From the Lectionary for 23 February 2025 (Epiphany 7C)

Luke 6:27-38 (NRSV)

“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

~

"James Breech, The Silence of Jesus, says “Jesus is the most loving and least sentimental man one could imagine.” “Love your enemies” is not sentimentality. This is something that goes right to the heart of it. Jesus says, “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” And watch what happens. This is a recipe for destroying the little bundle of lies about myself and my society that came into existence the moment my tribe and I found somebody to hate. (Like the Gerasene demoniac.) Following this injunction is not just a nice thing to do. It's a matter of destroying the whole system of mystification which has been the womb in which you've lived and moved and had your social existence. It's the recipe for deconstructing the whole business. We have to recognize the profundity of that."

- Paul Nuechterlein, from notes on Gil Bailie's “The Gospel of Luke” lecture series, tape #4 on the Girardian Lectionary page for Epiphany 7C (https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/epiphany7c/)

~

"Modern interpreters certainly see that everything in the Kingdom of God comes down to the project of ridding men of violence. But because they conceive of violence in the wrong way, they do not appreciate the rigorous objectivity of the methods which Jesus advocates. People imagine either that violence is no more than a kind of parasite, which the appropriate safeguards can easily eliminate, or that it is an ineradicable trait of human nature, an instinct or fatal tendency that it is fruitless to fight.

"But the Gospels tell quite a different story. Jesus invites all men to devote themselves to the project of getting rid of violence, a project conceived with reference to the true nature of violence, taking into account the illusions it fosters, the methods by which it gains ground, and all the laws that we have verified over the course of these discussions.

"Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive.

"To leave violence behind, it is necessary to give up the idea of retribution; it is therefore necessary to give up forms of conduct that have always seemed to be natural and legitimate. For example, we think it quite fair to respond to good dealings with good dealings, and to evil dealings with evil, but this is precisely what all the communities on the planet have always done, with familiar results.

"People imagine that to escape from violence it is sufficient to give up any kind of violent initiative, but since no one in fact thinks of himself as taking this initiative - since all violence has [an imitative] character, and derives or can be thought to derive from a first violence that is always perceived as originating with the opponent - this act of renunciation is no more than a sham, and cannot bring about any kind of change at all. Violence is always perceived as being a legitimate reprisal or even self-defence. So what must be given up is the right to reprisals and even the right to what passes, in a number of cases, for legitimate defence. Since the violence is [imitative], and no one ever feels responsible for triggering it initially, only by an unconditional renunciation can we arrive at the desired result:

“And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.” (Luke 6:33-35)

[...]

"No one can see that the true nature of violence is deduced with implacable logic, from the simple and single rule of the Kingdom. No one can see that disobeying or obeying this rule gives rise to two kingdoms which cannot communicate with one another, since they are separated by a real abyss. Mankind can cross this abyss, but to do so all men together should adopt the single rule of the Kingdom of God. The decision to do so must come from each individual separately, however; for once, others are not involved."

- René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, pp. 197-99 (quoted on the Girardian Lectionary page for Epiphany 7a: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/epiphany7a/)

~

"And what is Jesus saying? Is he saying allow yourself to be walked all over by people? No! [...] The first step is: don't let the bastards get to you, don't let them run you. [Then] start to turn the whole way you are towards them so that you're not reactive to them but on the contrary becoming good towards them, because that's how God is. This is instruction about turning our whole way of being around in the face of hostility, so as to be towards those hostile to us as God is to us when we're hostile to him. In other words, it's very very strictly related to the power of the Creator, us finding ourselves on the inside of the power of the Creator which works in an entirely different way.

[...]

"The measure you give will be the measure you get back. The suggestion behind this is what Jesus is whispering out from underneath this immeasurable generosity that we are being asked to allow ourselves to become part of towards others, however apparently hostile, evil and wicked, just in the same sense that has been pushed [by God] through our hostility and wickedness, to break the [imitative] forms of reciprocity that are mutual protections against violence, and actually open up the possibility of constructing a new world together in which people are not frightened of each other. This is the promise of [Luke's] Sermon on the Plain."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqBJNqJdxRg)

From the Lectionary for 16 February 2025 (Epiphany 6C)

Luke 6:17-26 (NRSV)

He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
    for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

“But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now,
    for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now,
    for you will mourn and weep.

“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

~

"It's the Lukan version of the Sermon on the Mount, which is a revelation about how the world really works, and a presentation of the ethics that this new community will have to adopt. The ethics that exist have to do with the way the cultural structures are. The ethics that Jesus is pronouncing have to do with the way the world is. Matthew has a much more elaborate sermon, and it on the mount, the place of revelation and transcendence. Luke has the sermon on the level place, among the people, talking to them about how to live in this world."

- from notes by Paul Nuechterlein on Gil Bailie's, “The Gospel of Luke” lecture series, tape #4. 

