02/18/01 Love Your Enemies 01/04

Scripture: Genesis 45:3-11,15

Luke 6:27-38

"But I say this to those of you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly."

Luke 6:27

Last Wednesday was Valentine’s Day and many of us took the opportunity to celebrate romantic love. Today we shall celebrate Christian love, which our text shows, is a significantly different thing. It is not entirely different, but certainly significantly different, as anyone can see from the fact that its test case is love not of friends and lovers but of enemies. The command to love one’s enemies is certainly one of the most challenging parts of the teaching of Jesus. "If you love those who love you, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what thanks can you expect? For even sinners do that much. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount. Instead, love your enemies and do good, and lend without any hope of return. You will have a great reward, and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked." (vs. 31-35).

Before we deal head on with the searching command to love our enemies we might notice two other features of the passage that are of great interest and importance. The first is that the Golden Rule occurs in the midst of this exhortation, "Treat others as you would like them to treat you," says Jesus in verse 31. The Golden Rule occurs in virtually every major religious teaching we know; it was also an ethical principle of the Greek sophists, who taught young Athenians how to get on in the world, especially the world of democratic politics. It is an essentially empty principle, lacking what we of the "internet" generation call "content." If you believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth the Golden Rule is a rule of revenge, if, however, you believe in love and forgiveness for your enemies, it is a rule of reconciliation. In this passage Jesus gives the Golden Rule a reconciling and forgiving content; he defines it as a rule neither of vengeance nor of retributive justice, but of generosity and compassion. We do not want to be treated as we deserve, as a rule of revenge or retributive justice would decree, but generously and mercifully. We want our enemies to love us, forgive us, bless us and pray for us, not punish and pay us back, and so we must do the same to them.

Why does Jesus make generosity the content of the Golden Rule? Because, and this is the second point, we must be like God our Father who is "kind to the ungrateful and the wicked (vs.35) " and, according to Matthew’s version, "…makes his sun to rise on the bad and on the good and his rain to fall on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45)." God is like a good parent who treats all his children, the good and the difficult, with the same steady generosity, and we Christians must imitate God. God in Christ is the great model of love for enemies. As the apostle Paul writes in Romans 5, "God shows his love for us in that while we were sinners Christ died for us…and if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, how much more now being reconciled shall we be saved by is life (vs. 8-10).

Our Old Testament lesson for today is a lesson in love of enemies. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery and now he has them in his power. Instead of taking revenge he welcomes them with tears as his beloved brothers. He had not nursed a grudge against them nor spent his time anticipating sweet revenge, but had rather done God’s will in the place where God had put him, and had become the savior of Egypt. Now he was in a position to save his family, and he was overjoyed to be able to do so. "I am your brother Joseph whom you sold into Egypt. But now, do not grieve, do not reproach yourselves for having sold me here, since God sent me before you to preserve your lives (vs.5)." Joseph links his forgiveness of his brothers with God’s will, roughly like Jesus links love of enemies with God’s impartial generosity. Joseph sees this whole history as the saving work of God, not only for himself the victim but also for his brothers the persecutors. This is surely the optimal outcome; victim and persecutors are reconciled and blessed, and even the crime is transformed at the deeper level into a work of God!

This good outcome depended as much on the good response of Joseph as on the good will of God. Joseph loved his enemies – not only his brothers but also his captors, the Egyptians, and served them all in God’s name. So Joseph is a vivid example of the difficult truth of our primary text, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly." The question now is, "Can I love my enemies or am I content to be part of the natural dynamic of reciprocal good or reciprocal evil, treating others as they treat me?"

The ability to love ones enemies is not a natural capacity. The natural reaction is to resist ones enemies, to fight them, to punish them, and to defend oneself against them. To love ones enemies requires a special gift of divine grace to enable us; such love is the result of the miracle of transformation worked by God’s grace in our lives. To love one’s enemies is humanly speaking an impossible thing, and the fact that Jesus commands us to do it shows that he has in mind not our natural propensity for love but the supernatural gift he is prepared to give us with the indwelling Holy Spirit. It is precisely here that we part company with the Valentine view of love. I do not wish to belittle the genuine joy of what the romantics call "falling in love "- it is marvelous while the feeling lasts; but we all know that it is only a stage on the way and that if the romance of the "falling in love" stage does not mature into a steady loyalty and commitment, a self-denying faithfulness and friendship, it will disappear, leaving mostly memories, which easily turn from good to bad. How many disappointments of this kind litter the landscape of human life! - Torrid love affairs that die as dramatically as once they sprang to life, leaving what Shakespeare called "An expense of spirit in a waste of shame." We assume that we naturally know what love is, but that is a mistake. By nature we experience the initial possibility of love; the Valentine’s Day love that is at best the possibility of the development of real love. Since love is the life of God in the lives of men and women it is a costly and precious thing; and since God loves his enemies, not just generally in that he makes his sun and rain to shine on them, but specifically in that he dies for each of us while we are his enemies, real love comes to its full realization as the love of enemies.

