Grace Over Grievance - Ps. 37, Luke 6:27-38
“Do not fret yourself because of evildoers.” The Psalmist seems to speak right through the centuries to our moment where, I for one, see a lot of fretting going on. Whether your news source is the daily paper or podcasts, cable tv or social media, we seem to be in a frenzy of fretting.
Such fretting seems justified, given that there are true evildoers about, working toward agendas that hinder human flourishing and the survival of creation itself. Yet, in Psalm 37 we are told three times not to worry about these workers of woe. And not only are we not to worry about them, we aren’t even allowed the satisfaction of our anger as we’re told to “leave rage alone.” Both worry and rage, the Psalmist tells us, lead only to evil. Instead, the ancient poet calls us to a different path. “Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for him.”
Be patient. That may sound like a hollow and pious instruction before so many real and urgent injustices. Be patient sounds all too close to the “wait” that Martin Luther King heard from the white liberal pastors he wrote to from his Birmingham jail cell. “Justice too long delayed is justice denied,” he responded. And yet, King himself was a great practitioner of patience.
Being still at a lunch counter sit-in is something very different from mere passivity. As is turning the other cheek. These are acts of patient power, a confrontation with evil that shows that we are not afraid of “those who can harm the body.” The waiting found in our Psalm and even more so our Gospel is the sort that the liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle called “revolutionary patience.”
It is this revolutionary patience that is the foundation of Jesus’s call to go beyond fretting and to instead love our enemies. It is hard to overstate just how radical Jesus message is on this point. Few teachers in history have gone so far, and most of our greatest examples of courage in the face of real evil were direct followers of Jesus’s teaching on this point.
Jesus’s teaching is so strange because it has no human source. No normal pattern of human life would produce love for an enemy. Instead, we learn to love our enemies because God pours out goodness and love toward everyone, even those who hate God. Our call is then to be imitators of God, and it is only through that imitation that we can escape the cycles of human violence that so easily turn the victims of evil into its perpetrators.
W.H. Auden in his poem “September 1, 1939” named the truth about the merely human pattern of dealing with evil:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
It doesn’t take a deep look at history to see those who have suffered injustice turn around and exercise it against others, often with profound moral blindness. There is simply something about retribution and revenge that draws us into a dark circle from which we cannot escape until we have become the very thing we oppose. And yet, on the human plain, our imaginations are locked there.
The way out of this trap takes rescue from the outside, the power of God to exhibit and energize a different possibility. This is why we are to wait upon God. Not as a mode of inaction, but because we know that our own actions will only feed the monsters of our making.
What could we call this alternative to the logic of tit for tat? Grace. Grace is the gift that is offered even before reconciliation is achieved. It is the for-gift of forgiveness that unsettles expectations and creates possibilities where none could be imagined. Where is the grace in our world? Jesus asks us to look around for it.
If we hope to find grace in loving those who love us, Jesus says we’ll miss it. If we do good to those who do us favors, grace won’t be there. Jesus offer example after example of reciprocal relationships and challenges, “what credit is that to you?” At least that’s how its put in our translation, but perhaps Jesus message is even more radical than that.
The scholar Ched Myers points out the word translated as “credit” here is the Greek word charis. In most other places in the New Testament this word is rendered as “gift” or “grace.” When we re-read the verse with charis as grace, we see that Jesus is not calling us to earn credit for how we behave, but is instead inviting us to live into the gift economy of God’s way. “The purpose of this teaching,” writes Myers, “is to push listeners beyond the conventional ethos of balanced reciprocity to a cosmology of grace.”
This is all nice theory and language study, but we should ask, where can such love of enemies actually show up in the world? There are extraordinary examples of people who have forgiven the murderers of their children, or people like Nelson Mandela who sought the good of the white south Africans that imprisoned him for 27 years, saying that “forgiveness heals the soul.” But love of our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, is likely to come in the more mundane work of loving those closer at hand.
There used to be a comic strip for theological types called “Coffee with Jesus.” It was illustrated in the style of a 1950s religious tract, and it would feature some person sitting down with Jesus for a conversation. One of my favorites featured a woman asking, “Jesus, when will you come and bring world peace?” To which Jesus replies, “I’m working on that Jane, but how about you work on getting along with your ex-husband in the meantime.” World peace begins in the mending of all those small, close relationships each of us have the opportunity to do something about. And whenever we love our nearby enemies, we are creating space for God’s grace to pour in.
This form of grace is a profound gift to the world, but sometimes we don’t even notice it. Yet, if we look around, we will see it in our friends, and neighbors, or even our own lives. Think of those children of difficult, or even abusive parents who tend to their parents in old age and illness. Think of those divorced couples who have found a way to love and desire the good for each other, despite the deep pain of their loss. Think of the small acts of goodness done for a neighbor who makes life in community a challenge. Each of these acts is a gift to a world that expects only the exchange of good for good, evil for evil. These small actions unsettle our merely human calculations of credits and debits and pour out God’s generous grace in our homes, and neighborhoods, and communities.
There is real wrong and injustice and evil in the world. And I trust God will deal with it and those who perpetrate it, for God is not only merciful but just. However God answers evil, it will not be through any exchange of retribution, tit for tat, for God cannot be diminished by anything in all creation. God is abundance and goodness, light without shadow, and so in the end God will overwhelm all with grace. When we forgive those who wrong us, when we give up our right retribution and offer blessing, we become participants in the very life of God. It is in that life that we can delight, for as the Psalmist says, there is no need to fret when we put our “trust in the LORD and do good.” Amen.