Sermon: All Saints Sunday
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Nov. 2, 2025)
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So it's a big day today. We really are doing it all today. It's a feast of all saints, all the saints. We're remembering all of them today. And we have this tradition, this on and again, off again tradition of welcoming the basketball teams on All Saints. I'm not sure why also, maybe it's just because you all are slightly closer to heaven than the rest of us. We also have communion. We have a baptism. It's a wonderful day. And then we also have this scene from the Gospel of Luke. These teachings from the Gospel of Luke, which really in many ways capture it all. They're hard teachings, hard sayings. But if we look at the scene, I think we can see so much of our Christian faith, our Christian tradition captured here.
And the line I really want to focus on, or at least build up to, is the, there are lots of hard ones in this passage, but the hard one, “love your enemies.” It's important what Jesus doesn't say here. Jesus doesn't say make friends of your enemies. He says, "Love your enemies." He's presuming that they remain your enemies, that they are the ones who are against you, who threaten harm or cause harm. That's hard. It's hard to make sense of. And just to put a fine point on it, if we look at the world around us, we don't have to think too long for the practicalities of how hard that is to be pressed upon us, to weigh upon us.
I'm going to get there, but let's start with the other parts, the other teachings that Jesus offers here. In Luke, this is called the Sermon on the Plain. Jesus gives these blessings, these woes. The analog in the Gospel of Matthew is the Sermon of the Mount. Matthew's is much longer. Matthew's takes up three full chapters. We get almost all of Luke's version here. And also, Matthew lets us off the hook a little bit. The more familiar version of this teaching, the beatitudes. Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Not only does Luke cut off the in spirit, he makes this a material thing, not a spiritual thing. Luke says, "Blessed are the poor." And also adds, "Woe to you that are rich."
Luke has blessings and curses, it seems like. It doesn't let us off the hook. Another difference is just in the scene itself. In Matthew, when Jesus preaches this long sermon, three full chapters, he goes up to a high place. He ascends a mountain. And from the mountain, he looks down on the gathered crowds and he delivers this discourse. It's not included in the reading today, but just before this, Luke's happens differently. In Luke, it says that people were coming from all around, from all the regions, to see Jesus, to be healed by him. Notably, Luke mentions that it's not just the Jewish regions that Gentiles, people who were not Jesus' people, were also coming to Jesus for healing. So all these people were gathering around. And instead of going up into a mountain, Luke says Jesus went down into the low place among them and he started moving through the midst of them.
He's in the middle of this scrum, and they are all reaching out to him, asking for healing. And his teaching starts, it says he looks up at them and starts saying these words. I think it's important that that stage direction is important. He's in the work. He is doing the work, and then he looks up at the people around him. And then he says, "Blessed are you. Woe to you." They sound like blessings and curses. I think there's something more subtle than that going on. The word that is translated is “blessed”; here, the Greek word "makarios", which can mean blessed, can also mean happy, like "Happy are you."
But what it means, almost like most directly, is just to say God favors you. God loves you. So again, imagine the scene he's moving through the crowd and these poor and sick people are coming to him. Now in the theology, the dominant theology of the times, they were understood to be being punished by God. If you're sick, if you're poor, it's because God is mad at you, and that's why you're where you are. But Jesus comes to them. They come to him, he goes to them, and he says to them, "No, God loves you. Don't believe what you've heard. God loves you." And then the poor, I'm sorry, the rich. The rich are also there. He says, "Woe to you." The English word woe comes directly from the Greek word, which is "ouai". And it's not really a word. It's an exclamation. It would be as if we wrote "ack" or "ah" in the text. Jesus is exclaiming. He is seeing them.
He's not saying, "Oh, God's going to condemn you." He's saying to them, "I pity you. You are going to come to grief. You believe your riches will protect you from suffering, but none of us is protected always from suffering. You think if you have enough to eat, you will never be hungry again, but you will be hungry again. What protects us, what cares for us, what supports us is relationship, is love, and I pity you. I grieve for you. I grieve with you."
What's happening is he is moving through this crowd of people who are pressing up against him, all different kinds of people, his people, others, rich people, poor people, sick people, well people, all people coming to him and he is moving among them, sharing mercy and love and pity to all of them, with all of them. It's not him up on top of a mountain like Matthew making proclamations. It's him face to face with each of these people, offering God's love, promising God's love. And that's the moment at which he says, "Let me tell you something, love your enemies." Now I said this is a hard teaching, but it's worth sinking into it a little bit. There's a famous New Testament scholar named Walter Wink. Some of you may have heard this interpretation before, but he has an interpretation of these passages, which is powerful.
