"Jesus loves Osama" - "Are you having a laugh?" Epiphany 7

Genesis 45: 3 - 11, 15
Luke 6: 27 - 38

Out in Australia, for once the churches are eclipsing the cricketers in the media. The reason is not just that the Poms aided by the New Zealanders have dented Australia’s sense of invincibility. It is as much about a controversy that currently surrounds some Baptist churches.

You see, a number of Baptist churches have recently displayed billboards that proclaim the message, “Jesus loves Osama.” Not surprisingly, there has been a reaction. For some there has been disbelief that churches should erect such billboards. They cannot be so crazy. Or to borrow my son’s favourite phrase when unconvinced by something his father says, “You’re having a laugh aren’t you.”

But now even the politicians are getting drawn in. Prime Minister John Howard who is even less qualified as a theologian than he is as a would be statesman, has suggested that the church could have “chosen a less offensive way of spreading its message.”

Now on the one hand I get his point. There are not too many people less deserving of Divine or human love than Osama Bin Laden. According to most Islamic scholars he is a heretic and his Al Qaeda is to all intents and purposes nothing other than a death cult. The man deals in death and destruction and offers no vision of society that could seriously be considered enlightened. In short, his life is far removed from Jesus as it is possible to imagine.

But wait a moment! By using the offensive example of Osama Bin Laden as being loved by Jesus, those Australian Baptists are revealing something of the scandalous truth concerning the love of Jesus. You see, if Jesus loves Osama Bin Laden, then surely Jesus loves every person no matter how dysfunctional or tawdry their lives might be. If Jesus loves Osama Bin Laden, then surely no person is beyond the love of Jesus. However low we might have sunk, surely this means that Jesus never gives up on us.

And certainly if we look at the life of Jesus, we find precisely that. He took a terrorist zealot into the community of his twelve closest followers. But he also called a tax collector who was to all intents and purposes a collaborator with the hated occupying Roman army. He brought a dignity to a woman who came from the ranks of the longstanding enemies of his people, the Samaritans, and did so even though her love life was a matter of some scandal. And time and again, he shared table fellowship with a motley crew of sinners and outsiders to the horror of the religious establishment who knew that such table fellowship involved a statement of acceptance of such reprobates.

But more than that, even when he was being personally wronged, he never stopped giving value to those whose evil was directed at himself. His patience towards those members of the religious establishment who sought to trap him, seems to have known no limit. And when evil did its worst in the Garden of Gethsemane, he tells Peter to put his sword away and even brings healing to one of those who had come to bring about his destruction. And then, and then on the Cross, his cry was not a curse but;

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

None of this means that Jesus is not concerned about right and wrong - he clearly is- but it means that Jesus is committed in love to all of humanity, as much when at our worst as when at our best. And that is the wonder of grace which should be the unending hymn of the church of God.

But now we meet another twist. For not only is Jesus the one who loves all but here he seems to be calling on those of us who seek to follow him to embody such love even to those who are our enemies.

“Are you having a laugh?” we respond. For all of us know that there are those who do great evils to others. Are there not we ask times, when evil of such magnitude is performed, that to ask the victim to love is but an act of cruelty?

Well, I think there is a sense in which Jesus is here using hyperbole, an exaggerated language to make a case for a different way of seeing the world. Yes, there are those who seem to rise to the challenge but for most of us, well we are not like Joseph able to show love to those who wreck our lives. And anyway, by the time Joseph is reconciled with his brothers, his fortunes have been transformed and from being reduced to slavery and jailbird, he is now raised to the highest office in the land along with the prestige that goes with it. He may see it as God’s plan but for many who suffer, mention of God’s plan can only give rise to hollow laughter.

More and more I am convinced that these words are addressed to for the situations in which we have power to effect a change for the good that we be prepared to use our power for good. For certainly, Jesus is here changing the ways in which we see our world.

Now just for a moment, we need to face the major objection to the teaching of Jesus. That objection is rooted in the violence of our world which in the face of wrong sees but two responses. The first of these responses is the cowardly option of “flight“, running away. This solves nothing. The other option is to “fight” but this takes the risk that we become the very thing that we are opposed to.

Jesus, on the other hand offers us the possibility of a creative way of confronting evil. For just a moment or two let’s look at his seemingly passive suggestions of how to relate to those who wrong us.

Firstly we see him suggesting turning the other cheek which on the face of it seems like the actions of a doormat. But it is not! The reason is that the only way you could hit someone on the right handed cheek would be with a backhanded action of the right hand as in those days the left hand was for cultural reasons kept for unclean tasks. The purpose of using the backhand would have been not so much to injure as to humiliate. Turning the other cheek would have meant the aggressor had to hit in the normal way but to do so would be to recognise that the victim was an equal rather than a subordinate. So Jesus is suggesting a stand that refuses to accept further humiliation.

Secondly we see Jesus suggesting that where a person is forced to give up their outer garment in order to pay off a debt in a society in which many were forced into indebtedness, that they should also remove their undergarment and give that also. Now given that poor people had only two garments to wear in the first place, this would mean nakedness. But the shame of nakedness in that culture would not be so much upon the naked person as on the person who witnessed it or the person who caused it. For here is Jesus suggesting a means by which the downtrodden should rise above their shame. The world is turned upside down.

Yes in all of this, Jesus is suggesting ways of resisting evil without the destruction of enemies. And that is at the heart of this teaching. By all means challenge evil! By all means do not be a doormat! But whilst there is no obligation to like those who do wrong, Jesus cautions us against willing their destruction and succumbing to hatred.

Desmond Tutu who chaired the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in South Africa after the painful years of apartheid puts it well;

“To be human, we live in community, we have to restore community and in the end only forgiveness will achieve that. A person is a person through other persons. Your humanity is caught up in my humanity.

If you are dehumanised, then inexorably I am dehumanised. For me to be whole, you have to be whole. If you are a perpetrator, a torn and broken human being who has lost your humanity, then I too am less than whole.”

Too right! For us to be truly human means living in community and we are all damaged when that breaks down. Of course, society must protect itself from those who bring destruction to it. Nowhere does Jesus dispute that. But the challenge is that we protect society often through the rule of law whilst not seeking to obliterate the possibilities of growth in even the most depraved.

At times, all of us struggle with this teaching yet within it we see a reminder that all are children of God made in the image of God, however much the image has been marred. And it is that we are called to remember in our local community hard as it may sometimes be, and in our national life. For if we heeded the call to follow the ways of Christ, we might be less ambivalent as a nation to torture, less inclined to send asylum seekers back to face death and less inclined to entice people into the indebtedness of problem gambling.

But now, we are on the edge of Lent. Now we prepare to follow Jesus on the road to Calvary. Now we prepare to see the wonder of a love which ultimately shows our pale imitations up for the pathetic efforts they are. Soon we will hear once more that cry upon the cross, the cry that has resounded through two thousand years of human violence and cruelty;

“Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”

And we will recall again that those words are not just for the torturing killers of two millenia ago but for us today even for the Osama Bin Ladens. For the love of Jesus is so immense that it pleads for all and in so doing speaks to us to dare to be a people of reconciliation and peace.