On US 23 heading south, somewhere around Marion, Ohio, you’ll find a large billboard saying, “Real Christians love their enemies.” After much thought, I cannot decide who paid for this sign.
Of course, nearly all practicing Christians could verify that Jesus give this command, to “love your enemies.” They might even name the chapter and verse. (Matthew 5:44). It’s part of Jesus’ greatest hits album, the Sermon on the Mount. (Luke’s version goes on, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. “)
What we fail to see in this whole exchange – and I must credit the billboard for being the first to make me consider it this way, so to whoever did pay for that, I’d like to express my gratitude – is that Jesus is both hilarious and wicked smart. He’s the same guy who answers questions with questions and speaks in parables with plot twists that leave jaws dropping.
We (or, until the last few months, at least I) read that straight up like a manual to my coffee maker, somehow believing that when we come into contact with contention, we are called to muster up love for the other person in an effort to change things. We think that when our enemies sense our “love” and “acceptance”, they’ll change.
In typical Jesus style, this was never the point. We don’t love our enemies for the good of the enemy. Our love may never change them.
But may our love change us.
Pueblo Yung writes in Inward, “unconditional love sees no one as an enemy.”
Jesus was a master with words and philosophy because when you get at the nature of love, we find that when we truly find love for a person, we cannot see them as an enemy. You cannot actually love an enemy. Jesus’ command wasn’t to be nice to them as an effort to get them on your side; Jesus actually wanted us to stop thinking of them as an enemy. And love is probably the only thing strong enough to change that way of seeing the world.
One of my favorite sections of scripture is a passage in Galatians (5), specifically translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message, when he compares living a life driven by selfish desires to the life of living “God’s way.” He says (emphasis mine):
It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.
This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom.
But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.
Of course, Jesus showed concern for the other; he loves our enemy before we do. But in this particular chapter of Adventures in Missing the Point, we fail to see that command – like so many others – was for our own good. It is in our own healing that we begin to heal the world. In our own sense of love that we begin to love the world. It’s from that place that we find we don’t have to live with enemies surrounding us.