~

"The second and third blessings are in the future tense, the first one is in the present tense: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Is there something more basic about the division between poor and rich which these beatitudes are immediately overturning? If we understand that God's kingdom, God's culture, is one not based on such divisions, then we are already blessed. We are already beginning to live in God's culture, even in the midst of those worldly cultures which continue to rely on a division between poor and rich. Our worldly cultures also rely on idolatrous gods who are seen as blessing the rich. This beatitude is obviously a direct challenge to those idols. The true God blesses the poor.

"I said that God's culture does not rely on divisions between rich and poor at all. So why does Jesus speak a woe to the rich? Does God bless the poor in exclusion to the rich? Does the true God simply play our same games but in reverse order? Is Jesus still presuming a culture that divides between poor and rich but simply turns the blessings and woes upside-down? I think that Christian liberation groups have often assumed the latter, and so have even gone along with a violent overthrow of the rich of this world, an attempt to turn upside-down this world's order. And God is seen as justifying their brand of justice and the sacred violence used to establish it. In other words, God does end up playing all our same games, including the violent ones.

"I feel it is crucial to let the Girardian anthropology give us another angle on this passage. God's cultural order does not depend on divisions between rich and poor. The miracle of the fishes and loaves are among those signs from Jesus that God is a God of abundance. There is enough for everyone. We don't have to presume a scarcity (which capitalism, for example, still does presume), which also presumes that some will be among the haves and some among the have nots.

"Then why the woes to this world's rich? In the present tense, they are the ones most likely to continue to live by this world's consolations. They already benefit from this world's cultural order and are not likely open to living by God's cultural order. An order based on anything other than the current system, which benefits them, will be viewed as woeful.

"Gil Bailie‘s noticing of Jesus turning his attention to his disciples is also important here. Luke's audience of disciples is generally agreed upon to have contained the greatest number of wealthy folks, compared to the audiences of the other gospel writers. It is not a coincidence, then, that Luke's gospel has by far the most challenges to disciples about material possessions. It would seem strange for Luke to direct a message to his wealthy congregants that describes some new order that ultimately leaves them woefully on the outside. It makes more sense that he would lift up a pen-ultimate reversing of this world's order as a needed challenge to coax such members into beginning to live in God's order today. Their wealth is a woeful stumbling block to their opening themselves to God's cultural order. If they ultimately end up on the outside in God's order, it will be because they have refused to come in.

[...]

"My question about the reversal indicated in these blessings and woes is whether they indicate a reversal within the human world order: those poor who are indebted to the wealthy become their rich creditors. Or does the apparent reversal represent the advent of God's world — in which case it isn't really a reversal within the human order. Rather, the poor are blessed because they are much more inclined to give up living in the human order in favor of God's order. Woe to the rich because they are more inclined to turn down the invitation.

"But if Luke's Jesus is simply giving us a reversal within the human ordering of things, then this really isn't such Good News, is it? [...] My point is that the Good News is not so much about a reversal as it is about the invitation to enter a whole new ball game in which we leave our score-keeping ways behind."

- Paul Nuechterlein, from 'Reflections and Questions' on the Luke text on the Girardian Lectionary page for this week (link below)

~

"This is going to be a constant in Jesus' teaching, the binary is arriving, the sword has come, the criterion is in your midst: the Son of Man. That is going to be the criterion from now on. And [...] if you're poor, if you're hungry now, if you weep now, and if you're in this position because people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you on account of the Son of Man - in other words, because you have 'got with the program' of the realisation that the truth is going to be spoken from the victim, something which power never likes.

[...]

"[T]he interesting thing is that here Jesus is talking to a mixed national crowd and he's not trying to specify, if you like, the ethnic inheritance of the prophets. In fact, the suggestion is rather that this dynamic - “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man” - that is something which is available everywhere, and that's what happens to true prophets anywhere. And if you are rich and full and laughing now, then you're the kind of person who people will speak well of, and that's not [just] true of a Jewish or Hebrew culture, that's true of all cultures. In other words, the flattery of falsehood, 'spin' if you like, to stay in with the powerful, is the way of the world.

"So Jesus is announcing very very strongly here that the dynamic, the center of what is coming up on people is going to be very drastic. It's going to make a very strong alteration to how the order of things works. At the center is the realisation that this word is spoken from beneath.

[...]

"So the Lukan journey continues, which is strangely secularizing, strangely international. [It is] apparently rather binary, but not because it's trying to lock people into things here and now [...] but because it's aware of the dynamic of desire which works either towards building you up so that you are receiving who you are from your name in heaven, or for the one who is grinding people down into death and violence."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLMudK4siKU)

[Source of Paul Nuechterlein comments, and for further analysis and discussion on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/epiphany6c/]

From the Lectionary for 9 February 2025 (Epiphany 5C)

Isaiah 6:1-8 (NRSV Updated Edition)

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said,

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”

The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said, “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

Luke 5:1-11 (NRSV)

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

~

"[In verse 8,] Luke throws what some commentators say is a mistake, because he refers to Peter as Simon Peter. And Jesus hasn't yet called him Peter. That happens a few chapters later in Luke's Gospel. In the other places, Luke has quite correctly referred to him as Simon but here he says, “But when Simon Peter saw it he fell down at Jesus and he's saying, ‘Get away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.’”

