As I was reading Luke 6 alongside 1 Corinthians 15 this past week, I was drawn first to the theme of loving our enemies that so characterizes the ministry of Jesus, reflected here in the text. But upon returning to these passages a little while later, I felt pushed in a different direction. The more I read this Gospel reading, the more I felt compelled to write, not only concerning the remarkable commandments Jesus issues here, but also the way that Jesus introduces them in the first place: “I say to you that listen . . .”

At first, I felt this was rather a shame, as I had already spent time with the implications of Jesus’s exhortations in Luke 6 and had written some words on them that I considered to be fairly pretty. But the irony of my not wanting to listen to Jesus when I felt that he might very well be asking me to write about listening to Jesus was too much to bear.

The Difference Between Hearing and Listening

First, let’s think about the difference between simply hearing versus actually listening. “I say to you who listen,” Jesus says. The word translated as “listen” is the Greek verb ἀκούω [akouó]. But it doesn’t mean simply “hear” or “listen.” The word ἀκούω encompasses both the physical act of hearing and the deeper understanding or comprehension of what is heard. In the New Testament, ἀκούω is often used to describe the act of hearing the word of God, the teachings of Jesus, or the message of the gospel.

We see this in the Shema, the central prayer of Judaism, a prayer Jesus would have prayed countless times, extolling the name and oneness of God, (Deuteronomy 6:4), which begins with "Hear, O Israel ..." This cultural context underscores the importance of ἀκούω as not just passive listening, but as understanding and response.

“Lord, Lord!”

Knowing this, we shouldn’t be surprised when we find that, towards the end of Luke chapter 6, Jesus says, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you?” It’s a tall order, given what he says!

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.

And almost as proof of the difficulty of listening to Jesus, I realized something that now seems obvious, but which had never occurred to me before. This passage gets summarized by that last line: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” And as I read it again a few days ago, I realized how different that sounds when isolated from what comes before it.

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

How would you want others to treat you if you hated, cursed, and abused the innocent, if you struck someone in anger, if you had to beg or steal? Jesus isn’t asking us to treat others as we would have them treat us when we’re at our best, but when we’re at our worst.

“I say to you who listen,” Jesus says, to you who understand, and yet it seems both like every time I read the Gospels something new grabs me. And this can sometimes be unsettling.

I think that anytime we really try to listen to Jesus, try to understand with patience, humility, and also courage, we might find that he calls into question many of the things we believe or want to be true and hold dear. We might even find that we act in ways that suggest we believe things we didn’t even realize.

Loving Those Who Love Us

It seems obvious, for instance, that we should love those who love us—obvious enough that the vice president recently suggested this was an ancient Christian concept. But, at least in our passage today, Jesus calls this directly into question. And we shouldn’t be glib about this because whether or not loving those who love us is an accurate account of the gospel of Jesus, it is surely an accurate account of the way many, if not most of Jesus’s followers live and love, myself included. When we come to see that gap between the gospel of Jesus and the way we interpret it to suit our own inclinations, it can be disorienting.

Maybe some of you have experienced something like this too! If so, take heart, because this also pretty much the story of the twelve apostles. Time and again, Jesus finds his disciples misunderstanding him, misconstruing not only his teachings but his very identity, and also acting in ways that are totally at odds with what the disciples believe, raising the question of whether they fully believe it yet at all. When they argue about who is the greatest, or when Peter denies Jesus, the one he had called the Messiah only days before, out of fear for his own life, we see people struggling to listen, to understand Jesus, in the same ways we are. But why is this the case? Why are Jesus’s teachings apparently so prone to confusing his audience, or so often received with dull, passive, and even obstinate ears?

Love Your Enemies

Second then, let’s talk about why we need to listen in this way, and what is hard about it for us. I think it only takes a quick glance through the rest of our Gospel reading to see why.

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.

We should be honest about Jesus’s teachings here. They sound farfetched, impractical, dangerous even. And I think the only honest response to those concerns is to say, “That is absolutely correct.” They are all of those things and more. If we aren’t to some extent scandalized by what we’re reading here today, I think it could only be because we are hearing but not listening, discounting even the possibility of being confronted and transformed by Jesus, rubbing off the sharp edges to make it fit into our lives and our world as we and it already are.

The Scandal of Jesus’s Life

We must remind ourselves that the gospel of Jesus—which is to say his utterly unique identity, his teachings, his very life—is a scandal, from the perspective of the world around us, maybe just as much today as it was in Jesus’s own time. St. Paul knew this perhaps better than anyone. He heard Jesus but, like so many others, did not listen, so much so that he was one of the principal persecutors of Jesus’s first followers. So when the penny finally dropped, when Paul was able to truly open his ears, his heart, to really listen to Jesus, he couldn’t pretend the gospel didn’t demand a radical break from most of his preconceived beliefs and assumptions about theology, morality, even what we simply refer to as common sense.

