The Peripatetic Preacher Love Your Enemy–Try!

Yesterday, the current occupant of the White House was quoted as follows: “If we have learned one thing from the pandemic, it is that I was right.” Yes, that is a direct quote from the President of the United States. Over 71,000 people have now died as a result of COVID-19, and there are recorded over 260,000 confirmed cases of the virus in this country, a number almost surely too low, given the relative lack of testing available throughout the land. It is almost a given now that more than 100,000 of our fellow citizens will perish in the pandemic, but what our president has learned is that “he was right.”

I cannot begin to express just how furious that statement makes me, so completely devoid of empathy, a complete absence of recognition of suffering, that it represents. I know that throughout the long 3 1⁄2 years of his time in office, Donald Trump has consistently shown a narcissistic face to every issue that has come his way, so of course I should not be surprised that the ravages of the virus have failed to touch him in any truly human way. I will not again catalogue the numerous times when that same Trump has demonstrated over and again his tone-deaf ear to the cries and pain of those he was elected to serve. He clearly cannot be someone he is plainly not, and since I am no psychiatrist, no physician, I am left in shock as he opens his mouth again in the same tiresome and dangerous ways. I can only hope that November will see a change in the office of the presidency, and that Donald J. Trump will head back to his gold-plated bathtubs and jet-setted life style.

Still, the words of Matthew’s Jesus haunt me as I rage against someone I can only see as my enemy and the enemy of reason, judgment, decency, and basic human understanding. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt.6:43-46). How often have I heard these words, and shunted them aside, muttering something like, “Well, that surely must be an interim ethic, all right for a tiny agrarian culture 2,000 years ago, but hardly useful or adequate for a vastly complex modern society, filled with those who would readily oppress, subjugate, and exploit whoever they can whenever they can. Such talk is fine for the itinerant preacher of the hills and valleys of ancient Palestine, but they just cannot work in 21st century capitalist America. I am simply too much a realist to imagine that I can in any way genuinely love Donald Trump, who will forever be my enemy.”

I might be willing to pray for him, though I admit that when I do, joining the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who says she prays for him daily, “my words fly up, while my thoughts remain below,” echoing the hapless murderer, Claudius, in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. I hope Rep. Pelosi’s prayers are more honest and more efficacious than my own. I doubt seriously that Donald Trump reciprocates her prayers for him by petitions of his own for her. I might conclude that if I cannot love Trump, neither can I pray for him, which says a good deal about the depth of my anger for the man. Yet, says the Matthean Jesus, I must both love him and pray for him, because by doing those things I might then become a true child of God in heaven, a worthy goal, I admit. And, says Jesus, when I do love and pray for an enemy, I acknowledge the fact that God’s sun and rain shine and pour on both good and evil ones, on both righteous and unrighteous ones. But, I ask, do those weather realities imply that there is finally no distinction in the eyes of God between good and bad, between righteous and unrighteous? If that is so, why should I strive for one over against the other, since God seems not to care? This echoes the terrible words of Job who claimed directly that God in fact did not care, destroying righteous and wicked alike, and laughing while both of them died (Job 9:22-24). Surely, Jesus would not agree with Job in that monstrous judgment!

But just how can I love my enemy, Donald Trump? Jesus goes on in Matthew, “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” Here Jesus raises the stakes of my love rather higher. By employing the category of “tax collectors,” those nearly universally hated first-century men of money, despised by the Israelites and distrusted by their Roman employers, Jesus in fact points me right back to my enemy, Donald Trump, who to me is the “tax collector” of my own time, the one I most dislike and distrust. I must love him, says Jesus, precisely because he cannot and does not love me. If I do not love him, I in effect become him, a person concerned only for himself, swallowed by my own ego needs, consumed by my narcissism, engorged on my anger and rage, unable to see him as a human being, to care for him as a fellow struggler. In short, to love him, something I have resisted mightily since his shocking ascent to the Oval Office in 2016.

Perhaps I can love Donald Trump after all. But, again in the way of Jesus, my love for him in no way implies an agreement with his way of being in the world. Jesus was not always “meek and mild,” a comforter of the afflicted, a healer of the wounded. He recognized unrighteousness when he saw it, and forcefully called it out. Certain religious leaders he named “whited sepulchers, full of dead men’s bones,” hardly a sweet phrase of full acceptance. Yet, when he was dying on that terrible cross, he did certainly forgive those who nailed him there, and that act demonstrated a love that surely included a radical love of enemies. If I am to be a follower of Jesus, if I might become a child of God, I must love Donald Trump, and I must pray for him, lest I become him, a furious and raging narcissist against all who will not bow the knee to his vast need for unmitigated approval and unbounded honor. I would never and will never vote for Donald Trump, but I, perhaps, can love him, though he is my enemy. The demands of Jesus are sometimes incredibly difficult, and for me, this demand is now the most difficult of all. I can only try.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)