Paul Stanley is Vice-President of the Navigators, a worldwide para-church ministry to students and the military. In 1967 he was a company commander in Vietnam; it was there that he took a risk and learned the meaning of Jesus’ words:
“On one occasion after the enemy had withdrawn, Stanley came upon several soldiers surrounding a wounded Viet Cong. Shot through the lower leg, he was hostile, frightened, helpless. He threw mud and kicked with his one good leg when anyone came near. When Paul joined the circle... a soldier asked, "Sir what do we do? He's losing blood fast and needs attention."
Stanley looked down and saw the face of a 16 or 17 year old boy. He unbuckled his pistol and grenades so the boy couldn’t grab them. Speaking gently, he moved towards him. The young man stared fearfully, but he allowed the American to slide his arms under him and pick him up.
As Stanley walked toward the helicopter, the wounded soldier began to cry and hold him tight.... During the ride, the young captive sat on the floor, clinging to the American’s leg.... He looked out with panic as they gained altitude and flew over the trees. He fixed his eyes back on Stanley, who smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. After landing, Stanley picked him up again and walked toward the medical tent. As they crossed the field, he felt the tenseness leave the young man's body and his grasp loosen. His eyes softened; his head leaned against Stanley's chest... fear and resistance were gone; he had finally surrendered.”1
Then this comment, “The God to whom we surrender is not our enemy. He heals and cares for everyone he takes captive.” Such stories are humbling; they raise the question, Am I willing to become one who loves enemies as if it were the only right thing to do?
If we read the teaching of Jesus in this section of the Sermon on the Mount as just another set of commandments, of impossible things we have to do to earn the title disciple or get our ticket for heaven or earn God’s approval, then we will have misunderstood them and not take them seriously. We will conveniently brand them as ideals and dismiss them as aspirations for only saints and super-Christians, not ordinary folk like ourselves.
But that is an error. Those who first received these instructions about loving and praying for enemies were only beginners at following Jesus. No one had done it before; they were all pioneers, what we would call rookies, what the New Testament calls learners or apprentices, which is what the word disciple means. They were not plumbers but only plumbers helpers, learning the name of the tools, dirty and smelly and contributing little. They were not pilots but students in ground school, learning the first lessons of weather and how a wing gives lift. Not Saint Peter but Peter the goober! Not Peter, James, and John as the inside circle, but more like the Three Stooges. No different than we are. As one observer put it, “Jesus did not call the qualified; he qualified the called.” They were not extraordinary men; they were everyday men with an extraordinary new friend.
What they contributed was not expertise but availability and ignorance, which is all God asks: show up and start learning from my Son! He is the way, the truth, and the life. And if you want to know the Father, hang around the Son and watch for the activity of the Spirit. Whatever we think of Jesus’ teaching, remember that it’s for all his followers, not just the advanced, whoever they are? We can’t get off the hook by claiming it doesn’t apply to us. If we are not learning to love our enemies and being drawn to the idea as an outrageous possibility, difficult as it is, we are missing something Jesus thought very important. There is nothing that reveals our spiritual parentage and family likeness so much as this one issue: what do we do with our enemies?
Thus far the disciples had responded to the challenge of Jesus’ call, “Follow me, and I will teach you to fish for people.” They had seen him heal multitudes and cast our spirits after announcing the kingdom of God.2 Where Jesus was, stuff happened, and it happened every day; the power of God’s active rule was present, and they had box seats at ground level. That they left work and family for an uncertain future with a near stranger demonstrates how powerful his attraction was. Jesus looked into their eyes and set their hearts and minds on fire. He had captured them as if by palpable magnetic attraction. They were now in the force field of who he was, and in this block of teaching we call the Sermon on the Mount they learned just how serious he was about making them into a new species of human being, what we are calling kingdom people, people who live in this world but with a new relationship with the visible Jesus, the invisible Father, and the ever-present Holy Spirit.
Without knowing all that was going on- because most of it was invisible, or even knowing how to talk about it- because it was all so new, they were invited through Jesus to know the truth of the Triune God and to be caught up as ground troops in God’s invasion of planet earth. It was a new relationship, eyes that see new things, new desires planted deep in the heart. I imagine they spent much of the time dizzy and disoriented. Jesus hooked them deeply, and it was not so much a curriculum of try harder as one of please pay attention, not so much white knuckled effort as open handed receptivity, and not so much make something happen as watch something happen. They were experts in fishing and tax collecting and novices with Jesus and the kingdom agenda. I cannot live this life, but perhaps he can dwell in me and live it through me. I cooperate with his working in me. John 15:5 is the operational principle, “... for apart from me you can do nothing.”
