Love Your Enemies (Midweek Message)

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Love Your Enemies

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 29, 2019

This coming Tuesday marks the 30^th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. 

“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 abuse you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.… So be whole, just as your heavenly Father is whole.” (Matthew 5:43-47)

The best sermon I ever heard in my life was given in Beijing in the late summer of 1989.  It was by a layman in a House Church, and it was on the text “love your enemies; pray for those who abuse you.” 

During the somewhat liberal period of religious openness in China prior to the June 4, 1989 massacre, local Chinese had begun attending services with expatriates. After the crackdown, the Chinese security and political control apparatus was brought to bear on Beijing’s Chinese Christians as well as any other group seen to be too closely identified with foreigners.  Old rules that had remained on the books forbidding Chinese nationals from attending “foreign” worship services started to be enforced with a vengeance, including lengthy interrogation and physical abuse.  The pressure brought to bear on our Chinese congregants became almost unbearable.  Finally our congregation decided that the local people and the expatriates in our little congregation would have to go their own ways and worship separately.  It was very hard on all of us, because we had become close friends.       

One of these Chinese members of our congregation spoke at the last service we held together. He started his sermon, in Chinese, by noting that separate worship would be hard, since “gathering together each week is like drawing individual pieces of firewood together, to make a blaze that can warm us through the week.”  Pulling apart the critical mass of fuel for the fire posed the risk of extinguishing the flame, especially if the individual pieces of fuel were isolated, put aside, and kept alone in the cold, where their flame would die for want of heat. But we had no real choice in the matter, given the pressures. 

My friend said he had always thought that “love your enemies” was a little over-dramatic, “for why should Christians have enemies?” He said he now understood the passage much better.    “If I could be so bold, I’d like to refer to a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.”  Since in all probability our meeting place had listening devices in the walls, most of us shifted uncomfortably.  

 Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner in the Gulag.

He told the story at length:  Solzhenitsyn is in the labor camp system in the Soviet Union.  He becomes more and more dehumanized by his torment, but then, in a chapter called ‘Resurrection,’ regains his Christian faith and begins the long road to true freedom, even within that system.  In the key passage of that key chapter, Solzhenitsyn says that he realized at that critical time that no matter how tightly his interrogators constrained him, he always had a choice—though they always eventually could force him to say what they wanted, he could do so willingly or unwillingly, cheaply or expensively in terms of the suffering he endured before giving them what they demanded. 

He also realized that they too were constrained to do what they did, and that they too had a choice in how they did what they were constrained to do.  In a system where all were compromised and all were victims in one degree of another, he realized the great truth that the line between good and evil is not found between one country and another country, between one economic class and another, between one political party and another, between one religion or another, or one race and another.  The line between good and evil is fine but very definite, and runs down the middle of each and every human heart.  It is found in that space of the heart where we exert our choices, no matter how constrained our choices may be. 

My friend concluded: 

“So Solzhenitsyn realized that he needed to pray for his interrogator, and for all of God’s creatures, even Stalin. It is where my faith begins as well.  This is the reason, I believe, that we must pray for our enemies.  They, like us, are in God’s image, and have that line down the middle of their hearts, no matter what decisions they have made before, no matter how distorted the image of God may have become in them, or how twisted or constrained the options left to them might be.”

“So we must pray to the creator to help his creatures–not that they be like us, not that they treat us more favorably, not that they choose what we wish they would choose, but that in whatever way God wants, here and now, they might opt for the good in their hearts and not the evil.  We pray that they might become what God created them to be, not what we think that they should be.  We do this because we share with them in our hearts the capacity to do great evil or great good.  Without such a belief in my solidarity with all my fellow creatures, even those who abuse me and what I believe is good, I would not have hope that God might work his miracles in my own heart, and help me to choose the right.  That is why I must pray for even Premier Li Peng, who imposed martial law, for all who ordered the military actions during the first week of June, and for those who put forward lies defending such things, like government spokesman Xuan Mu.”

And so the congregation divided, and our Chinese friends managed to do church on their own.  My friend was held hostage in his own country for two years to buy the silence of his wife, an outspoken Peking University professor who fled China for Germany in the turmoil after the massacre.  Finally, at the intervention of the German government, he was allowed to leave China.   But the words of his sermon stayed with me, and remain so to this day. 

Jesus was perhaps establishing an impossible standard for human behavior and emotions in the sermon on the Mount, when he said love your enemies.  But as he said elsewhere, with God nothing is impossible.  God gives us the grace to be able to pray sincerely for our enemies’ good.  For we must do this if we are to become “perfect,” or “whole,” i.e., what God wants us to be.   

The resurrection of Jesus helps us: as we live in Him and He in us, we no longer fall easy prey to tribal and parochial loyalties overwhelming the need for equanimity and compassion:  “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14). 

We are all God’s creatures and all bear God’s image, no matter how we may have distorted and twisted it. And so are all who are our enemies.  We are all in this together. And that is so regardless of what we think of each other, regardless of how right or wrong we may be in our judgments of each other.

God loves us, each and every one.  So we must learn to love each other.  Not pretend to love each other.  Not practice passive aggression on each other as we despise the other.  Not silently disengage and passively submit, detached, from the abuse others give us.  But love.  And love as God loves, which means sometimes being a pain in the neck and almost always means challenging the beloved.  We must forgive, knowing that reconciliation and restoration of trust comes later, as all live into their best selves. 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+

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