The Lord Jesus said:
“43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Some medicine heals more than one disease, even if it is usually used to cure only one. For me aspirin is the sovereign cure for headaches, but it is actually a “wonder drug that does wonders.” Evidently, it can help with any number of illnesses.
When I heard the words of Jesus on loving my enemies, it usually reminds me of the divine command to love everyone. That “everyone” includes people that irritate me, people that do evil to me, and people that oppose everything I believe.
A quick read of the blogosphere shows that Jesus’ words are not being heeded, but Jesus is not speaking only to “them” but to me. Today I must ask myself: “Do I love the atheist while I oppose atheism? Do I love the sinner while hating the sin? Do I love my political opponents while rejecting their solutions? Do I delight in the misery of my foes and rejoice in their pain?”
I have almost never asked those questions and escaped without regrets.
This sovereign cure for nastiness is, however, not the only implication of this passage. In the Beatitudes and throughout his teaching, Jesus assumes we will have enemies. Sometimes, God help me, I wish to be so reasonable and adopt such thoughtful positions that nobody will misunderstand me or think me wrong.
“Wait!” cries the blogger to his impatient wife, “I have to finish this post. Someone on the Internet misunderstands my view!”
This self-centered desire to be liked imperils faithfulness to the truth as we see it, but you cannot love your enemies if you will never take a stand that makes any. Some of us are less tempted to nastiness than we are to the vain attempt to “make no enemies.”
I see this desire in myself most often in trying to be the “good Evangelical.” The “good Evangelical” is the one that non-Christians will describe as “reasonable” or “thoughtful.” There is an annoying tendency in many of us to delight in getting to sit in the back of secularism’s bus.
We never offend, because we have ceased to clearly say what we believe. And yet many of our views as Christians are bound to offend a culture that rejects Christ and His teachings. We do not set out to offend, but Jesus implies that it will be an accidental result of our attempts to do the right thing.
Even our attempt to love our enemy is as likely as not to irritate and offend our foe as it is to help him.
Taking a stand without being nasty or cutting ourselves off from criticism is hard. We are tempted to take stands and despise the people who disagree with us. We run to tiny communities of like minded folk (or big Internet ones!) and refuse to listen to the critic. There we can mock and simplify the views of our enemies and so ignore what we might need to learn from them.
We are nasty for Jesus.
But in academic types, I think this less likely than the opposite. In this disease of the soul, we become so nuanced and so careful not to be nasty that nobody is ever offended by anything we say. We are nicer than Jesus who would tell the powerful off and make sure they understood His loving complaints about their evil.
Some of us are eager to make fewer enemies than the Lord Jesus made.
We fear the cross we are called to embrace. It is time to call this tendency what it is: moral cowardice. We must clearly say: I believe abortion is morally wicked. We must articulate without equivocation: Your oppression of the poor is wrong. We must be bold to say: Jesus is the only way to Heaven.
God help us find in the Words of Jesus a cure for both the disease of hatefulness and the disease of cowardice.
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