We should add a vow for all new Christians as a warning label, “Are you willing to look dumb on a regular basis, and then when you think you know something to look ignorant all over again?” The first disciples answered Yes; they looked stupid much of the time, so the question is, Would you rather look good at something trivial or foolish at something that matters? I have a hard time with that one, even if I wrote the question.
July 5th of this year is the 34th anniversary of my adult conversion, and I still feel like a beginner. The biggest fear of most pastors is that one day we will be found out and fired! Our people will learn that we’ve been faking it all along and really don’t know what we’re doing! Fake-it-till-you-make-it is our normal mode of operations.
I confess that I often envy people who seem really competent at what they do. They know their craft well, whether it’s flying airplanes, leading businesses, or practicing medicine. The have the marks of competence and signs of success. But this Jesus thing and this church thing and this obedience thing and this kingdom thing and this servant thing and this Holy Spirit thing are not like other jobs. The kingdom of God remains a mystery, even if it’s in our midst, and in the end it’s not so much about mastery as about being mastered, not so much about leading as about being led, not so much active voice as passive in the sense of allowing something beyond you to happen through you. I keep asking the Lord, Will I ever get it right? Do I ever get to win? He smiles and is silent; I feel stupid again.
TURNING TO THE TEXT
The high demand is surely there as Jesus takes key concepts from the Old Testament and makes God’s will behind them clear. External conformity is just not enough. Jesus is after a whole new me with a new heart, and so he raises the bar to the highest notch, way beyond my abilities. I could never jump that high.3 What does he demand? No only no killing but a heart free from the acids of chronic anger and the cold calculation of bitterness. Not only no adultery but no lust that sees people as objects of pleasure only, and no throwing away of spouses. Not only no false swearing with God’s name but no swearing at all because your words are to be simple and true. Not only no revenge, the disciple must respond with creative non-violence that turns the other cheek, voluntarily goes a second mile, and lives with an open wallet. Not only the love of the neighbor, the one who is like me and shares my prejudices, but showing love to the one who is not like me, the enemy and the outsider, not only in action but in prayer to God for them and me. I can’t do these things on my own, and neither can you; that’s just the point. But, and here is the good news, in the company of Jesus and through the interior work of his Spirit we can be changed so that we begin to desire impossible things, and then, by the miracle of God’s supporting grace, find ourselves sometimes getting it right and surprising even ourselves! Jesus welcomes us into a parallel reality called the kingdom of God. We are invited to plug in! It is a new world in the midst of the old.
But living in two worlds at the same time is confusing, and we can understand how slow the first followers were to learn. What was natural for Jesus was unnatural for them. He made it look easy, and for him it was. He was not weakened by sin, and evil had no place to attach to him; he was free to obey the Father and full to the brim with the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not have to try hard to pray as he died, “Father, forgive them; look how ignorant they are; they don’t know what they’re doing.” It’s who he was; what would have been hard for him was to hate and curse his killers, which is what is easy for us.4
Speaking of the command concerning perfection, which is another way of speaking about the love of enemies, C.S. Lewis clarifies the meaning:
“I find a good many people bothered by... our Lord's words, ‘Be ye perfect.’ Some people... think this means ‘Unless you are perfect, I will not help you’; and as we cannot be perfect, then ... our position is hopeless. But I... think he meant ‘The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less.’”5
Lewis also wrote: “The command ‘be ye perfect’ is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command.”6
We may be committed to comfort, but Jesus is committed to nothing less than our being made perfect in love, which means always being dependent on his example and the Spirit’s energies, never independent of them. He knows what we are capable of apart from him, which is truly ugly, and what we are capable of with him, which is nothing less than amazing. Jesus will carry out the task of making us open pipes for God’s love and power to flow through. The words “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” are not so much a command as a promise only Christ can fulfill. This is where we are headed. If we are going on with Christ, then we are, as John Wesley taught, going on to perfection in love in this life, and in the life beyond this life. As his brother Charles taught us to sing, “Finish then, thy new creation; pure and spotless let us be. Let us see thy great salvation, perfectly restored in thee; changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise.”7
