The Way of Love by Church Publishing

Author:Church Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Church Publishing Inc.
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

2. The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Hymnal Corp., 1979), 360.

3. Christine Lavin, “The Moment Slipped Away,” from the album Beau Woes and Other Problems of Modern Life (Rounder Records, 1987).

5 Learning from Our Enemies

“What is the point,” Jesus asks, “of loving only the people who love you?” This is one of his hard teachings, tucked away in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. He makes it clear that it’s not good enough to sort people into neat groups of acceptable and unacceptable, lovable and unlovable, keepers and disposables. And it’s certainly not good enough to permit ourselves the luxury of hating our brothers and sisters, no matter how much we might feel that they deserve it. Love your enemies, he commands, and pray for those who persecute you.

We may try to persuade ourselves that Jesus was guilty of hyperbole here, maybe overdoing it to make a point or to set a high standard and play out little scenes in our imaginations, where we discuss the situation with him in a reasonable way: “Nice idea, Jesus, and I certainly understand what you’re getting at. But you cannot honestly expect me to love X, Y, or Z!” Depending on the circumstances, it might be the neighbor who permits her dog—who is the size of a small pony and has a voice like the Hound of the Baskervilles—to bark lustily at four in the morning. It might be a political leader whose views about compassion and justice are radically different from ours. It might be the serial murderer whose face is on the tabloids at the supermarket or the parent accused of unspeakable child abuse or the drunken driver who killed a little old lady on her way to the bus stop. It might be a loved one who unthinkingly wounded us decades ago, and we remember the incident as if it were yesterday. It might be a friend who betrayed; if we have lived long enough, we have all met Judas. So our negotiations with Jesus go something like this: “Okay, I agree that loving my enemies is a laudable goal, and I promise that I will strive to achieve it. But in the meantime, isn’t ninety percent good enough? Or maybe even eighty-five?” Despite all our internal equivocation, we know that his answer is a flat no.

Yet we are compelled to recognize the fact of enmity. To read the Psalms on this topic is profoundly liberating, especially if we contemplate those passages we never hear in church. Remember that the Psalms are prayers offered to God rather than God’s pronouncements on us, and as such they are powerful examples of candor, shockingly blunt communication with the God to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. They make it clear that to be human is to have enemies, to be human is to suffer from injustice and betrayal, to be human is to yearn for vengeance. The bottom line: to be human means that we are not as nice as we pretend to be.

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