Love Your Enemies

 It’s another one of those things Jesus taught: “Love your enemies,” Matthew 5:44. Like his teaching “Do not judge” (Matthew 7:1), we tend to dismiss this teaching as unrealistic. We essentially ignore it, excusing ourselves from doing what Jesus taught. We rationalize our choices by saying it is impossible to love our enemies. It is beyond our ability

In the current splintering of The UMC, it seems to me this teaching has been put on the back burner of our awareness. We have struggled to love one another (John 13:35). Instead, we have often treated one another and spoken of one another as though we were enemies rather than as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Is Jesus’s teaching really impossible or do we just not want to do the hard work it requires?

In order to love our enemies, we have to (1) shift our focus and (2) change the way we view them. How we think of them has to change.

Our so-called enemies develop around some issue or interaction. Their position on an issue is the opposite of ours, making them on the wrong side (in our opinion) of the issue. We naturally think of them as wrong. Or they do something that we perceive as an attack on us. They say something negative about us that devalues us and discounts our position.  Consequently, we view them as a threat, someone who will hurt us. We are unable to love our enemy as long as our focus is on the issue or the offense.

Loving our enemy calls us to shift our focus. It calls us to look beyond the issue and beneath the behavior. Loving our enemy calls us to seek to understand them. We seek to understand why they take the position on the issue that they do. We seek to understand the fear behind their position. (The more rigid or defensive a person is in their position, the greater their fear — which raises the question: what fear underlies our position on the issue?) Of course, seeking to understand our enemy requires us to actually talk to them (rather than about them) and to listen deeply (rather than thinking about how we can attack their position or defend our own positon). We seek to understand what their treatment of us says about what is going on inside them. Attacks on others reflect unrecognized, unaddressed, and unresolved pain. Hurting people dump their pain on others. If we can see beyond the other’s behavior to what their behavior reflects, then we can begin to view them and think about them differently. We can respond to them rather than react to them.

Recognizing our enemy’s fear or pain helps us to see them with compassion. We begin to see them as a person again rather than as an enemy we demonize. We honor their fear and pain.

Seeing the humanness of our so-called enemy allows us to do the other thing Jesus said. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” Matthew 5:44. When we see beyond the issue or beneath the offense, then we can pray for our enemy. We can pray about their fear and their pain. Praying for them reminds us of their humanness. It helps us turn the other cheek (Luke 6:29) and bless them when they speak negatively about us (Luke 6:28).

None of this is simple or easy. It is hard work. It requires emotional-relational-spiritual maturity. It calls us to recognize and deal with the log in our own eye (Matthew 7:1-5). It calls us to rely upon the power of the Spirit to do what we cannot do in our own strength.

As long as we view the other and think of the other as an enemy, we will treat them as an enemy. We will not see them as a person created by God and loved by God. We will have little or no compassion for them or their pain. We will remain alienated and divided. The relationship will remain broken.

Such is the way of the world, not the way of the followers of Jesus.

Love your enemies. It wasn’t just a suggestion. It was and is the way to healing and reconciliation, to progress and growth. It is the way of life.