Have you noticed that love has it’s own, carefully monitored comfort zone? If someone is just inside or outside the boundaries, I feel it. I like this kind of people but not that kind, this color and race of people but not that race and color of people, people from this part of the country but not people from that part of the country, people who share my politics and bad habits and not those who are politically different and have other bad habits, people of my denomination and particular circle and not those in another clique or church? Isn’t that who we are? and we feel perfectly justified in our prejudices. Anne Lamont, the quirky Christian novelist, stings us with her insight, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."8
So it was in the day of Jesus. In Leviticus 19:18 it says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and since the word love was clearer than the word neighbor, the second word was easier to shrink down to manageable size. Now nowhere in the whole of the Old Testament is anyone commanded to hate their neighbor. It has echoes in several passages and outside the canon in the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not in Scripture. It was an understandable move to draw boundaries about who was in and who was out. To love the neighbor? What does that mean, and who is my neighbor? Surely not the pagans who worship many false gods? Surely not our distant cousins the Samaritans who worship on the wrong mountain and accept only part of the Bible? Surely not fellow Jews who are lax about the law and my school’s interpretation of the law? Surely not.... surely not... surely not... and you can fill in your own prejudices.9
Soon the circle is small enough to be manageable, and you feel quite good about your ability to maintain at least civility, if not love, in the smaller circle.
So when Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said...” he knew full well that most of his audience thought that to love the neighbor and hate your enemy were on the same level of authority, which they were not. The first was Scripture, the second sinful, bigoted, understandable, human prejudice which bends the Word of God about love and the neighbor all out of shape. And after he publicly acknowledged the confusion, Jesus went on to blow the second phrase completely out of the water, “But I say to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you....” For Jesus the word neighbor was a large, not a small concept. And with the word neighbor there was no room for hate. I remember the impact Edwin Markam’s little poem had on me when first I heard it as a child:
“He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.”10
His fellow Jews drew a small circle; Jesus blew it up and drew a circle as big as God’s heart. Because love is demanding, we wish to make it smaller and more manageable. Family over non-family, us over them, our kind over their kind, near over far away, people I know over people I don’t now, gays over straights, Christians over Muslims, the attractive over the less attractive, skinny over chubby, and on and on, but Jesus will have none of that. He’s into very large circles, as big as the world, as big as all the types of folk we avoid.
Contrary to common thought, the words love and hate in Jesus’ world do not have primarily to do with positive or negative emotions. They are conscious exaggerations to speak about who gets preference, who gets regard, who gets help, who gets first place and who gets second, who is included and who left out.11 The first I love, and the second, by contrast, I hate. One I help, the other I ignore for perfectly good reasons. The use of extremes for such choices was common in that day; it made for clear distinctions.
But Jesus plainly announced to his disciples that he come to completely obliterate that
form of deciding who gets our help and the help of our prayers and who does not. God does not behave like that, and neither should we, and if we do it’s a sign of spiritual disease, not health. A sign of living with Jesus in the kingdom is that you get the privilege of showing the world how God acts, and if understood properly, not that we have to love our enemies but that we get to as a privilege of sharing God’s work in the world, so that if we don’t it demonstrates which kingdom and mind set dominates our lives. To love your enemies through deeds of kindness and prayer is a high, kingdom privilege which you can only do with Christ’s help. On Sundays most of the prayers I hear are for the smaller circle rather than the larger circle. Why do I not hear any prayers for Muslim leaders or personal enemies? Perhaps we should be honest and have a time of prayer marked only for enemies. As I have asked this week, Who are my enemies, and who do I feel justified in putting outside my circle of concern? I have found the words of the Thomas Merton most helpful:
“Do not be too quick,” he wrote, “to assume that your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you were capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.
Do not be too quick to assume that your enemy is an enemy of God just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy precisely because he can find nothing in you that gives glory to God. Perhaps he fears you because he can find nothing in you of God's love and God's kindness and God's patience and mercy and understanding of the weakness of men.
Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God. For it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and sensuality and selfishness that have killed his faith.”12
In other words, who I label as enemy may say more about me than about them.