So I do not wish to dismiss romantic love; it can be a first stage on the way to real love; but romantic love is dangerous because it can easily be accepted not as a first step on the way to, but as a substitute for, the full divine love, a substitute rather than a foretaste. The divine fullness of love is the divine life itself and that is an immense power for healing, saving, cherishing and supporting; real love never wavers and never disappoints; it never ends. Real love embraces enemies as well as friends. Real love is the life of God in the lives of men and women. Real love comes to and through us when we respond to Jesus Christ in faith and allow him to live and to love in us and through us. There is perhaps no teaching of Jesus that points out the truth so powerfully as this one, and the truth is that his teaching is ultimately always a call to us to become united with him in faith, to become servants and bearers of the Holy Spirit. Only in that case will we be able to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, and to do good to those who do us evil. Love your enemies is a call to confess our inability to do what Christ commands and an invitation to throw ourselves on his mercy and to seek his help with all our hearts. This command is the great antidote to complacency, a clear call to faith in Jesus.

Perhaps the chief form our complacency takes is the easy assumption that we have no enemies. I have used the term enemies of my opponents and some people have found it shocking. Jesus takes it for granted that we all have enemies, even when we are so complacent and self-congratulatory that we refuse to believe anyone could be of such poor taste as to be inimical to us. Jesus assumed we all have enemies; - what does he mean? Let us define an enemy simply as one who does not wish us well, who wants us to fail, or just to go away so that they can resume the line of action that our presence somehow retards. We all have enemies; we have only to become aware of them; to insist that we do not have enemies is to put us beyond the reach of this most central teaching of Jesus. So, when you next update your prayer list, ponder who your enemies might be and be sure to add them to the list and to pray for them each day!

There are many examples in history of the saving power of this divine love of enemies. Let me in closing give you one from my recent experience. During my latest visit to Bloemfontein, South Africa, where I go often to visit my mother, I became interested in the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1901. I hired a guide to take me around the historical sites in and near the town, which as the capitol of the Boer Republic of the Orange Free State had many such sites. Chief among them is the venue of a concentration camp where the British interned women and children after burning their farms to deprive the Boer commando’s of support. 27, 000 women and children died in those camps and in Bloemfontein there is a monument and a museum to them. I placed some flowers on the monument, right beneath the plinth and said a prayer. The column is framed by three large tombs, of Martinus Steyn the last president, Christiaan de Wet the commanding general, and the Rev John Kestell chaplain to the president and armed forces. They were the three powers in the land, political, military and spiritual respectively. Directly at the bottom of the column, in the place of nearest intimacy, was a modest inscription to the English lady, Emily Hobhouse, marking the place of her ashes. To Emily Hobhouse the Boers were enemies; her people were burning their farms and imprisoning their women and children; but she loved her enemies. She visited the camps and returned to Britain to make trouble for the military prosecuting the war and the government in power in Britain. She was relentless in championing the welfare of the Boer women and children and she had an enormous impact for good, both during and after the war. She paid a high price, as some who opposed the Vietnam War also paid, and ended her days in penury. Nevertheless, the Boers, themselves bereft after a war of attrition and destruction, took up a collection for her and purchased her ancestral home in Cornwall so she could have a place to live out her latter days; and regularly they sent her care packages of food and clothing, from the impoverished interior of South Africa. When she died they placed her ashes in the holiest shrine of the memorial in Bloemfontein to the suffering of their women and children, and that English name in the midst of Boer suffering is a word of divine grace. Her work and witness were the basis of the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation. The title of the book published in 1994 by her grandniece Jennifer Hobhouse-Balme, is "To Love one’s enemies, the work and life of Emily Hobhouse."

"Jesus said: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly."

Amen.