“Help Your Friends, Punish Your Enemies” by Rev. Dr. Clark Cowden | February 15, 2026
Last Sunday, Pastor Steve kicked off our new sermon series on Learning from the Master. For the next 8 weeks, we are going to be looking at stories in the Gospel of Luke about the greatest person who ever lived. Jesus is our master, our model, and our mentor. He is our pattern, our paradigm, and our precedent. He has the words of life we need. He teaches us pearls of wisdom we don’t find from anyone else. He opens up our minds and our hearts to truths and realities we haven’t seen or understood before. He gives us a glimpse into the eternal and helps us see what is important and what is not. We are going to be looking at some of Luke’s accounts about Who Jesus is, what He said, and what He did, as we lead up to Easter – the greatest day in history.
Archeologists have discovered a site near Bath, England, where about 2000 years ago some hot springs formed a combination spa/worship center. At that site, they dug up scores of prayers that had been written down. They are called curse tablets because by far the most common kind of prayers were curses. People would give the name of someone who hurt them and pray that the gods would harm them. One tablet said, “Docimedus has lost two gloves. He asks that the person who has stolen them should lose his mind and his eyes in the temple at the place where the goddess appoints.”
In Rome, a curse tablet was discovered that said, “I invoke you, holy angels and holy names… tie up, block, strike, overthrow, harm, destroy, kill, and shatter Eucherios the charioteer and all his horses tomorrow in the arena of Rome. Let the starting-gates not open properly. Let him not compete quickly. Let him not pass. Let him not make the turn properly. Let him not receive the honors… Let him not come from behind and pass but instead let him collapse, let him be bound, let him be broken up & let him drag behind. Both in the early races & the later ones.”
The attitude of the world is to Help Your Friends and Punish Your Enemies. The attitude of the world is to attack your adversaries, file lawsuits vs. your opponents, and fire people who speak out vs. you. The way of the world is to call people names, question people’s integrity, and try to ruin their reputations. The way of the world is to see how much dirt you can dig up on people you don’t like, try to hurt people who have hurt you, and accuse your enemies of breaking the law even if its not true.
This is what we sinful human beings do to each other. This is what we are all capable of doing, because we are all sinners. These are the things that come naturally to us. But this is not the way of Jesus. Jesus calls us to do what does not come naturally. He calls us to a different way, a better way. We read about Jesus’ way in Luke 6:27-36:
“27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”
In writing about this passage, NT Wright says that some people believe in a gloomy God, a penny-pinching God, a God Whose only concern is to make life difficult. He says this passage shows us that all religions are not the same and all gods are not variations on the same theme. This God is different. If you lived in a society where everyone believed in this God, there wouldn’t be any violence. There wouldn’t be any revenge. There wouldn’t be any class divisions. Property and possessions wouldn’t be nearly as important as making sure your neighbor was all right. If we took Jesus seriously and lived like this, life would be exuberant, different, astonishing, and people would stare.
Jesus’ life was one of exuberant generosity, giving everything He had to people in need. And when people struck Him on the cheek and ripped the shirt off his back, He went on loving and forgiving them anyway. He didn’t show love only to His friends, but to His enemies too, weeping over the city that rejected Him.
1)When we talk about loving or forgiving our enemies, one question people sometimes ask is: DO I HAVE TO FORGIVE SOMEONE WHO ISN’T SORRY? Is it possible to forgive someone who doesn’t think they did anything wrong, who hasn’t apologized, and who has shown no remorse for what they did? The answer is YES. It is possible. No, it is not easy. Jesus doesn’t tell us to only forgive the people who forgive us. He says, if you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt people do that. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that.
Jesus calls us to do what is hard, not what is easy. Forgiveness is important because forgiveness means letting go of my right to hurt you back. Forgiveness means giving up my attempt to make you pay for what you did to me. We can probably all think of people who refuse to do this. They believe in punishing their enemies, not forgiving their enemies. But, when we do that, we end up hurting ourselves just as much, if not more, than the other person. For your own spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and relational health, Jesus says – let it go.
We are not always able to accomplish reconciliation. To reconcile with someone is to restore your relationship back to a good place. That doesn’t always happen. And Jesus does not command us to trust people who are not trustworthy. But, Jesus’ command to love our enemies is not a suggestion. It is an order. We are called to love the repentant people who have hurt us. We are called to love the unrepentant people who have hurt us. Jesus calls us to love our enemies.
2)TO LOVE YOUR ENEMIES MAY BE JESUS’ MOST FAMOUS AND MOST VIOLATED TEACHING. We human beings are side-takers. We tend to divide the human race into Us vs. Them. We divide people up religiously, politically, racially, culturally, and on and on. If someone is in my group, I tend to magnify their good qualities and I overlook their negative qualities. If someone is not in my group, I supersize their bad qualities and I minimize their good ones.
A few years ago, they held the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC, just a day or two after the US Senate had held their final vote to not remove the President from office after being impeached by the House of Representatives. It was a great time to invite people to pray because we really needed prayer, but it was an awkward time to pray because people walked into the room feeling like enemies.
They had invited Arthur Brooks to speak at the Breakfast. He spoke about his book Love Your Enemies. He urged the people present not to let their disagreements over politics lead to contempt. He recalled speaking to a group of conservative activists and telling them their opponents were neither evil nor stupid. That line did not get much applause.
He went on to talk about being raised by Christian parents in Seattle who had progressive politics. His parents were neither evil nor stupid. And he challenged the audience to remember their loved ones who have different points of view—and to stand up for those who would ridicule them. He told the audience that Jesus told his followers to love their enemies—not just tolerate them. Putting that into practice, he admitted, is hard. He asked the crowd, “How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?” Many people in the audience raised their hands. Some of the highest leaders in our nation did not.