It is interesting to inspect the images Jesus used. If some of us had our way, according to Jesus (and I increasingly believe what he says about me rather than what I believe about myself), we would walk in a circle of light and our enemies would walk around in a circle of darkness; our garden would get rain, theirs none at all. That way you could know who was in and who was out with God, just look for spotlights and soggy gardens. But that’s not how it works; this God is positively promiscuous with blessings: sun and rain for the good and evil, the just and the unjust. Not that distinctions are not to be made; moral categories abide: the good are not the evil, and the unjust are not the just, only that God is the only one who can sort them out, not us. And when we learn God’s ways, then we show the family likeness that marks us as daughters and sons. We behave in ways for
which Jesus Christ is the only answer. And not always, but sometimes our enemies change.
Take Indonesia for example, the world’s largest Muslim nation. According to a January 06 poll by the Terror Free Tomorrow organization, humanitarian aid is a very effective way to improve how Muslim countries view the United States. In May of 2003, research indicated that only 15 percent of people in Indonesia had a favorable view of the U.S. Then came the tsunami in December 2004. In the year that followed, aid poured in from the U.S. and other Western nations. As a result, the January 06 poll showed that Indonesians with a favorable view of the U.S. had nearly tripled, jumping to 44 percent. Information from the Indonesian Survey Institute showed that "support for Bin Laden and terrorism has dropped to its lowest level since 9/11." It also reported that Indonesians with a "very unfavorable" view of the U.S. had fallen to just 13 percent, down from 48 percent prior to the tsunami.13
Now the Christian message is not about getting people to love America but to love God. The insight, however, is that practical love of potential enemies has spiritual power and should increasingly be a form of diplomacy. That it is much easier to rally energy and finances for war than to raise money and human capital for peace is a sign of just how fallen we all are. War energizes, and peace makes us morally sloppy. How bad is that?
A second example is less global and more individual:
“According to an A.P. account, in September 1994 Cindy Hartman of Conway, Arkansas, walked into her house to answer the phone and was confronted by a burglar. He ripped the phone cord out of the wall and ordered her into a closet. Hartman dropped to her knees and asked the burglar if she could pray for him. "I want you to know that God loves you and I forgive you,'' she said.
The burglar apologized for what he had done. Then he yelled out the door to a woman in a pickup truck: "We've got to unload all of this. This is a Christian home and a Christian family. We can't do this to them."
As Hartman remained on her knees, the burglar returned furniture he had taken from her home. Then he took the bullets out of his gun, handed the gun to Hartman, and walked out the door.”14
Praying for our enemies is incredibly disarming. It is not enough to avoid them and not do them harm. We must actively love by doing good whenever possible and holding them up in prayer before God. Amazing thing that I have discovered: it is nearly impossible to do someone good, pray for them, and hate them at the same time. Such radical actions are not only for their benefit, but for ours. And when we do this we see in them new things, unexpected beauty and new possibilities. We dare to see them as God does. Helmut Thielecke, a German pastor and teacher, saw this and wrote:
“Loving our enemies, then, does not mean we are supposed to love the dirt in which the pearl is buried; rather it means that we love the pearl which lies in the dust. Since the people who encountered Jesus found that he uncovered this level, and they therefore did not stand before him as criminals but as the lost and sought and mourned children of God, they were changed by those eyes. Under that gaze their original destiny revived; it was loved into being.... Therefore they went away changed. God does not love us because we are by nature lovable. But we become lovable because he loves us.”15
Therefore, loving the enemy at two levels, practically and in prayer, always changes us by rooting us back in the kingdom of God, and if they respond to the grace coming their way, there is hope for them as well. And when your enemy is saved, then you have to love them as a brother or sister in Christ, which can be harder than having them as an enemy!
There’s lots of what looks like love out there. Lots of cordiality and conviviality in fraternities and sororities, hunt clubs, Tupperware parties, family reunions, whites with whites at Country Clubs, blacks with blacks at nightclubs. After all, what could be easier than to love those who love us and extend greetings to those who extend them to us. Tit for tat; you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. It’s the form of love than calculates the benefits and keeps the boundaries between neighbors and enemies. It is the primary force of social cohesion for all sorts of groups, but it is not yet a Jesus thing, only a human thing. Jewish tax collectors who sold out their faith and country to the Roman occupiers do as much. Gentile outsiders do as much. So what? You don’t need the kingdom of God or the Jesus of the kingdom for that low level of love, only the desire to survive and belong, the ability to keep some in and others out and think yourselves justified for doing so.