In our reading from 1 Corinthians today, Paul writes:

“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.”

One way of reading what Paul is saying here is that Jesus’s impact and import, the difference Jesus makes in our lives and in the world around us, is not the logical result of Jesus’s life and teachings.

We are used to thinking in terms of logic and causation. If I do x, then y is likely to happen. If I want a crop to harvest, I have to plant a seed and keep it alive. But Paul says: That is not how progress and transformation happen with Jesus.

A Different Order of Logic: Foolishness or Wisdom?

The logic, so to speak, of loving your enemies, of lending without hope of return, of loving those who don’t love you ... it’s not that it’s nonsensical, but that it adheres to a different order of logic altogether. This logic looks to the world, and I think if we’re honest, often looks to us more like foolishness than wisdom.

Earlier in the second chapter of his letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes:

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

In the face of what we think works, Paul says that Jesus shows us another way, a way that transcends the logic of causation and instead appeals to the logic of grace and the transformative power of love. Loving your enemies, loving those who hate you, might not be the smart play, but it is the only way to turn a hater into a lover.

But, if Jesus is asking us to challenge all our well-grounded ways of pursuing change and progress, setting aside our accurate understandings of how to get things done, how are we to come to understand and trust in the alternative that he lays out before us? How can we listen like this?

How to Listen to Jesus

So thirdly, and finally, I want to talk about how we can listen to Jesus. Here again, we can look to the example of the twelve disciples. They are often perplexed by Jesus’s actions and teachings. They get it wrong, and Peter especially, just as often as they get it right. But we know that even if they misunderstand Jesus, they are trying to actively listen to him because they continue to follow him. They cling to his presence; they stay close to Jesus. This doesn’t mean just shutting up and getting on with it. No, the disciples are constantly asking Jesus to explain himself and to help them to understand.

To have ears to hear, to be one of those who listens, does not mean never asking questions. But the disciples’ questions are never skeptical in spirit, designed to show the illogical nature of Jesus’s ministry and in so doing, to let themselves off the hook from following him.

They don’t issue from an already preconceived notion of impossibility or an assumption of impracticality, though Jesus certainly gets questions like that from the Pharisees. The disciples’ ham-fisted attempts at understanding, at listening to Jesus, come from a simple desire to stay close with Jesus, to understand him, to listen to him as he asks of those who follow him.

But they had the physical presence of Jesus and we don’t. What does this mean for us?

As obvious as it may be, I need to say it. We need to read the Bible, and the Gospels especially. It is there that we encounter Jesus not just as a teacher, not just as savior and redeemer, but as a person like us, moving through life and very literally practicing what he preaches.

And because it isn’t always obvious, we need to read the Bible together, when possible.

Jesus said, “Where two or three of you are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” We need Jesus’s help as well as the help of Holy Spirit whom Jesus promised would guide us into all truth. We need God’s help to wrap our heads, our hearts, even our whole selves around Jesus’s words and what it means for us to follow them, to follow him.

Jesus really lived the way he asks us to live, and it is essential that we not lose sight of that.

The Lord knows that we will continue making mistakes, and that many times we won’t even know what it means to listen to Jesus or follow him in specific situations. Our lives are separated from Jesus’s by two thousand years and enormous changes in the world around us.

To listen to Jesus and to understand the claim he makes on our life is not the same thing as being ready and able to do all that he asks of us. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the fact that he is asking us to obey his teachings, and especially if we want to understand what is being asked of us in the first place.

Faith Seeking Understanding

We can see the disciples here again, but in a more positive light. Simon and Andrew, indeed all the disciples, start following Jesus before they understand who he is and who he is asking them to become. This is what St. Anselm of Canterbury called “faith seeking understanding.” Many of us think of faith as an operation of the mind, as a mental posture or commitment. But if we want to listen to Jesus, we need to see that it is a posture of mind and body. And it is only after we start acting in the ways that Jesus asks us to that we can begin to understand what he is saying, and listen to him.

Loving your enemies, giving to those who will not repay you—make no mistake, these are big asks. And I think we will only ever be able to understand why it is being asked of us, and what difference it makes for ourselves and the world around us, after we start trying to do it.

The state of our world gives us more than enough opportunity to try to put into practice even these seemingly extreme ways of living.

Opportunities to Show Love

So maybe this week, let’s all keep an eye out for opportunities to show love and patience to someone who is annoyed, or who is behaving angrily or aggressively. Maybe we could start each day this week just reading these words again to us:

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.

You might find it impacts that person in powerful ways. You might find it does not. But I think, I trust, that either way, you will be impacted, that you feel a bit closer to Jesus, a bit more able to hear him and hear where he is calling us as we move through our daily lives. And that will undoubtedly make all the difference.