A great number of people have said that this passage from Luke and its parallels in the other Gospels and in Paul embodies the absolute apex of the Christian life. The Christian life involves many acts: being nice, and, as I said a couple of weeks ago, responding to the beauty of the earth. But I think that all of these aspects of Christianity are lesser manifestations of our transformation in Christ than the description of human life that Luke is offering in this passage.

When we hear this passage, our initial response is to say that this statement contravenes nature. Nobody wants to accept this. Nobody is built in a manner that makes the love of one's enemy plausible in any way. And so then we create this magical notion of grace which somehow radically reverses our nature, transmutes us into lovers of our enemy. I think that this is profoundly wrong and terribly misleading and gives rise to a radically distorted view of God and of the Christian life. Instead of this, I would like to suggest a totally different model of what Jesus and the Christian life was about. I can even point in our time to one writer who has probably shed more light and deepened my understanding of this more than anybody else. He is an English Benedictine by the name of Sebastian Moore who worked in the United States for a long time. He is an old man now and he has resumed his work at Downside Abbey. He was here, at King's College, several years ago. Moore has created a phrase which encapsulates this radically different view of things. He refers to Jesus as the awakener of desire. You see, our normal assumption is based on what appears to be our most profound desire: - - to retain our own integrity. Therefore, the rest of the world is simply grist for that enterprise. For example, we make little mutual defense pacts which are fragile and then if the line shifts we make them someplace else with a view, above all, to preserving ourselves. What Moore was getting at, and what has been so helpful for me, is his belief that what we really desire at our utmost is to be connected with everybody else. This is the deepest desire and it is supplanted by this other desire simply out of fear, guilt (real or neurotic), and out of all kinds of distortions of human life. Again, that phrase from Genesis states this most eloquently: "To be able to stand naked and unashamed before each other". In his own career, that is by the way he lived, Jesus awakened this deepest desire and illuminated this second stratum of desire, namely the desire to protect and retain ourselves, to reveal it as a distortion. Jesus revealed that the law of human life that we would like to say is the most fundamental is, in fact, not the most fundamental and that our selfhood is achieved when we can be with others fully and freely. Everything else that is contrary to this is precisely a distortion of this deepest desire.

I think that this analysis of desire is brilliant. I can even quote psychologists and psychiatrists who propose this as psychologically plausible. But what is so wonderful is that this view illumines our text in a way that no other does. It is very easy to say that Jesus said, "Love your enemies. Be good to those who hurt you. Pray for those who abuse you" and then respond to this by stating: "All right, by God, this is what I am going to do, even if it kills us all". This is not the true Christian course. If Jesus does not open new possibilities for what authentic human life is than he is of no purpose to us, and I think that this is exactly what captivated these early followers of Jesus: that he broadened the range of our expectations, that he, in Moore's wonderful phrase, "Awakened", perhaps you can say, "re-awakened" our most fundamental desire. What this new frame of mind does, the more you think about it, is shift, in a massive and absolutely fundamental way, all kinds of other things in the Christian life. It enables us to re-assess, to clarify, and to revalue all sorts of things that are part of the Christian tradition. And I think that it is really fortuitious that this text is given to us in the same week that Lent begins, because Lent, if nothing else, is a time for us to seek ourselves and God. It is a common search. So, Lent is the time when presumably we can clarify for ourselves all sort of things.

Finally, the splendour of this way of understanding this desire is that it absolutely cuts away any possibility for us to see God as the alienating presence that God is so often in the lives of so many of us, so much of the time. God does not want to remove us from ourselves, but to restore us to ourselves. Thus the question is: who is this self? Is this self the one that must do a cost-benefit analysis of every relationship, gesture, word, and move that is made, with the view of protecting oneself? Or, is God the one who calls us always to more, to larger life, as the Gospel of John states, to fuller life, to real life, in which the love of our enemies becomes not implausible, not counter-natural, but simply the inevitable spelling out of the mercy, grace, and love of God.