The bottom line being that if we are not loving our enemies and praying for them, the world has a right to ask who we’re following, because if we are not different, what good are we? The quickest way to change your world and this world permanently and get in line for the next Nobel Peace Prize is to ask for grace to obey this command, Love your enemies and pray for them. Here’s a great example for you baseball fans:
“Former Boston Red Sox Hall-of-Fame third baseman Wade Boggs hated Yankee Stadium. Not because of the Yankees; they never gave him that much trouble but because of a fan. That's right: one fan.
The guy had a box seat close to the field, and when the Red Sox were in town he would torment Boggs by shouting obscenities and insults. It's hard to imagine one fan getting under a player's skin, but this guy had the recipe.
One day as Boggs was warming up, the fan began his routine, yelling, ‘Boggs, you stink’ and variations on that theme. Boggs had enough. He walked directly over to the man, who was sitting in the stands...and said, ‘Hey fella, are you the guy who's always yelling at me?
The man said, ‘Yeah, it's me. What are you going to do about it?’ Wade took a new baseball out of his pocket, autographed it, tossed it to the man, and went back to the field to his pre-game routine. The man never yelled at Boggs again; in fact, he became one of Wade's biggest fans at Yankee Stadium.”16
Love your enemies. It might change them, and we know it will change you.
Perfect is one of those words that tends to philosophical thought and abstractions, as in the sense of flawless and ideal. A new BMW may be the perfect car in one sense, but a broken down 75 Nova may be a perfect fishing car. To the Hebrew mind that which was perfect was not flawless but that which fulfilled its purpose and was rightly related to God. So when Jesus said, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” he was aiming at the notion of completeness and maturity, not pristine perfection.
We will always be tempted, always on the verge of sin, always lacking in knowledge, never all that we want to be, making many errors, but if we take Jesus’ program seriously, that he has the power to make us loving in this spectacular sense, then we will find ourselves with a share of the divine that can be found no other way. You become a sharp tool in the hands of your Creator. Loving difficult people is what God does with all of us!
CONCLUSION
My friend Thad Hinnant sent an email this week. I promised to use it in this sermon. It seems that a group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, "What does love mean?" Here are a few of the answers:
“When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love." Rebecca- age 8. Good as that is, it’s still tit-for-tat.
"You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget." Jessica - age 8. Perhaps a bit closer
"Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day." Mary Ann - age 4. Dogs are great teachers; they rarely hold grudges or withhold love.
These are all good so far as they go, but it was Nikka, aged 6, who came the closest to the heart of the matter, “If you want to learn to love better,” she said, “you should start with a friend who you hate.” Nikka understood what Jesus was after and why it mattered.
If you have an enemy, even one, and particularly if they are in your immediate family like a spouse our a child or a parent, then you have work to do, first with Jesus to ask for help, then with your enemy through loving actions and persistent prayers, even if they never change. And after this message, for which you are now accountable to God, I encourage you to start today and to start at this altar. I want to live in the kingdom and be so inwardly changed that the impossible becomes the normal. Yes, this is hard, but what else is really worth doing?
1. Edited from “To Illustrate: Surrender,” Leadership, Summer 1992, 47.
2. Matthew 4:12-25.
3. The following litany is a summary of Mt. 5:20-48.
4. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1998), 183.
5. PreachingToday.com search under Mt. 5:43-48.
6. Idem.
7. “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” UM Hymnal, No. 384.
8. PreachingToday.com search under Mt. 5:43-48.
9. For the historical and exegetical work behind this and the next paragraph see Dale Allison, The Sermon on the Mount (New York: Crossroads, 1999), 84ff; Charles Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount (Columbia, SC: USC Press, 2004), 93ff.
10. Found at http://www.jefallbright.net/node/3018.
11. David Garland, Reading Matthew (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 76-77.
12. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, Christianity Today, Vol. 32, no. 1.
13. Tom McCawley, "U.S. Tsunami Aid Still Reaps Goodwill," Christian Science Monitor, February 28, 2006, 12.
14. PreachingToday.com search under Mt. 5:43-48.
15. Idem.
16. Idem.