Love Your Enemies; Pray for Them
Epiphany 7C
Parish Church of St Luke, Grants Pass Oregon
The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SPC, Ph.D.
Genesis 45:3-11, 15; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50; Luke 6:27-38; Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42
23 February 2025
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
The best sermon I ever heard in my life was given at a house Church in Beijing China. It was on the text “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”
During a short-lived period of social openness in China prior to the June 4, 1989 crackdown, local Chinese had begun attending services with expatriates. After the Tian’anmen Massacre, the Chinese security apparatus was brought to bear on Beijing’s Christians. Old rules that had remained on the books forbidding Chinese nationals from attending “foreign” worship services started to be enforced with a vengeance: I remember seeing neat little rows of cigarette burn scars on the back of a fellow congregant just released after two weeks of interrogation by security agents who had arrested him leaving our Sunday service. We finally had no choice but to submit: the Chinese and foreigners in our congregation would have to go their separate ways.
One of the Chinese members of our congregation spoke at the last service we held together. He started his sermon 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.” But we had to forgive and love those who were forcing us to break apart our community.
He went on, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, Jesus says. I have always thought that this was a little over-dramatic, for why should Christians have enemies? But I see now that having enemies in life is how life is. So why love them? If I could be so bold (at this, he looked nervously at the walls, which we all knew contained listening devises), I think we find an answer to that in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.”
“Solzhenitsyn was in a Soviet labor camp, tortured almost daily to denounce friends, more and more dehumanized by his torment. But then he regains his Christian faith and begins the long road to true freedom, even within that system. This was when he realized that no matter how tightly his interrogators constrained him, he always had a choice—though they always eventually could force him to say whatever they wanted, he could do so willingly or unwillingly, cheaply or expensively in terms of the suffering they gave him.
“This made him realize that his tormentors too were constrained to do what they did--if they didn’t torture him, they’d be the ones being tortured. But they too had a choice in how they did what they were forced to do, brutally or with some empathy. In a system where all were compromised victims, he realized this great truth: 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, he says, 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.
“So Solzhenitsyn realized that he needed to pray for his torturer, and for all of God’s creatures, even Stalin. This was the turning point in Solzhenitsyn recovering his humanity. And that is why I believe I too must pray for my enemies, even Premier Li Peng, who imposed martial law, and all who ordered and carried out the mass murders on the streets of Beijing. They, like us, are in God’s image, and have that line down the middle of their hearts, no matter what decisions they may have made before, no matter how distorted the image of God may have become in them or us.
“We must pray not that they be like us, not that they come over to our side and choose what we wish they would, but that God help them to do not what I want them to, but simply to choose 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 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 persecute me and what I believe is good, I would not have hope that God might work his miracles in my own wayward heart.”
Again, the best sermon I ever heard.
Is the call to love our enemies and pray for them, to not fight against them, a command that we be submissive victims and simply let evil pass without a response? I think not. Matthew’s version of this saying preserves many details that give a clue to what the historical Jesus meant here.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not fight back against an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. … Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on both the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matt 5:38-39)
Jesus here starts by quoting the Torah that vengeance or punishment for harm inflicted be just, that it never exceed the original harm. You could put out the eye of someone who had put someone else’s eye out (an "eye for an eye") but not take their life. But Jesus says that in order to enjoy fullness of life, we should be more than merely just, but more like God, who blesses both the righteous and the wicked.
Theologian Walter Wink notes a crucial detail in Matthew’s text—“if someone strikes you on the right cheek.” In that society, you interacted with others only with your right hand. So mentioning the fact that it is the right cheek that is being struck implies a haughty overlord giving a brutal but dismissive backhanded blow to a social inferior. Jesus says “Don’t strike them back. Instead, stand up tall and turn, forcing them to use their open palm on your left cheek, a much less demeaning blow than the backhanded one they started with.” In Chinese terms, we would have added—“thus making them lose face.”
Like the Mahatma Ghandi’s idea of Satyagraha, or Truth Force, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful resistance, both developed from this very saying of Jesus, the goal of this offering the right cheek is to overwhelm the evildoer by exposing evil through a show of goodness.
Matthew’s Jesus uses a second example. “If a creditor sues you for your outer garment, give him your inner garment as well.” The outer garment was used for warmth and as a cover at night. The inner garment could be worn without shame in public, though there were no underclothes beneath it. By saying “throw in your tunic as well,” Jesus was saying to strip naked before the creditor, shaming him before all and revealing the true dynamic of the exploitative system of the uber-wealthy forcing small farmers off their land.
The third example Jesus gives is being compelled to carry baggage for the Roman Army. The Roman legion had the legal right to require local people to carry their substantial baggage. But this had touched off anti-Roman riots when large groups of people thus impressed found themselves far from home at the end of the day. So standing orders were issued limiting the length of impressment to only one mile. “If they force you to carry baggage a mile, walk on another mile as well.” One can imagine the incongruous situation of soldiers, afraid of breaking regulations and being punished, begging with a head-strong follower of Jesus to please lay down his load after the allowed 1,000 steps.
Jesus did not teach his followers to be docile and submissive victims of abuse. If that were so, one of the few historical facts that we actually know with certainty about his life—his execution at the hands of the Roman authorities—makes little sense. If he taught gentle submission to all authority, even abusive authority working against God’s purposes, it is highly unlikely the Romans would have crucified him: this death was reserved for those found guilty of sedition and rebellion, a charge implied by the title they fixed over Jesus on the cross, “King of the Jews.” Had Jesus simply taught submission, the Romans would have let him pass him as useful fool who unwittingly helped them in rural pacification programs. But they didn’t! They put him to death for disturbing the order of things, for subverting the Empire in sayings just like these.
Jesus says love your enemies in complete honesty about them and us. We are all God’s creatures and all bear God’s image, no matter how we may have twisted it. This includes our enemies. He says we are all in this together even if they don’t recognize this. God loves us, each and every one. So we must learn to love each other. Not pretend to love each other. Not be passive aggressive as we shame and despise each other. Not silently disengage and passively submit, detached, from the abuses others subject us to. But love. And love as God loves, which means sometimes being a pain in the neck and almost always means challenging the beloved enemy in ways that allows them to choose the right that is there in their heart. Loving our enemies means treating them as we would be treated, cutting them the slack we would want them to cut us, being as honest about our own faults as we want them to be about theirs.
It is not an easy path. Some of our own may judge us for loving our enemies, for not openly confronting and shaming them, or even violently fighting them. You are enabling the wicked, they say. But Jesus says you are just trying to emulate God’s compassion. Suffering from such in-house abuse is what it means whewn Jesus says we will be persecuted for sake of Jesus’ name.
In a world of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, however just, we all just may end up blind and toothless. That is why we must learn to forgive, even as we must hold each other to account. This is why we must learn not to judge, not to label, lest the other side do the same thing to us. This is what Jesus taught, and still teaches today.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Thank you for posting this.
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