Luke 6:27-36: Jesus Teaching on Love

One of the reasons why Christ has turned the world upside down is because of His teaching on love. Not only does Jesus teach a pure version of the OT teaching on love, to love God and our neighbour; not only is His teaching on the golden rule supreme and positive compared to all the other versions of it floating around in philosophy and religion; He introduced radical models of love, namely loving each other as He has loved us, and the command to love our enemies. In our portion of scripture today in Luke 6:27-36 Jesus outlines His love ethic for the disciples, a teaching that will be practised and repeated throughout the rest of the NT. He has overturned the prevalent teaching on the type of person who is blessed by God and now He has a new teaching on love that goes beyond anything that the world has seen. In particular we want to examine how Jesus outlines His teaching on love as a response to the persecution mentioned in the sermon so far. Jesus has split the world up into two groups, the victim and villain, the one who loves God and the one who loves the world, those whom the world hates and so provoke persecution and those whom the world loves and are the persecutors. Jesus is now going to outline how we are to respond to those who persecute us.

We will divide out section into 4 parts, firstly we will look at some of the love commands in v27-28; then we will look at some illustrations of love in action in v29-30; and then we want to see how Jesus expands the definition of love in v31-36 beyond what the ordinary and acceptable definitions of love would approve.