Message for worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 23rd of Second Month, 2025
Speaker: Brian Young
Scripture: Luke 6:27-38
Luke 6:27–38, NRSVUE: 27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
My friend Dorothy knows a good deal when she sees one. This is a f/Friend of Stephanie’s and mine from California, an important member of the meeting that I served when we lived there, Berkeley Friends Church. One day fairly early in our time there, she invited me to come along with her to make a visit to a member couple who lived some distance away and that I hadn’t yet met. It was a drive of perhaps an hour from where we were in the East Bay, to Napa County. Dorothy wanted to bring lunch, since we would get there around midday, and the folks we were visiting would appreciate something different from their usual. So we went to the 99 Ranch Asian Supermarket in Richmond, CA, to get provisions (I’ll make a brief detour here to say that grocery stores are a true phenomenon in the Bay Area—there
are so many independent and/or organic and/or specialty and/or ethnic stores, and they each have their devoted fans. It’s almost a secular religion: will a Berkeley Bowl shopper have anything to do with a Monterey Market shopper?)
I have no idea where this place got the name 99 Ranch, but they definitely had all kinds of Asian specialties—including really good Chinese food. And that’s what we had come to get to take up to our friends in Napa. Dorothy put me in charge of ordering a few to-go entrees while she saw to something else. I have no memory today of what we ordered—but what I do remember is the way they served it to us. This was not a fancy place, just a typical deli counter. They had the ubiquitous plastic tubs, pint and quart sizes, I think, and whatever I ordered, we wanted a couple of quarts. When the woman who served me had filled the first one to near the top, I said, “That’s great, thank you,” expecting her to hand it over—that was the point when your typical Whole Foods staffer would have put it on the scale—but then she put more in, mashing it down, making sure that we had enough. Again I thanked her, now expecting to have her give it to me, but still she gave me more, compressing the contents so much that there couldn’t have been any air left in that container. THEN the top went on, doubtless requiring great force to keep it sealed. And the same with the next container. So we went to Napa with the two most liberally defined quarts of Chinese food I have ever seen. And while I’m sure we were paying by the weight of the container, Dorothy still knew a good deal when she saw one—there was no question that the folks at 99 Ranch were going to give you plenty.
So when I read the end of today’s passage, where Jesus speaks of giving in such a way that we receive back a great abundance, I think of that counterwoman at 99 Ranch Asian Supermarket. “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap” (v38). There is no question that you are going to get plenty. Now, we know that Jesus wasn’t speaking of shrimp fried rice or kung pao chicken, but it’s never been clear to me exactly what it was that the disciples could expect to have poured into their laps. It’s possible that Jesus meant to evoke grain or spices of some sort, something dry that would have been measured with a scoop or a bowl; certainly if that were poured into one’s lap, meaning into the lap of one’s tunic or robe, one could gather the garment around the bounty and get it home without losing any of it. But I also think of those words from the 23rd Psalm, “my cup overflows” (23:5; also “my cup runneth over,” KJV), another image of the abundance of God’s care for God’s people, and I wonder if Jesus’ hearers might have thought of wine or oil. Either way, I have to remind myself that this is a metaphor, and the point is that the abundance of God is kind of messy: the plenty that the disciples will receive will be more than they expect, perhaps more than they can deal with. There will be so much that it is going to slop over a bit, like a quart container at the 99 Ranch supermarket.
I’m beginning at the end of the passage here because of this theme of abundance that I’m seeing emerge in Luke’s Gospel, and I want to be sure that we catch it here. But to step back a bit—this passage comes from the section of Luke’s Gospel that is often called “The Sermon on the Plain,” because it contains some of the same material as Matthew’s well-known “Sermon on the Mount.” Luke’s sermon is shorter than Matthew’s—really just the second half of chapter six—but it mixes together ethical counsel and short parables like Matthew does, with Luke’s own variations and unique material. That pressed-down, overflowing measure in v39, for example, is a unique feature of Luke’s Gospel.
Like the Sermon on the Mount, Luke includes beatitudes, statements of blessing, which come before today’s passage, beginning at v20: “Blessed are the poor,” etc. But Luke also includes woes, statements of non-blessing, following his beatitudes, which don’t show up in the Sermon on the Mount. And here is where Luke makes one of his particular concerns very plain: the contrast between the poor and the rich, and the differing results they can expect in the Reign of God—so placing the first of Luke’s beatitudes and woes together, Jesus says “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God... But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation” (vv20, 24). If you read the whole set, it’s clear that Jesus is here speaking in material terms, and not metaphorically; this is not Matthew’s “blessed are the poor in spirit,” but “blessed are the poor,” full stop.
