Luke 6:27-38
Gospel Summary
This passage from the Sermon on the Plain (6:20-49) is the counterpart of the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel according to Matthew (5:1-7:27). The sayings of Jesus which make up the Sermon, in their poetic simplicity and in their challenging complexity, have become part of the world’s common language: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you…Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Stop judging and you will not be judged. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give, and gifts will be given to you.
Life Implications
The essence of Jesus’ mandates is simple enough: Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful…be like God. Everything else follows. If we are like God, there will be love, forgiveness, and generosity-—all beyond measure. If one hears these mandates of Jesus in isolation from the entire New Testament, however, one might conclude that they represent an impossible ideal, and thereby may be ignored as impractical. The second reading of today’s Mass from Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians provides the necessary context and helps us make sense of Jesus’ command to be like God.
In his Letter to the Corinthians, Paul contrasts first man, Adam, with the last Adam, Jesus. First Adam, created in the divine image and likeness, was meant to be like God. Through prideful disobedience, however, Adam rejected his authentic human existence as God’s image and likeness. All humankind as a consequence has inherited, and has added to Adam’s condition of alienation from God and from all creation. Humanity, stuck in a false value-system, is like an animal trapped in quicksand that has lost its freedom to live as it was meant to live. Part of the tragedy is that humanity has become blind, and believes that its ungodly values reflect what it means to be human.
In contrast to first Adam, Jesus begins a new creation as the New Adam. Created in the divine image and likeness, through his obedience, love, forgiveness and generosity, he is like God-—merciful, just as his Father is merciful. The good news is that through the power of God’s mercy, which Jesus has come to proclaim, human beings can be liberated from the sorry mess we have gotten ourselves into.
At the beginning of his ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus said that the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled in him: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the lord” (Lk 4:19-19). Those who recognize that they are poor in the deepest sense (in captivity, blind, helplessly oppressed by evil forces of a fallen world) are blessed because they are able to accept the gift of liberation from their enslavement.
Freedom from enslavement, however, is not enough. Liberation from slavery achieves its purpose only if we live according to the freedom of the New Adam, Jesus Christ. “You have been called to freedom; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another.” “Stop lying to one another, since you have taken off the old man (Adam) with his practices and have put on the new man, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator” (Gal 5:13 and Col 3:9-10). Because we have been reborn into his image and likeness as New Adam, Jesus can say to us: Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful…be like God.
Father Campion P. Gavaler, O.S.B.
