Love Your Enemies || Christ Vision 4/5

Year B: Proper 15

Over the next four weeks, I’ll be preaching through series called Christ Vision. We know that Jesus is like God, and we know that God is like Jesus. This is really good news. This series is about how Jesus came to show us how he sees the Father, as the Source of infinite love and compassion. Jesus wants us to know that God loves us just as God loved Jesus from before the beginning.

Once we begin to understand this, we will be transformed in such a way that the Love of Father, Son, and Spirit will overflow from ourselves and churches into the world around us.

This fourth video builds off the last one. If God desires all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, then how are we to live? Shouldn’t we also love our enemies? But if God actually does love those who are considered enemies of God, then why would God also send people a lake burning with fire? If God is love, then what is that about? We explore these questions and more in this video.

For those of you who enjoy the lectionary posts, they are sill here. Just look below the video!

Year B, Proper 15, August 18, 2024

First Reading: Proverbs 9:1-6

Psalm: Psalm 34:9-14

Second Reading: Ephesians 5:15-20

Gospel: John 6:51-58

Sermon - An Invite to the Messianic Banquet

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” John 6:51

This passage is shocking. As some of the audience reacted, this may conjure in our minds a picture of cannibalism.

But let’s slow down for a moment.

John is going out of his way to make sure that we recognize Jesus as the New Exodus.

Jesus offers the water of life in John 4 and 7. John says Jesus is the light of the world in John 1 and 8. And here Jesus is identified with the manna.

Like Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 who saw Jesus as the Rock in the wilderness, John sees Jesus is everywhere in the Exodus. In chapter 1, John the Baptist sees Jesus as “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” which we might see as a reference to the Passover lamb.

So when Jesus invites his audience to consume his flesh, he is simply invoking the passover/ Exodus imagery.

But there’s also something else going on here that is super cool. The word for “flesh” is “sarx.” Jesus “took on flesh and dwelt in us” (John 1:14).

Jesus is inviting us to enter his experience and allow his experience to become our own.

Through taking on flesh, Jesus entered into our delusion, our brokenness, our “sinful flesh,” and redeemed it. He showed us that God can dwell with humans despite their brokenness. In fact, it is through eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking is blood that we really begin to understand who the Father is. Or, to say it in a more tame way, when we absorb Jesus’s teaching, his life, and his example, we come to know the Father and have eternal life (John 17:3).

But there’s something else going on here too!

Jesus is inviting his audience to participate in the resurrection banquet. In the Hebrews Scriptures and in the New Testament in places like Proverbs 9 and Isaiah 25 and Matthew 8, the presence of God is pictured as a great feast. People come from all over the world to sit with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.

Through offering himself as the meal in John 6, Jesus is saying that those who follow and embody his teachings participate in the eternal life associated with this great eschatological feast!

Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which the ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” John 6:57–58

While we perceive connections to communion in this passage, keep in mind that in John’s narrative, this scene happens before the Last Supper. In fact, John’s gospel contains account of the inauguration of the eucharist, which may be why this part of Jesus’s dialogue is included here; perhaps John is trying to move his audience away from a magical or transactional view of communion back to what Jesus originally intended: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

So the point of this passage is to challenge us to “eat the Word of God.” We are to embody everything he does and says. We are to love as he loves, to walk as he walked, to heal as he heals, and to forgive as he forgives.

When we come across 5,000 people who have no bread, we should have compassion on them. We come across someone in need of saving from the religious elite who have their stones ready, we should step in front of her. When we come across a religious institution that exploits the poor in the name of God, we should be prepared to flip over some tables.

Accept Jesus’s invitation to the meal today.

Second Reading: Give Thanks at All Time and for Everything

In Ephesians 5:20, Paul says, “…giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Just for a few moment, close your eyes and think about the expressions “all times” and “everything”.

When I think of “all times” I think of good times and bad, ups and downs. I think of those days when nothing seems to be going right, and I think of those days when the day couldn’t go better. Am I really supposed to be thankful for both of these experiences?

This morning, for instance, we had to keep both kids out of school for COVID, a program on my computer malfunctioned right before an important call, and then my microphone that I invested in several years ago quit working. How can I be thankful for times like this?

Then there’s “everything.” Does that include the guy who cut me off in traffic yesterday? Does that include the acid reflux I struggle with? Does that include the pain, suffering, and death we witness throughout our lives? How can we be thankful for these things?

I think the key is “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The word “Lord” reminds us that Jesus is the Creator. The word “Christ” reminds us that Jesus is the Promised King. And the word “Jesus” reminds us that this Creator King took on flesh, entered into our misery and delusion, and invites us to join him on the Cross and the tomb that we might taste of his resurrection.

That is, we can be thankful because even in the shadow of the Cross there is hope. God meets us in our pain and misfortune as well as in our good days, and for that we can always be thankful.

---

Thanks so much for keeping up with this blog. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or critiques, you can always comment here or reach out through my website: https://danielr.net.