So those blessings and woes are what has come immediately before what Jesus then says about loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you. These words are probably familiar to many of you, at least from Matthew’s version in the Sermon on the Mount. This is one of those parts of the Gospel that as Friends I hope we have paid more attention to than perhaps other folks have. It is part of the Biblical basis for our peace testimony, and continues to form the ethic that we present to the world.
I’m afraid I am not going to spend a lot of time on the “love your enemies” part of the passage today, other than to say that there is one line of interpretation that emphasizes the fact that these words were spoken in first-century Palestine under Roman occupation, and suggests that Jesus was teaching a kind of civil disobedience to his Jewish audience. Turning the cheek to a Roman soldier who had backhanded you across the face required him to then strike you forehanded, as he would an equal rather than someone beneath him. And a soldier might be permitted to take someone’s cloak, but to then have the victim give up his shirt as well would risk public nakedness, which would bring shame upon the assailant. There is more to this interpretation than I can do justice to here today, and Matthew’s version of the sayings (end of Mt. 5) provides the clearest context to understand it. (If you do want to know more, look up the writings of Walter Wink, the Biblical scholar and practitioner of nonviolence.)
Whether or not Jesus was counseling civil disobedience in the first part of of today’s passage, it is clear from the beginning to the end that he is upsetting the world’s standards of reciprocity. By worldly standards in his day and in ours, you are to give as good as you get: if someone mistreats you, you need to get them back somehow; if they take something from you, you are right to demand it back from them; you should love your family, for they love you, but you owe love to no one else, and certainly not your enemies; and if someone borrows from you, you are expect that loan repaid, maybe with interest. This is the way the world works; we give only when we have received, and we give only in like measure to what we have received.
But in what I have been calling the household of God, the alternative community of Jesus’ disciples, things are different. Remember a few weeks ago, when we looked at Jesus’ claiming his mission statement: he reads from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, and he says he is there to “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” but he leaves out the part that mentions “the day of vengeance of our God” (Luke 4:19, cf. Isaiah 61:2). Vengeance is part of the world’s system, not part of the Reign of God that Jesus proclaims. So in God’s economy, the coin is not vengeance—it is not even reciprocity; rather, it is mercy.
And Jesus makes this clear in vv35–36: “...love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Followers of Jesus are to operate as God operates, by mercy. And the more we are operate by mercy—not judging, not condemning, forgiving, lending without expecting repayment—the more we will experience God’s mercy.
That is the good measure, pressed down, shaken shaken together and running over, that will be poured out on us. And again, this is not about reciprocity; God does not mete out mercy one for one, like “OK, you didn’t judge this one person that one time, so here’s your little portion of mercy, don’t come back ‘til tomorrow...” No. Rather, God has an abundance of mercy and grace for each one of us, if we will but turn into this way of discipleship just one tiny bit, and keep in it. The good measure never stints, never runs out—and it’s kind of messy. If a little spills out, that’s OK; there’s enough for you, and for that neighbor down the street that you can’t stand. Like a counterwoman at the 99 Ranch, God wants to make sure you get plenty—maybe more than you expect, perhaps more than you can deal with.
Friends, today’s passage is one of those places in the Gospel that is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Meditating on these words and the rest of the Sermon on the Plain, I feel more afflicted than I do comforted. Mercy seems hard to come by in today’s political climate. When I turn on the news or read the paper, I am so ready to be outraged, that mercy never even crosses my mind. How ready I am to accept the world’s coin of vengeance, rather than God’s coin of mercy.
And there’s more, when I think about the blessings Jesus speaks for the poor, and the woes that he speaks for the rich. By the standards of 90% of the people in the world, I am among the rich. If these words are good news for the poor, what do they mean for me? Luke presents a very clear economic critique that I am struggling with mightily. How more
comfortable I am clutching at the riches that I have, expecting my reward from them, rather than from the abundance that God’s Reign promises.
With all of that said, it is clear that Jesus was counseling mercy to people who also struggled with that teaching, who misunderstood, or forgot it almost as soon as they had heard the words. These are hard teachings to live into, and we can’t do them in isolation. In fact, it is only in community that the abundance of God’s grace can be manifested. We practice mercy best not as a private pursuit, but as a corporate discipline. Let’s reach towards the abundance of God’s mercy now together, as we settle into quiet.
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