Ever the Lamb--May 25, 2023

Ever the Lamb--May 25, 2023

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” [Acts 9:1-6]

Like a recurring melody in a great symphony, we keep coming back to the theme of God's enemy-embracing love that doesn't keep score or hold grudges, but perhaps it's has never been so dramatic, so striking, a love up to this point. 

Earlier in this season, in Sunday worship and in our devotions, we heard Peter's sermons on Pentecost and then before the religious leaders, how he labeled his hearers as complicit in the death of Jesus--and then at the same time held out the offer of God's gift of new life in Jesus to those same ones who bore their share of responsibility for Jesus' suffering. And as the storytelling in the book of Acts continues, there have been moments where Jewish Christians made the choice to welcome Samaritans who had come to faith in Jesus, even though those two groups had nursed a deep hatred for one another on ethnic and religious grounds. 

But this may be the first time that someone who so actively was set as an enemy of Jesus is met with the transforming love of Jesus. Those earlier stories hint at forgiveness and love for the enemy, but maybe we could dismiss them as just hints or minor themes in the bigger story. We might have dismissed those as minor grudges or small potatoes in terms of resentments.  In other words, maybe we could have denied that loving enemies is central to our faith if we only had those other stories from earlier in Acts. But once we hear the words from heaven, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," and then the call to be a servant of this Jesus, there's no denying it any longer. Love of enemies, love that doesn't allow itself to be consumed with bitter resentments, is at the crux (literally) of our faith because Jesus himself has loved his enemies.

We sometimes are willing to grant that Jesus loved his enemies right up to his death--we think of the line, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing," or the offer of mercy to the thief on the cross, maybe, as quintessential examples of this kind of love. But what does it mean that even after the resurrection Jesus is still loving enemies, and not just vaguely ignoring them, but actively seeking them out and calling them into belonging in the new community with a new purpose? See, sometimes, you hear people talk about as though Jesus had some death wish and was willing to do all sorts of crazy, unwise things in order to get to a cross. Maybe we would be tempted to see his forgiveness from the cross or his teaching on enemy-love as just part of a program that would ensure he would die. And then, we might like to think, once Jesus was raised from the dead, he would again be a macho, tough-guy type who meted out justice and zapped his enemies. (You sometimes hear this in talk about Jesus' coming again—"He came like a lamb the first time, but when he comes again, he will be a devouring lion!" Never mind that in the book of Revelation, there is an announcement that the Lion has arrived, and when everyone looks to see him, they see nothing but the slain-but-living Lamb!) It would be tempting to think that Jesus' bit about loving enemies was just a hiccup that made his passive death on the cross possible, but now that Easter has come, we're back to business as usual and the normal order of kill-or-be-killed. At least it's a way of life we're familiar with, a logic we have been trained in.

But with Saul's call experience on the Damascus road, it is clear that Jesus is still the Lamb: risen and victorious, yes, but still wearing the scars of slaughter, and still committed to loving enemies. God's new way of doing things in Christ is to love enemies and to transform them by that love. As Luke notes here, the first Christians were called followers of "the Way," and it seems clear today that this "Way" was not just a mental acceptance of certain facts about Jesus, it was about being pulled into a certain kind of love that Jesus makes possible, the love that includes neighbor and stranger and enemy together. It is not just a minor theme of Jesus before he died, it is the fabric out of which our own salvation is woven. This same Saul, who finds himself a reconciled enemy of God, is the one who will later point out in his letters that God loved us while we were "enemies" of God, every last one of us (see Romans 5), and that because of this, we too are called to "bless those who persecute us" (Romans 12). These ideas are not unrelated—they are two sides of the same coin! God has loved us even when we were enemies, and that divine love has transformed us—and still is transforming us. And part of how we are transformed is to be made vessels through which God's enemy-embracing love transforms others. Paul/Saul did not just invent this idea out of thin air, and he did not just write this kind of theology abstractly without having really lived it. He could speak of Christ's love even for the most ardent persecutors of Christ because he had been one and found himself changed by this experience on the Damascus road. And he could speak of the new order of love in the Christian community because he had found it happening in his own life.  Paul becomes the first one to make the connection and put it into words: because Christ has loved us without resentments for our hostility toward him, we are called to love without resentments toward others as well, even those we would call our "enemies."

These ideas are not just intellectual theories or abstract thoughts—Saul lived the story of God's enemy-reconciling love in his real, flesh-and-blood life. And this story invites—no, it calls—us to live in that same new order of things, the order we call the kingdom of God. After all, as Revelation tells us, too, the One whose kingdom it is, who sits in the midst of the throne, is still--and ever--the Lamb (Rev. 5:6).

O Love that will not let us go, hold onto us today in all the twists and turns of this day. Open our eyes to see the ways you have loved us, and then open our hands to extend the same kind of love for those with whom we are estranged, so that together we may all be transformed into the likeness of your Son, the one who called on the Damascus Road and who calls to us on Main Street as well.