Commentary on Luke 6:27-38

Mary Hinkle Shore

The Taizé community has put to music words from St. Teresa of Ávila, offered here in English translation:

Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten.
Those that seek God shall never go wanting.
Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten.
God alone fills us.¹

The hymn verse describes the reality out of which Jesus speaks in Luke 6:27–38. Earlier in this chapter of Luke, Jesus has spoken to those excluded, reviled, and defamed on his account. He offered them blessings and encouraged them toward joy. Now he encourages all who hear him to live out of that same joy, regardless of what others are directing toward them. When they do, they will be resisting hate, curses, abuse, theft, and judgment by responding to those things with love, mercy, nonviolence, generosity, and forgiveness.

Jesus knows how different the ethic is that he commends from that which is widely acceptable: “If you love those who love you, what credit [or “what grace”; the word in Greek is charis] is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32). That is the acceptable ethic.

The implication is that anyone can love those who love them. Anyone can lend to someone from whom they expect repayment. That kind of love and lending is a transaction. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.

A closer look at such transaction-based behavior reveals the problem: In such a world, what you do dictates what I do. When we return hate with hate, the original hate has won! It inspires and directs our actions. This is not to be. In the reign of God, what we do is not directed by what others do to us. In the reign of God, what we do is a response to the God who alone fills us, the God who “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35).

Three additional observations may be helpful to the preacher.

Life together

First, Jesus is speaking to all those who are listening to him (see also 6:27). He speaks throughout the Sermon on the Plain to the people gathered as a group. The King James translation will show the places where Jesus says “you” in the singular by translating the Greek as “thee” or “thou.” The plural form is translated as “you” or “ye.” In the Sermon on the Plain, only Luke 6:29–30 and 41–42 are addressed to individuals. This may be because these verses circulated apart from the rest and were incorporated into the Sermon on the Plain by Luke. Perhaps these verses are directed to individuals because cheeks, coats, goods, and motes in eyes are possessed by individuals.

The great majority of the Sermon on the Plain, however, including its exhortations to love enemies and show mercy like that of the Most High, is spoken to the community of those listening to Jesus. This ethic is not meant to be tried alone. The text is not a directive, for instance, to an individual suffering spousal abuse to bear up under it while the rest of her Christian congregation looks the other way. In the reign of God, we live and act in community, which means, bluntly, that we concern ourselves with each other’s business more than the transaction ethic might suggest we should.

Historical and contemporary expressions of Christianity offer examples. One thinks of the accountability groups, or “bands,” that were part of John Wesley’s work to reform the Anglican church, or small-group ministry in the current day. The goal of such groups is to support one another in Christian life and witness. The lifestyle commended by Jesus in the Sermon on the Plain is life lived in such a group.

An ethic of resistance

The second point to be made is that Jesus offers his ethic as a way for the community of his followers to resist the tit-for-tat of the present age, not to be passive in the face of it. When we live the ethic of this Sermon in the face of this world’s violence, we are collectively saying to those who hate, abuse, strike, judge, and condemn, “You are not the boss of me.” We are demonstrating that bad behavior cannot goad us into reacting in kind. We are resisting the evils we deplore.

In his passion, Jesus will perform the ethic he commends here. He resists by praying for the one (might we say, the enemy?) who will deny him three times (see also Luke 22:31–34). When he speaks on the cross, it is to forgive (see also Luke 22:34, 43) and to commend his spirit to the merciful Father he refers to in Luke 6:36. He resists violence with self-giving love.

“Not as the world gives”

He dies, of course, prematurely and violently. This fact brings us to the last observation for the preacher to consider. The “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over” is not a reference to success in the transactional economy that Jesus calls his followers to resist settling for and settling into. Our giving is indeed met with God’s giving, but that is because it is in the nature of God to give, not because we found the magic coins for the cosmic vending machine.

“Not as the world gives do I give to you,” Jesus says elsewhere (John 14:27). We might imagine the pressed-down, shaken-together, running-over measure as the measure of God’s promise to fill us precisely at those times when, by all worldly measures, the life is being drained out of us. Jesus dies on the cross. In resistance and response, the Father raises the Son from the dead. Following this pattern, the Most High continues to fill those who are empty and call to life those as good as dead.