Loving your enemies is Jesus’ most famous teaching and His most violated teaching. Jesus seems to have regarded Himself as a Man for All Sides, but as His followers, we often fall back into us vs. them. Miroslav Volf has said that the tendency to exclude the other was often regarded as a virtue by the religious leaders in Jesus’ day, but it was regarded by Jesus as a great sin.
In Luke 9:53-55, it says, “53 But the people of the village did not welcome Jesus because he was on his way to Jerusalem. 54 When James and John saw this, they said to Jesus, “Lord, should we call down fire from heaven to burn them up?” 55 But Jesus turned and rebuked them.” James and John thought Jesus would be pleased with this offer. We are going to take a stand. We are going to be on Jesus’ SIDE. Jesus wasn’t pleased. He admonished them instead. He was protecting the Samaritans and rebuking people on His own side.
When the soldiers came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He was crucified, Peter pulled out his sword and cut off the ear of man named Malchus. Jesus told Peter to put his sword away. Then, he picked the man’s ear up off the ground and put it back on his head. You could imagine Jesus telling Malchus, “I’m sorry about my friend Peter here. I’ve been working on him for 3 years, but he still has a ways to go. Sorry about the ear thing.” Imagine when Malchus got home and his WIFE asked him, “How did it go at work today?”, and Malchus would have said, “Well, my ear got cut off, but the guy I went to arrest healed it for me. Who is This Man?”
The movie character Conan the Barbarian was once asked: what is the best thing in life? He paraphrased Ghengis Kahn when he said, “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.” An alternative idea came from Jesus. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. It’s Jesus most famous command and His most violated command.
3)A 3rd thing we see with Jesus is that WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME SIDE. For Jesus, the categories are not Us vs. Them. The categories are Perfect vs. Not Perfect. The categories are Holy vs. Sinful. This puts all of us on the same side. We’re all on the wrong side. But Jesus was determined to bring us over to His Side. We are all sinners. We all need to repent and turn away from our sins. There is something wrong with every one of us. And it’s not just that there are little things wrong with us. There are major things wrong with us. They are so major, the only way to save us was for Jesus to die on the cross in our place. That’s our only hope for salvation.
Jesus doesn’t say, “If you follow Me, everyone will like you and you will have no enemies.” Jesus does not give us the option of an enemy-free existence. In the 23rd Psalm, it says, “Thou has prepared a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, and yet my cup runneth over.” Jesus does not remove our enemies from our lives. He makes us sit down at a meal with them and He tells us to love them. Jesus asks us to do hard things. But with His help, we can do hard things.
One Sunday morning, a woman named Mary and a man named Oshea walked up to the front of the sanctuary to give their testimony. In 1993, Mary’s only son was killed by Oshea during an argument at a party. After he died, Mary tried to say all the right things. At the trial, she told Oshea she forgave him. She meant it sincerely. But, as time passed, it was clear she really hadn’t. How can you forgive the person who killed your only child? Bitterness and resentment ate at her like a cancer.
Her church did not help her much. Her pastor told her the reason her son had been killed was that Mary did not pray enough. She left that church. But she couldn’t leave her pain. She stumbled upon a story of two women who met in heaven. The first woman said, “I would have taken my son’s place on the cross.” The other woman said, “Oh, you are the mother of Christ” and fell to her knees. The first woman said, “Tell me about your son that I may grieve with you also.” The second woman said, “My son is Judas Iscariot.”
After 12 years of not being able to get over her son’s death, Mary decided she needed to go to prison and visit the man who had killed him. She was told – he is not a 16- year-old any more. He has been in prison for 12 years. Prison had molded him for more than a decade. He’s not a pretty sight. Still, she felt she had to go. The prison asked Oshea if he wanted to meet her and he said no. He said, “Why would I meet with her? She will just want to hurt me and blame me.”
She waited 9 months and tried again. This time, he said yes. They sat at a table across from each other in a supervised room. She said, “I don’t know you. You don’t know me. So, let’s start there.” She wanted to know him before judging him. Something she said loosened his spirit. He decided to trust her. They ended up talking for hours. At the end of the visit, Oshea asked Mary if he could hug her. She said yes.
When he put his arms around her, the floodgates burst. She sobbed. After being in prison around hardened criminals for 12 years, he said this was the scariest moment of his life. But from that moment on, a bond developed between them. She would return often to visit and they would talk. She had to be willing to understand his side of what happened. He had to be willing to see what he had robbed her of.
In December of 2009, Oshea was released from prison. Mary threw him a “welcome out party”. She asked some nuns who lived nearby to help her out. They were known as the “sisters in the hood.” Mary’s landlord mentioned that the apartment right next to hers was vacant. Maybe she could invite Oshea to live next door. She said, “He would never do that.” He said, “Why not ask? So, she did. He said yes.
Today, Oshea lives next door to the mother of the man he killed. Oshea said, “Sometimes when I get down and discouraged and things aren’t working out, I look at Mary’s face. And I say, hey, she gave me another chance. I need to give myself another chance.” Mary and Oshea have given each other gifts that neither would have known without the miracle of forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard, but an enemy became a neighbor.
We live in a world that says help your friends and punish your enemies. We see people taking out their revenge and their retribution on their enemies. In this series as we are Learning from the Master, we see that Jesus said – DON’T do that. There’s a better way, which at first, may feel like a harder way. Jesus said, 1)Forgive People Who Aren’t Sorry, 2)Love Your Enemies, and 3)We’re All on the Same Side. Instead of imitating the ancients and some of our contemporaries who pray for curses to come on our enemies, Jesus tells us – love your enemy. That’s what Jesus did when He died on the cross, and because of His resurrection on Easter Sunday, all who believe in Him are no longer enemies with God.
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN