7th Sunday after the Epiphany
Texts: Matthew 5:38-48;
Lev. 19:1-2, 9-18; 1 Cor. 3:10-11, 16-23
DO THIS IN IMITATION OF ME!
Has it been happening again over the past several weeks in Egypt? Has a
group of mostly non-Christians been following the teaching of Jesus in
this morning's Gospel better than most
Christians have over the centuries? It primarily started last century
when a Hindu man by the
name of Mahatma Gandhi led 350 million Hindus and Muslims in a
nonviolent revolution
against the Christian peoples of the British Empire. At the center of
Gandhi's brand of revolution
were these eleven verses from Matthew 5 that we heard this morning.
The 1982 motion picture Gandhi (my all-time favorite movie)
has a scene near the beginning in
which Gandhi is walking down a street with Anglican priest Charlie
Andrews. Menacing youths
appear in their path. Andrews is about to suggest they change routes,
but Gandhi wants to press
the issue:
Gandhi: Doesn't the New Testament say
that 'if your enemy strikes you on the right cheek offer
him the left'?
Andrews: I think maybe the phrase is used metaphorically. I don't
think...
Gandhi: I'm not so sure. I have thought about it a great deal, and I
suspect he meant you must show
courage, be willing to take a blow, several blows, to show that you
will not strike back nor will
you be turned aside. And when you do that it calls on something in
human nature, something that
makes his hatred for you decrease and his respect increase. I think
Christ grasped that, and I have
seen it work.
My favorite scene in the movie is when Gandhi is fighting apartheid in South
Africa, early in his
career, before he returns to India. He organizes a rally in a theater packed
with willing protesters,
ready to go fight unjust laws. Gandhi outlines features of the new
laws: mandatory fingerprinting
for People of Color, only Christian marriages are to be considered
legally valid (all the Indians
are either Hindu or Muslim), and police may enter their dwellings
without permission. There are
outcries from the crowd promising violent resistance, ending
with someone shouting out: "For
that cause I would be willing to die!" To which Gandhi responds:
I praise such courage. I need such
courage, because in this cause I, too, am prepared to
die. But, my friend, there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.
Whatever they do to
us, we will attack no one, kill no one. But we will not give our
fingerprints, not one of us.
They will imprison us, they will fine us, they will seize our
possessions. But they cannot
take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.
A person in the crowd interjects: "Have you ever been to prison? They
beat us and torture us...."
Gandhi continues:
I am asking you to fight. To fight
against their anger, not to provoke it. We will not strike
a blow. But we will receive them. And through our pain we will make
them see their
injustice. And it will hurt, as all fighting hurts. But we cannot lose.
We cannot. They may
torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then, they have my dead
body. Not my
obedience. We are Hindu and Muslim, children of God, each one of us.
Let us take a
solemn oath in God's Name that, come what may, we will not submit to
this law.
Brothers and sisters in Christ: If our world is to survive, we need
more people to imitate Gandhi
who imitated Christ, who imitated his Father in heaven. We need more
people to imitate Martin
Luther King, Jr., who imitated Gandhi, who imitated Christ. This is it!
This morning! This is the
very heart of our Christian faith! That cross which we process every
Sunday morning -- that's
what this cross is all about. It's precisely about this teaching of
nonretaliation and love of
enemies, which Jesus of Nazareth not only taught but then lived out
on the cross. In going to his
death under our unjust laws, Jesus was able to live out perfect,
universal, unconditional love of
the true God -- showing us that the justice of the true God is mercy..
It began with his arrest. One of his disciples begins violent
resistance, retaliation, by cutting off
the ear of a servant with a sword. Jesus heals his ear, and says, "None
of this!" So the disciples
run away. That's been the sum of our human history: fight or flight. We
either fight back or run
away in the face of violence. But Jesus came to show us a third way,
the true way, the Way of the
Living God who lovingly created each of us, everyone on this planet.
So Jesus stood with courage before his accusers. When they mocked him
on the cross, he asked
his Father in heaven to forgive them. They mocked him, of course, with
taunts from our false
gods of violence: 'If you are the Son of God,' they said, 'come down
from the cross. Let God
deliver you from this evil. Come down and get us, if you are the Son of
God.'
But the fact that Jesus stayed where he needed to be as the true son of
the true God is precisely
the point. He came to show us the pure and unconditional love of that
God who made every one
of us. He showed us a love that does not retaliate, a love that
forgives instead of forswearing
vengeance. He lived out on the cross a faith in the God of Life who can
give us life even in death.
He showed us the God of Life who desperately wants us to understand how
to live completely for
life and never for death, never for killing. As Gandhi said, there are
causes to die for, but not to
kill for.
And so Jesus comes again to us this morning, showing us this love once
again, and pleading with
us to live it. He comes to us and says, 'This is my body given for you,
my blood shed for you,
God's unconditional love feeding you, so that you do this. Do this! Do
this! Do this in imitation
of me! You can do this! Because I have done it, a full
blooded, fully embodied human being. I
DID THIS SO THAT YOU MAY DO IT.'
Has it been happening again in Egypt these past weeks? Have a group of
mostly Muslim people
been living out this central Christian teaching, even if they are not
aware of where it comes from?
I'm not completely sure. We pray that it's happening, and that it will
yield a peaceful and just
democracy. But this I do know: God needs us who do bear the
sign of the cross to live it, to do
this. God's world, God's children need us to do this. Amen
[Note: Presiders might consider a
change in the 'Words of Institution' today from "Do this in
remembrance of me" to "Do this in imitation of me."]
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran,
Portage, MI, February 20, 2011