Lent Midweek 2: “Love Your Enemies”

Matthew 5.38-48

During these weeks of Lent, we are reflecting on the Sermon on the Mount—a sermon spoken by Jesus to his disciples, and that means to us. The commandment to “love your enemy” is perhaps the most familiar of all Jesus’ teachings—and yet it is certainly one of the most astounding. In our heart of hearts, I suspect we often dismiss it as a kind of overstatement that no one could really be expected to fulfill.

Yet we must always beware of dismissing what Jesus says too easily as impossible exaggerations. Jesus does not speak these words lightly; and if we are to truly hear him, we must take his words with utmost seriousness. So let’s think about just what Jesus means when he asks us to love our enemies.

First, who are our enemies? Some have interpreted the term to mean national enemies—Iraquis, Koreans, or whoever it might be at the moment. Certainly that seems to be included, since Jesus speaks here of “going the second mile”—a clear reference to the practice of the Roman soldiers of impressments, forcing their subjects to do certain work on their behalf. For the Jews of Jesus’ day, the Romans were national enemies, and Jesus’ words include them.

Others have interpreted the word “enemies” to mean something more personal—the nasty neighbor, the uncooperative co-worker, perhaps the criminal who has robbed you. And there is certainly room for such as those in Jesus’ words, too. His commend about turning the other cheek probably refers to responding to an insult—in other words, a very personal kind of enemy is involved. So we can say that Jesus’ use of the term is big enough to encompass just about anyone whom we ourselves might define as our enemy.

But what does he mean by love? That’s the sticking point, isn’t it? I think we often convince ourselves that he means we should treat our enemies with a certain benign neglect—that we shouldn’t retaliate, shouldn’t hate, shouldn’t argue or mock or badmouth. But there’s more to it than that. The word “love” is a positive word, an active word. So what does he mean?

Perhaps you recall that in Greek, there are several different words for “love.” There is philia, which means the kind of love we have for our friends; there is storge, the love we have for our family; there is eros, the Valentine’s Day love, romantic love. And then there is agape, unconditional love like the love God has for us. The word used in this passage is agape. That’s important to notice, because each of the other kinds of love is primarily an emotion or feeling. If I am speaking of love for my friend, my child, my spouse, it is a love full of the warmth of affection.

But agape is not primarily about feelings. It has to do more with a commitment to care for other people. When Jesus says, “love your enemy,” he is not saying that we need to have warm fuzzy feelings about our enemy—“Oh, isn’t he a wonderful person, I just love him!” Rather he means that we are to commit ourselves to treating that person with unconditional love. In a way, it is not a feeling we have but a decision we make.

And it is a decision that shows itself in actions. I think this is where we often go wrong in trying to follow Jesus here. We believe that if we just concentrate on it, we can engender feelings of affection for our enemy. But again, it isn’t about feelings. It is about action. Isn’t that really what Jesus is getting at in the previous verses? If someone demands your coat, give him also your cloak! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the left as well! These things are active—ways of treating people, responding to people, not ways of feeling about people.

May Haviland was a Quaker lady who opened the door of her house one night to find a burly man rifling through her dresser drawers. At the sound of her entry, the burglar wheeled around. He had a gun. “Put that thing down,” she told him, “I’m going to help you because you must need whatever I have more than I do if you have to steal for it.” The burglar watched, dumbfounded, as she opened a secret drawer and took out her jewelry. She handed it to him, expressing her sorrow that his need was so urgent. Suddenly he dropped the gun and ran. The next day she found a note in her mailbox. “Madam, I have known only hate and fear. I can deal with them. But I was powerless before your kindness.” Her expression of love for this man, you see, had nothing to do with emotions. She didn’t like what he was doing, and didn’t especially like him. But out of love, she acted.

Another example. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was among the most adamantly critics of Hitler’s government in Germany. He was eventually imprisoned for his activity against Hitler, and, of course, executed for treason. But while he was in prison, he treated the guards with utmost respect. He never expressed hostility to them, or even spoke crossly to them. He treated those men who were part of that monstrous system as ordinary people, worthy of his kindness and his regard. Out of love, he acted.

Now of course how we act in love toward an enemy will vary from situation to situation. But there is one kind of action that Jesus specifically dictates: “Pray for those who persecute you,” he says. We say that so easily, and yet it is no easy thing. I suspect that if we do manage to pray for enemies, it is a prayer that goes something like this: “Dear God, please change this guy so he won’t be such a problem for me!” I don’t think that is exactly what Jesus had in mind! Rather Jesus asks us to pray for our enemies because when we seriously pray for another, we begin to see them, not with our own eyes, but with God’s eyes. When we let someone into our prayers, we acknowledge that they stand before God, just as we do. We come face to face with the reality that whatever we may think of that person, he or she is loved by God—that God grieves over his or her sin just as he grieves over ours. And so we begin to see the enemy with different eyes—with Jesus’ eyes, not our own.

Helmut Thielicke tells of going as a pastor to visit a family, one of whose sons was something of a prodigal. He had been in lots of trouble, and was quite alienated from his family. During the visit, the young man sat down at the piano and played a hymn with great sensitivity and beauty. As he was playing, his sister hissed contemptuously: “The rotten hypocrite.” “I cannot remember,” Thielicke writes, “whether she actually said it aloud, but at any rate it was written all over her face. What she was doing was reacting hostilely to this enemy . . . and humanly speaking, nobody could say she was wrong. For he really did appear to be a hypocrite, putting on an act. But in a moment like that must not the eyes of a disciple see something else and something different? Was this young man at the piano really dissembling when he played ‘sacred music,’ pouring out in music the cry of a lost child for release and redemption, while he was still in reality a hard-boiled sinner? Or was not perhaps just the opposite true, that in reality he was the child yearning and hungering for redemption, that in reality his fallen state was merely a mask, a dissembling, a distortion of his true being?”

Praying for our enemy, you see, forces us to see him as a human being, faulty and sinful as we are, and therefore not to be condemned or hated but forgiven and loved. When Jesus commands us to pray for our enemy, he is really asking us to do the highest and best thing for him that we can—the thing that Jesus himself does on the cross when he prays for his enemies. He doesn’t pray, “Change their hearts so they’ll stop crucifying me”; he prays, “Forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

Now let’s say a word about why Jesus commands us to do this difficult and unnatural thing. Notice he doesn’t promise that loving our enemies will change them; indeed, experience teaches us that often it doesn’t. He also doesn’t ask us to love them in order to show we are better than they. St. Paul comes close to that when he tells us that loving our enemies is like heaping piles of burning coals on their heads, but that’s not Jesus! No, Jesus has his own explanation for why. By doing it, he says, you will become children of your Father who is in heaven. That’s a way of saying that you will be more like God. Remember that we human beings are made in God’s image. Jesus’ words suggest that if we truly want to grow into God’s image, then we will love our enemies. That’s also what he means when he says we must be “perfect.” In Greek that word really means something like this: “to be completely and fully what we are meant to be.” We are meant to be the image of God—and that means loving our enemies, just as God loves even those who hate him or ignore him, just as Jesus loved those who crucified him. So this commandment is more than a commandment. It isn’t, “Do this, or else!” It’s really more of a promise: “Do this, and you will come closer to what God intends for you.”

Dear friends, it isn’t easy! Loving your enemy, praying for your enemy, is a real stretch for all of us. But it also isn’t impossible, and it isn’t an exaggeration. It is what Jesus intends. And at the bottom line, it is who we want to be, and who we are meant to be. And so I say to you: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”