The hiding place
Today’s Gospel reading continues on from last week, where Jesus made a series of challenging statements to his disciples. One was this:
Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man. (Luke 6:22).
Jesus was not advocating a life of self-imposed martrydom, as if that could please God and earn his favour. Jesus was encouraging his disciples—that those who recognise their spiritual poverty before God, who hunger for righteousness and weep over the sin in the world and their own sin—are already blessed by God; they have already been blessed with wisdom from the Holy Spirit.
We see this most clearly in the last verse. Why would Jesus’ disciples be hated, excluded and rejected? Because of the Son of Man—because they belong to Jesus and not to the world. A person’s attitude to Jesus’ disciples’ is their attitude to Jesus himself. Being persecuted because they confess Jesus is the very sign God is with them, and that they are people who belong to him.
The same is true of Jesus’ followers today. Our natural inclination would be to ensure justice happens by exacting some kind of punishment or retribution, like in Luke 9 when Jesus and his disciples were rejected at a Samaritan village, and James and John ask: “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?”
But it is his disciples, not his enemies, who Jesus rebuked. It can’t be like this for God’s people, for God himself is not like this. Jesus says: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” These words in today’s text call for a reversal in our natural human thinking; from human things to divine things.
This is what a lady by the name of Cornelia came to understand. Cornelia was the youngest of four children, born in 1892, to a Dutch working-class family. Her father was a watch-maker and the family lived upstairs over his shop. The family were Christians and their faith inspired them to serve their community, offering shelter, food and money to those who were in need. Cornelia’s more familiar name was Corrie ten Boom. During the war Corrie and her family hid and saved many Jews who were being pursued by the Nazi authorities. However the family were themselves arrested after a Nazi informant exposed what was happening. Corrie miraculously escaped death in the gas chambers after an inexplicable administrative mix-up, but the rest of her family all perished in Nazi concentration camps.[1]
After the war, Corrie spoke in various churches about God’s love and faithfulness even in the midst of horror. In her best-selling book, “The Hiding Place”, Corrie wrote:
“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, a former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing centre at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, [my sister] Betsie’s pain-blanched face.
“He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. ‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein.’ He said. ‘To think that, as you say, [God] has washed my sins away!’ His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
You can hear the immense pain and intense struggle to forgive in Corrie’s words, and that’s not surprising given the hellish horrors she lived through—a pain unknown to us.
But not unknown to God. He knew the depths of Corrie’s pain and torment—and that of all humanity—as his Son hung on the Cross. That was where Jesus knew persecution, the righteous for the unrighteous, to redeem us by his precious blood. You see, this is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching today. Why are we to love our enemies? Well, because of sin, we were all once enemies of God, Paul says in Romans 5. Can you imagine if God let that situation remain? What if he did judge us? What if he did condemn us? What if he had answered the disciples in Luke 9, and rained down fire from heaven on those who reject him? What if he punished us?
But because of his great mercy, God didn’t punish us. God’s punishment on sin was borne by his completely righteous and innocent Son, who endured the shame of the Cross to reconcile the world to God.
Corrie continued her book, The hiding place:
“Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I prayed, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.
As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on [Christ’s]. When he tells us to love our enemies, he gives, along with the command, the love itself.”[2]
Corrie wasn’t able to forgive because she tried really hard. She was able to forgive because it was Jesus’ own death and resurrection power at work in her to put to death her hatred, pride and hurt. Through his own love, life and grace, Jesus strengthened Corrie to forgive.
Jesus’ words in today’s text are not a prescription to be passive and let others trample all over us. But they are his own pattern of life that is radically distinct form the world’s way of insisting on getting even, and making our others pay for their wrongs. We are not to give only if we can get something in return, because God gives freely even though we don’t deserve it. We are not to breathe hatred, bear grudges, place conditions on forgiveness, or seek revenge because God loves even those who hate him. But we are to love all people and are even to love our enemies. This is the way of God’s own merciful heart: to bless those who curse us, pray for those who mistreat us. If someone slaps us on one cheek, we are to turn to them the other also. If someone takes our coat, we are not withhold our shirt from them as well. We are to do good to those who hate us. We are to be merciful just as our Heavenly Father is merciful.
In our enthusiasm to see evil wiped out, by hating our enemies, or refusing them mercy rather than loving them—even our brothers and sisters in the church who we can sometimes treat as enemies—we place ourselves under the same sentence we pass on them, for none of us can perfectly fulfil God’s law. Only God’s standard is universally consistent. His commandments show us what his will is for our relationship with himself and others. When we reflect on them they show us that the end to evil we wish for would leave none of us standing. Even the worst atrocities we witness on the news begin with a hurtful attitude, a selfish thought; attitudes and thoughts which sprout in our hearts also.
When we determine who is worthy of our love and who isn’t―we are in effect saying to God that when we fail and fall short we should be judged by the same standards—that he should refuse to forgive us, or place conditions and limits on his mercy and favour to us. This is what Jesus means when he says: “For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Is that what we want?
When we are kind to only those who are kind to us, and treat those who hurt us in a hostile way, or withdraw from them to punish them, we are only treating them the way the world does. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. Jesus says.
But God did not try to get even with us and make us pay. It was while we were sinners; while we were enemies of God, that God opened the storehouses of heaven and poured out the treasure trove of his riches for you, sending his own Son into the world.
It was Christ who was persecuted for you. He turned the other cheek when he was struck and slapped before the High Priest, he was forced to walk the extra mile to Golgotha and bear the crushing burden of the sin of the world upon his shoulders, his clothes were taken from him. Jesus came to reconcile the world―even those most wretched criminals, the least deserving―to his Father in Heaven by his precious blood.
When we have been wronged, hurt, insulted, excluded, rejected, and don’t feel like forgiving, when it hurts too much to be merciful, the hiding place that we have is Jesus, who hides us in his wounds. This is the very thing he proclaims with his holy meal. With and through a small wafer and a tiny sip of wine, God gives you a good measure of his mercy, pressed down, shaken together and running over, poured into your lap—an abundant measure, an extravagant measure of his mercy, grace and blessing to share with others, with still enough for all you need also. Amen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrie_ten_Boom#cite_note-auto4-18
[2] https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermon-illustrations/100144/love-by-kerry-haynes