It's more obvious than the Matthew version, but it still holds true in this version because we can read these lines. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other. If someone takes your cloak, give them your shirt as well. We can see this is sort of like a self-effacing impulse to sacrifice, to allow ourselves to be harmed. And Professor Wink says there's something more complicated going on here. So in the ancient world, when you struck someone who was beneath you, you use the back of your hand or you used your left hand, because the left is the impure hand. In Matthew, there are some directions given, but Luke is echoing it. If someone strikes you with their impure hand or the back of your hand, if you turn the other cheek to them, what you do is you demand that they open their hand to you, they use their pure hand, or they treat you as an equal, not backhand you. The turning of the cheek is not just this kind of self-effacing sacrifice, "Beat me more, beat me more."
It is a way to signal to your abuser that they are being unjust, that they are defiling themselves. The same is true with the shirt and the cloak. If someone takes your cloak, at the time, people were not allowed to see one another naked, and so you take off your shirt, you're naked. You are making them impure. What Professor Wink is seeing in these strategies are strategies for resistance. What Wink is asking us to do, what Jesus is asking us to do, is to consider what it would mean to respond to violence without ourselves becoming violent. What would it mean to respond to harm, to stand up to harm, to signal that it is harm and resist it, to communicate to our offenders that they are defiling themselves while not harming them in return? This is what Jesus is trying to develop and teach these people as he moves through this crowd of people who are enemies, who are at each other's throats, at odds. He's trying to communicate that God loves them all.
And the reason for it comes after our passage ends. He says to them, "If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? Doesn't everybody do that? Don't even the worst people do that? If you do good only to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Doesn't everybody do that? Don't even the worst people do that?" This is the logic of the world. If you are inside my group, you are my friend. If you are outside, you're my enemy. If you are inside my group, I love you. If you are outside, I hate you. This is the logic of earthly rulers and earthly kingdoms. Love your friends, hate your enemies. But the solution to that problem cannot just be to flip the equation. It can't just be for one inside to become outside, and the new outside to become inside.
All that does is create a new pattern of exclusion, a new pattern of hatred, a new pattern of animosity and antagonism, and recurring reciprocating violence. This is the logic of worldly kingdoms. This is people in high places standing up and saying, "I don't love my enemies. I hate my enemies." But that's not what Jesus says and not what Jesus calls us to do because what Jesus does, what Jesus preaches, is that God loves all of us. As he moves through this crowd, seeing people who are enemies to his people, as he moves through this crowd, seeing wealthy people and poor people, sick people and well people, he says to each of them, "God loves you." This message, this ministry is spoken and lived in this scene as Jesus moves through this crowd. God loves you.
God loves us all. God loves the folks you don't like. God loves the people who have hurt you. God loves the people you would like to hurt or are hurting. God loves those you do not and cannot love. God loves those who can't love you. This is what Jesus is doing, what he is speaking and living in this scene as he moves through this crowd. This is his ministry, all of it spoken and lived, spoken and lived, and also passed on to us. That's the hard part. This impossible love has been passed on to us because it's hard to love your enemies. It's hard not to return harm for harm.
It's hard, especially when your enemies are your enemies, because they want to preserve these divisions, because they want to preserve the divides of violence that sunder us, because they exclude. This is the gospel of Christ. This is the ministry of Jesus that is what he is speaking and living in this scene, and it is what he has given to us. This difficult task, this impossible love. It's ours now, and not just ours, but also Shay's. Little Shay is going to be baptized in a couple of minutes, and his parents are going to come up to this font, and all the difficult, impossible things that Jesus has just passed onto us, we are going to pass on to him.
I think he has the appropriate response. But don't laugh too much, because all of you who have been baptized, you have already made that promise. And today, in this church, you are going to make that promise again. It is difficult work, almost impossible work. But behind this difficult work, this difficult promise that all of us are going to make or remake this morning, behind that difficult work is some good news. The reason for it, the reason you have to love everybody, is because God loves everybody, which means that God also loves you, whoever you are, whatever you have done.
However far you have wandered from others or from God, you are loved. What standing up and making this promise means this day and any day, what it means is to stand up and confess that the creator of the universe loves you, good or bad, happy or sad, sick or well, friend or enemy, God loves you. It's All Saints' Day. Being a Christian, being a saint, doesn't mean we get more of God's love than other people. I worry about the forms that Christianity takes in our world because it seems to say something like that, that Christians get more of God's love than other people, and that's just not true. It's just a lie, and we can see the lie as Jesus moves through this crowd, blessing and loving every person who comes to him. Being Christian does not mean we get more of God's love than other people.
Being baptized does not mean we get an extra share of salvation or sanctification or that we are loved more. I'll tell you right now, Shay could not be loved more than he is. That's not what being Christian means. It's not what being a saint means. Being Christian means promising to be those people who know that God loves us all and then who show that love to one another, especially those who feel it least. It means going like Jesus into the low places. It means moving through the crowds with love or pity or mercy for whoever comes. Being a saint, being Christian means believing so deeply in God's love for us and for others that this scene, this moment, and the miraculous life and ministry of Jesus become the shape and pattern of our own lives too. It is a holy task and a sacred promise, and one into which we invite Shay this morning. Amen.