Luke 6 - Heart Check
Meegan Zillman • October 26, 2020
A few days back, I received a nasty email from an anonymous stranger. It took me a few moments to process that this wasn’t junk mail, but an intentional, expletive-filled, all-capped message raging at me for being, in more polite terms, an idiot. My crime? I had accidentally listed a craigslist post trying to sell a $5 cork board in the wrong category. Oops. While I certainly didn’t feel my mistake merited that level of concentrated animosity, I initially closed out my inbox and shrugged it off. Initially.
But as I continued to think about it, I started to get a little hot under my proverbial collar. Who does that? Who puts that kind of time and energy and effort into harassing a stranger for making a (very) minor mistake? What’s up with such vitriol? What kind of horrible, evil human goes to such lengths to…
Wait. It might still be bothering me a bit.
And so, against my better judgement, and honestly, the Spirit’s whisperings to my heart, I opened my email back up and prepared a number of golden zingers to fire off. I still had to at least give an appearance of Christianity though, so I deleted a number of the more clever ones and settled on a sweetly sarcastic, “Wow. Thank you for so kindly pointing out my mistake.” (Seriously—I composed some that were way better.)
Send.
Uggh, Meegan!! Why didn’t I just let it go?!? Why didn’t I stop myself from engaging in some passive-aggressive skirmish with a mean guy I will never meet? I certainly wasn’t trying to help him. I wanted him to feel bad, to feel ashamed, but that’s not happening to someone who was willing to send such a message in the first place. Why didn’t I just take the high road and ignore it?
To be honest, I don’t fully understand my motives. I know on some base level, I wanted this jerk to pay. I wanted him to feel ashamed, abashed, judged, wrong…hurt, even! I wanted to assert some justice into the situation. His actions were not right, and I wanted him to suffer for it.
Fast forward to this morning, as I sit down in front of my Bible, and happen upon Jesus’s words in Luke 6:27-28:
“But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
While a part of me hopes the fact that I chose to send the nicer of my sarcastic responses absolves me of wrongdoing, I sit ashamed of what was truly going on in my heart. I wanted to wound. I wanted to respond in kind to this angry person (even now a number of derogatory nouns jump to the front of my mind in place of “person”! Jesus help me!)
Boy oh boy. Let me keep reading. Luke 6:32-33:
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do that…”
Okay, Jesus. I see what you’re doing here.
Luke 6:35-36:
“But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting anything back.”
Yikes. Convicted. But oddly compelled…
“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.”
Have. Mercy.
Literally. What kind of a God do I serve, what kind of a Father am I encouraged to approach and experience and know and imitate? One who treats jerks with kindness. One who gives mercy to those deserving judgement. One who is fully capable of responding to mean emails with acerbic wit that will cut the guilty sender down to size, but chooses to instead simply
move the message to the trash.
Maybe he can do this so easily because he’s not afraid that meanies will get away with it. He is not concerned that injustice reigns because he was THERE, offering himself and his life on the cross, to bring mercy to those who would have it and justice to those who would not. That opens a different can of worms that I can consider another day.
But today, I am sitting here considering my own heart. My own response to my fellow messy, broken humans who lash out at others in a misguided attempt to salve their own wounds. I want to be merciful, just as my Father is to me. So now, here I sit, kind of hoping to get another nasty email. But also knowing my next test is unlikely to come in electronic form, but more likely as I go to the store, or drive down the road, or talk with a friend who is hurt and overwhelmed. This time, I am going to fight to remember to do good to the next careless jacka-ninny who comes at me. (Yep. Still need Jesus.)