Let me just start by saying I don’t want to love my enemies. I want to hate them. Maybe they threaten me. Maybe they hurt me. I want to think they’re stupid and wrong and deserve to be hated. I want to be right and to have the satisfaction of seeing them rebuked, punished, humiliated. I want Jesus to swoop in with a sword and smite them. Because that’s so how he works. Lots of smiting, right?
Yeah, so instead we have Jesus telling us to turn the other cheek, which Amanda Aikman preached about last week. Turning the other cheek takes a lot of courage and a lot of love. It calls the one doing the hateful thing to stop and see the victim as a fellow human being worthy of respect. And we have Jesus telling us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. He says even the tax collectors love the people who love them; we have to do better. Once again, Jesus sets the bar impossibly high.
Why should we bother to love our enemy? On this Martin Luther King weekend, when we are remembering King’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, let’s see what King has to tell us. He gives three reasons for loving our enemies. He writes,
The first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus’ thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe…. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. And that is the tragedy of hate, that it doesn’t cut it off. It only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love….
Along these same lines, he also wrote,
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. [140.]
Think of the situation between Israel and Hamas right now. They hate each other. In the past 15 months we have seen the result of returning hate with hate, violence with more violence. So many tens of thousands of innocent people have died, and many thousands more have been injured, have lost their homes, have had to move multiple times, have endured starvation and cold and lack of water and many other hardships. All because of hate.
I said that King gave us three reasons to love our enemies. The first is that returning hate for hate just makes the world terrible for everyone. He goes on:
There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. … You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted.
If you Google photos of desegregating schools, you may find this photo that I came across: A Black high school girl walking to school, carrying her books. She is protected by troops. Right behind her—literally about two steps behind her—there is this mob of angry white people. The ones in the front are mostly women, all dressed up: nice shoes, nice clothes, nice hair. And there’s this one white woman whose mouth is wide open, whose eyes are furious, who is clearly spewing hate at the top of her lungs toward this quiet Black girl just a few feet in front of her. You may recall Jesus’ teaching elsewhere that it’s not what you put into your mouth that makes you clean or unclean; it’s what comes out of your mouth—and what’s coming out of this woman’s mouth is vile. Jesus also says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean.” (Matthew 23:25-26.) This white woman may be all dressed up, but the hate coming out of her mouth distorts her features and makes her someone that you do not want to be around.
Dr. King goes on:
Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. … [144.]
[Love] is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies. [145.]
A Hindu man once came to Gandhi and asked for advice. His only son had been killed by Muslims. What should he do? Gandhi told him to adopt a Muslim son and raise him as his own, for the boy’s parents may have been killed by Hindus.
Imagine telling an Israeli whose beloved daughter was killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023 to adopt a Palestinian orphan girl from Gaza and raise her as their own. There would be all kinds of challenges on multiple levels, but if they could do it, what a powerful testament that would be. What a tangible, transformative way to interrupt the chain of hate with profound love.
When I was Googling those photos of children desegregating schools, I also found photos of Black and white children eating lunch together, working on school projects together, sitting together in classrooms, or carrying signs saying that all children deserved a good education. There’s the power of love.
Refusing to hate can topple governments and interrupt wars. During World War I, German and British soldiers took Christmas Day off from fighting and discovered they had a lot in common. They shared photos, sang carols in several languages, played soccer in No Man’s Land. They all had people back home who loved them and worried about them. For 24 hours, they refused to cooperate with the governments who told them to hate and kill each other. They refused to be enemies, to play the deadly game of war in which they were the pawns, the cannon fodder.
We learned once again about love triumphing over hate on the issue of marriage equality. “Oh, it’ll destroy the institution of marriage,” some people said. “Marriage is one man and one woman.” You remember all that? Marriage equality doesn’t destroy the institution of marriage. People being unfaithful to each other does that. People falling out of love, falling into hate, betraying each other, abusing each other—that destroys the institution of marriage. But allowing people to marry their beloved, regardless of gender, that is only affirming of the institution of marriage. Loves wins.
My sense of what is often behind hate is a lot of fear. Fear of change, fear of being displaced, fear of having to confront our own history of white people oppressing and tormenting Black people in order to make money from their labor. The cotton plantations of the South relied on slave labor; without it, they were nothing. You had no workers. As a nation, we have not reckoned with our hateful, racist history, and so it continues to haunt us.
After World War II, Germany spent years coming to terms with Hitler’s whole Aryan Nation fever dream. Our members who live in Germany can speak to this better than I, but I understand that there are monuments around the country to honor the victims and to say “Never again.” When Apartheid fell in South Africa, there was a whole truth and reconciliation process put in place to create opportunities for hearing the pain of the oppressed and sowing the seeds of reconciliation. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a strong hand in creating this process specifically to interrupt and confront the history of hate and abuse and oppression of Black South Africans by white South Africans. The US has only recently taken down many of the statues honoring Southern Civil War generals. The post – Civil War era of Reconstruction experienced wild backlash that turned into Jim Crow, which offered all sorts of new ways to hate and oppress Black people—barring them from equal education and employment opportunities, refusing to grant them the vote. We have not had the reckoning that would help us interrupt and heal the pattern of hate.
So Jesus tells us to love our enemies, as challenging as that may be. He is not going to swoop in and smite them. Dr. King says,
Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies. [142.]
Our work is cut out for us. In a time of deep divisiveness and hate, let us practice love. Let us wage peace. Let us embody the way of Jesus, the Pax Christi, that says everyone is beloved of God. Ghandi’s commitment to nonviolent resistance and justice for the oppressed toppled the British imperialist rule of India. King’s commitment to love of enemy fueled the Civil Rights Movement, which brought about sweeping changes that benefit all of us. But there is still much to be done. As Amanda Gorman said at the inauguration four years ago,
We are striving to forge a union with purpose,
to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and
conditions of man.
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another.
Amen.