"Now I don't think it's a mistake at all. I think that Luke is showing the vocation of Simon, and the process of him becoming Peter at its starting place. And its starting place is a vision, very much like the Isaiah vision, which is the text we have in our first reading, and it's the important text for this passage, in which Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up. And he says, “I am undone, I am cut, I am a man with unclean lips.” So he explains his unworthiness, and that he is told: go and preach, go and preach.

"This is where Peter comes into being, this is the beginning of the formation of the oracle, and it's the first sign we get of that Isaiah text in Luke-Acts. That is our text, the vision of the Holy One with the fire in the Holy Place and the shock of the sinful prophet as it were. That is going to come up again very much in the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles where the Lord is high and lifted up and the smoke later fills the house. It's where the fullness of this vision is enacted amongst the apostolic group: that's what Pentecost is all about.

[...]

"[Jesus is] saying, “Listen, there's much much more where that comes from. I'm giving you something attractive so that you can see you're going to be able to do what is your work, but do it more fully. It's not [that] I'm saying you do something completely different, I'm sending you to do something that is more of what you do best, that's the work of the fisher of people.”

"And strangely this must have had a huge impact on them, the realisation that they had seen a sign of the Lord who was showing them something that was going to happen, which both fit into what they were doing best but was offering them so much more than they could imagine, that they left everything and followed him. So the first hint that Peter's vocation is going to point to something oracular, far greater than he, and amazingly, through the sign of the fish, he and his partner's starting to move into it.

[...]

"The 'away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man' is not anything to do with wallowing in sin. I hope that one of the things we are being taught by the Holy Spirit as we are nourished by the Word is the distance between who we are and the holiness of what we're being given. Not so as to make us ashamed or distraught or crushed or annihilated, but I think that there's something completely authentic in the realisation that we really aren't up to talking about these things - they are so much more alive, exciting, dynamic than what we can say [...]

“Away from me, I am a sinful man. But on the other hand, no, please not away from me. As a sinful man, enable me to show the respectful love of your Word, your teaching, and the life you offer.”

- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9djTq9R964I)

[For further discussion and reflection on this week's lectionary texts, see also: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/epiphany5c/]

From the Lectionary for 2 February 2025 (Epiphany 4C)

1 Corinthians 13 (NRSV)

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

~

"[...] St Paul simply takes it for granted that “being known” is what underlies all our knowing, and that we do not yet know properly because our “being known” is still to some extent veiled from us in a world run by rivalry and death. And this “being known” is in fact the reception of a loving regard towards which we, like so many heliotropes, find ourselves empowered to stretch in faith and hope.

"No wonder love is the greatest of these three, because it is the coming towards us of what really and inalterably is, the regard which creates, while faith and hope are the given response from within us to what is; the given response which love calls forth, while we are “on the way.” Faith and hope are a relaxing into our being uncovered, discovered, as someone loved. But they are relaxing into love's discovery of us."

- James Alison, On Being Liked, pg. 133 (after quoting 1 Cor. 13:11-13)

~

"It is as we begin to get a sense of what it is like to be loved from that space of God's giving that we begin to be empowered, and impelled, to open it up for others.

"And that, I think is actually the really difficult part of Christian morality: not what we do, but perceiving what has been done for us, becoming attentive to the one who is speaking us into being. This is because it is so much more difficult for us to allow ourselves to undergo something, to appreciate what we are finding ourselves on the inside of, and to allow ourselves to be stretched by it towards others, than it is to say “I haven’t got the time for all that ‘being loved’ stuff - just tell me what to do.”

"Yet this sinking into appreciation of being loved is no merely passive exercise. In fact it is usually through little acts of being stretched out towards others that we find ourselves becoming more aware of being loved, and the two moments, activity and undergoing, then enrich and inform each other.

"In any case, I would like to offer you an exercise to enable you to sit over time in a sense of being on the receiving end of being loved [...] [T]he famous passage from 1 Corinthians about love [...] has acquired very particular associations for us owing to its use in weddings. So it tends to get linked to a particular account of love, and a particular moment of love, neither of which are bad things. But the passage is much richer than that. [...] [R]ead this passage not, if you like, as a piece of abstract moralism defining what love is, but as an invitation to dwell in what it looks like to be undergoing the presence of One who loves you. In other words, everything we've seen about Jesus the forgiving victim coming towards us, and our sitting in his regard."

[...]

"This, all this, language of Paul's, is filling out dimensions of the regard of the Forgiving Victim in our midst. This is the space which Jesus has opened up for us so as to show us how God looks at us. It is as we find ourselves being looked at in this way, as we sink in to allowing this regard to tell us who we are, that we find ourselves impelled from within, contagiously, to do the same for others."

- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pp. 556-57, 561

[Source of the quotes, and for further analysis and discussion on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/epiphany4c/]

I also highly recommend James Alison's video "Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022 C" which is focused on the Gospel reading (Luke 4:21-30): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLyod15Cik