Love Your Enemy

It was after the close of worship last Sunday. I was greeting the line of worshippers on the way out of the sanctuary when one of our dear members approached me. She had an issue with my sermon. “How am I supposed to love the person who attacked three of my friends.” The sermon was on Jesus’ Sermon on the Plateau* in the Gospel According to Luke. The focal text was Jesus instruction to His hearers to love their enemies.

I want to give this member of my church credit. She “got it.” Much of the time in our reading of the text the full implications of Jesus’ teachings are lost by the corrosion of years of familiarity. Not for this member. She heard Jesus demand to love those who abuse us. The man she referenced is one of the vilest criminals known to our community. He created havoc by breaking in the homes of retired single women, holding a sharpened screwdriver to their neck, raping them, then robbing them. The third of the women was armed. She shot him before he could hurt her. He fled the scene, but his injuries required him to go to the emergency room where he was caught. He is now facing an extended prison sentence. The member was exactly right. Jesus is commanding that we love that criminal. She was also right in stating just how hard that is.

To understand Jesus command here, it is important that we back away from our notions of what love is. Love, as a wise person once said, is to seek the highest and best good for another. It does not necessarily mean that we have good feelings about another. If Jesus were asking that we somehow develop the feelings we call love for the criminal, who could obey? What Jesus is stating bluntly is that we are to do the loving thing for the criminal, give up our desire for vengeance, and give up our will to destroy him.

Jesus is not saying that we should fail to get justice for the women who were attacked. We are to love these women, too. Loving them means that we are to get justice for them. It means that we are to make sure they are safe in their homes. This requires the incarceration of the criminal.

Love for the criminal means that we are to want him to become the kind of person that would never harm another. That means that we are to want him to become transformed by his time in prison. If, however, he cannot be transformed, we must want him to remain in prison. Love for him means that we want humane conditions in his prison stay and that he would receive the kind of spiritual guidance that would change him forever.

Is that hard? You bet. Does it go against our natural inclination to destroy our enemies? It absolutely does. How is it possible to love in this way? First we must practice. We learn to love our enemies by loving those who have committed small injuries against us. We learn to love the one who bullied us in high school. We learn to love the family member whose words caused us great suffering and shame. When we learn to do that, we develop the kind of spiritual strength that enables us to love those who have abused us. Secondly, we pray. We ask God to give us the strength to love even when our deepest desire is to hate. I believe God will answer that request. When we actually pray for our enemies, we eventually learn to see them the way God sees them. None of this is easy, of course.

I prefaced my sermon Sunday by saying that “Love your enemies” is the hardest thing Jesus ever commanded. Who could love an enemy? Jesus. When we become like Him we will learn to love as He did.

*In various places called the Sermon on the Plain or the Sermon on the Flat Place. The text was Luke 6:27-38