God might not only hear your prayers, but that God prays for you as well?
God’s greatest hopeful prayer for us is Jesus himself. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Jesus here with us was God’s prayer for our salvation from all evil.
Then, in his time with us on this earth, Jesus was constantly praying for us. Some of the most eloquent of his prayers are in John’s gospel, like this prayer he prayed for his disciples—“Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one….I ask you to protect them from the evil one.”
And then, just as God gave us the prayer of Jesus, Jesus gave us the prayer of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is always interceding for us, praying in and through us, that is—God praying in us, on our behalf, when we are unable to pray for ourselves.
Jesus bluntly says that God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, that God is merciful, and that we should also be merciful if we are children of God and followers of Jesus.
To be merciful is to have compassion or forbearance, especially to an offender or someone subject to your power. But wait, you say. Someone with more than I have who is asking for what I have is the one with power over me.
But I am here to say today that no one or anything in the world has power over us if God is our first love.
If God is our first love, then we have the power of God’s love.
And that is the divine love that gives us the ability and the desire to do good, to bless and to pray, especially for our enemies.
Another important thing to note is that if God is our first love, then we can trust that God is in control despite the constant and blatant reports to the contrary. We can give up our own desires to be in control.
We can commit ourselves to God and put our trust in God, and God will bring everything round right in God’s own time.
The Psalmist, knowing that God is in control, could write that we don’t need to fret over the evildoers and the ones who succeed in evil schemes. Our job is to trust in the Lord and to do good instead of getting caught up in retribution, the tit for tat, the withholding of gracious generosity because the other isn’t deserving, or doesn’t behave in the way that we deem appropriate.
In today’s reading from Genesis, we hear a bit of the story of Joseph, one of the great sagas of the Old Testament. As one commentary says, the Joseph story has been a favorite of both Jews and Christians through the centuries because the story reflects human nature in every age. But even more importantly, this story of Joseph brings to life the idea that in and through the events of our lives, God is at work to save God’s people.
Most of us probably know the Joseph story, but here’s a quick review. Joseph was one of the twelve sons of Jacob. The ten older sons, who were jealous of Joseph, had sold him into slavery years ago, and then had gone home and told their father that Joseph was dead.
Now there’s a famine, and Jacob has sent the sons to Egypt to try to find grain to buy. Meanwhile, Joseph has risen to great power and serves as the Pharoah’s right hand person. Joseph oversees all the stores of grain that have been stored up to get the people through the famine.
Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. And they are terrified, because Joseph must certainly want to take revenge on them now for what they had done so many years ago. But instead, Joseph shows his brothers mercy, because he can see that in the big picture, God has been working for good, even in all the bad things that have been done.
Joseph says to his brothers, “God sent me before you to preserve life….so it was not you who sent me here, but God.” And so Joseph provides for them.
Maybe Jesus had this well known story in mind when he taught the disciples to love their enemies, to do good to those who hated them, to bless those who cursed them, to pray for those who abused them. This is what Joseph, God’s servant did, and in doing so, preserved the people of Israel.
You might say that Joseph, by showing forgiveness and mercy to his brothers, was no longer a man of dust, but had become a man of heaven, to use the Apostle Paul’s terminology.
When his brothers threw his perishable body into that well and sold his perishable body into slavery, but Joseph grew out of that perishable body into a man who has been remembered through the ages for his goodness—a man of heaven.
And we too, who are children of the dust, can bear the image of the man of heaven, Jesus himself.
We bear the image of people of heaven by doing as Jesus did, by loving God above all else, and then pouring that merciful and compassionate love out into the world, knowing that God means it all for good, that God is in control, and ultimately, God’s love will overcome all.
In his sermon at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back in 2018, Bishop Michael Curry preached about the power of love, which is of course what Jesus was doing that day when he told the disciples to love their enemies.
Bishop Curry says that we were all “made by the power of love and our lives are meant to be lived in that love. That is why we are here.”
He goes on to say, “Ultimately, the source of love is God: the source of all of our lives. There’s an old medieval poem that says:
‘Where true love is found, God’s own self is there.
The New Testament says it this way: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God, and those who love are born of God and know God. Those who do not love do not know God. Why? For God is love.”
There’s power in love. There’s power in love to help and heal when nothing else can.
There’s power in love to lift up and liberate when nothing else will.
There’s power in love to show us the way to live.”
Then Bishop Curry talks about the love Jesus had for us. “Jesus didn’t die for anything he could get out of it. Jesus did not get an honorary doctorate for dying. He didn’t… he wasn’t getting anything out of it. He gave up his life, he sacrificed his life, for the good of others, for the good of the other, for the wellbeing of the world… for us.
That’s what love is. Love is not selfish and self-centered. Love can be sacrificial, and in so doing, becomes redemptive. And that way of unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive love changes lives, and it can change this world.
“If you don’t believe me, just stop and imagine. Think and imagine a world where love is the way.”
Imagine our homes and families where love is the way. Imagine neighborhoods and communities where love is the way.
Imagine governments and nations where love is the way. Imagine business and commerce where this love is the way.
Imagine this tired old world where love is the way. When love is the way – unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive.
When love is the way, then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again.
When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook.
When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary.
When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more.
When love is the way, there’s plenty good room – plenty good room – for all of God’s children.
Because when love is the way, we actually treat each other, well… like we are actually family.
When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all, and we are brothers and sisters, children of God.
My brothers and sisters, that’s a new heaven, a new earth, a new world, a new human family.”
Michael Curry’s words sum up the great vision that Jesus has when he said to those who are listening, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who abuse you. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
Jesus calls us, as his followers, to be part of God’s reign already taking shape here on earth, right here in the midst of our enemies. So this week, let’s ask God to make us people of mercy, whose name breathes love.