Loving your enemies is maybe the most ridiculous idea in the whole Bible. Nobody loves their enemies. My wife, who is a New Englander, will never love the New York Yankees, even if they replaced their whole roster with corgi puppies. I do not love the Japanese beetles that used to infest my garden at the high point of the summer. And nobody loves the person who steals the last cookie at lunch when nobody’s looking, or the people who won’t stop talking during the movie.
Because we are nice, and relatively good at keeping the peace, we deal with these enemies in mostly peaceful ways. And so it is comforting to imagine that when Jesus tells us to love our enemies he simply means that we shouldn’t get too worked up about them. We should be civilized about our rivalries. We shouldn’t let a little dispute get in the way. In other words, we find it easy to think of “love your enemies” not as really “love your enemies” but “be nice to the people who modestly inconvenience you.”
But what if Jesus really meant what he said? Love your enemies. As in, your enemies. Not just the bad driver on the way to Walmart, or the soccer teammate who won’t pass, or the politician that you don’t like, but real enemies—the KKK, the Nazis, or even the Romans in Jesus’ time who crucified anyone who stepped out of line. Those enemies? That’s pretty hard.
David did it. Our reading from 1 Samuel shows one of multiple moments when King Saul was in his grasp. It would have been so easy to finally end his life when he himself would have almost certainly killed David if he had the chance. Saul was his enemy, under any definition you can think of. But instead he goes out of his way to show that he means him no harm. What a strange thing to do.
And of course, Jesus did it, too. He forbade his disciples to attack those arresting him. As he was dying, he prayed and forgave those killing him. He practiced what he preached. And it killed him. Even stranger.
Martin Luther King, Jr. is, of course, a prominent example of enemy love in the last century. In a sermon from 1957 he says, “Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.”
Learning to love our enemies means learning to free ourselves from that addictive desire to always win. Because I think we can all think of those times when we had the chance to get back at somebody, to give them what they had coming. And I think Dr. King is right that these are the moments where the truth of our motivations really shines through. Will you beat the man who’s already down, even if he’s your enemy? Or will you give him a hand? Recall the stories of saints, like Perpetua, one of the martyrs of Carthage, who saw the trembling arm of the gladiator trying to finally kill her and helped guide his sword to her throat, almost certainly resulting in his conversion. Enemy love is not some strategy of self-interest, some alternative way of winning, but an act of total witness, of martyrdom.
Sometimes it’s just a witness to ourselves. When I went to my first real confession, just before being received into Full Communion, my confessor picked up on an oddly strong note of bitterness about this one guy that I used to really, really dislike in college. I thought of him as my enemy. It was this odd little comfort to me, to harbor this longstanding ill-will, totally irrational and totally removed from the original circumstance of our meeting. Honestly, this wasn’t what I thought was going to be the most important part of my long confession. But it became clear that I really needed to let it go, because my stubborn desire to defeat this perceived enemy was getting in the way of me accepting the love of God.
Many people, thinking about Jesus’ command, have said that loving your enemies isn’t naturally possible. It is only possible with supernatural grace. And I wonder if what that means is that in order to love our enemies we have to learn, with God’s help, not to see them as our enemies. We can work on that, maybe, when it comes to small rivalries in ordinary life. When it comes to the really bad enemies, the true villains of the world, it takes more than a little mental-emotional effort, it takes a long experience of God’s love to transforms us. When we allow ourselves to be exposed to the love of God, getting to know God and his purpose for us, we find that it changes our understanding of love. Love is no longer about what makes me feel good or what helps me out. It’s no longer about being on the right side. It’s about God’s ability to bring all things, even the worst things in history, into his love and power—that’s the arc of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
And if that’s true, and we can really love our enemies, I think what it means is that we do not have to worry about controlling the future, as if, somehow, when the wrong side wins, everything will fall apart. God is bigger than that. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care, or that we should ignore evil; but it means that the way we deal with evil matters. You can’t meet hate with more hate, violence with more violence. You have to meet it with love. Love and truth can change things in a way that control and competition and winning can’t—fundamentally, rather than trying to force the world to be better, it forces the world to see a soul transformed by grace. That will always be the most radical and the most difficult message of Jesus. God give us grace to hear it.