Within this context, Jesus taught his disciples about a way of life that questioned the very assumptions under which people usually operate. If another person has power and abuses it, people usually make one of two choices. One choice would be to fight back, using the same methods as the oppressor, as much as they are able. The other choice would be to lay low and do what is demanded. Jesus suggests a third way—to resist oppression by refusing to accept the oppressor's scenario—to resist injustice by choosing to act in way that overturns the perpetrator's expectations. This sort of behavior involves great risk. The Romans executed Jesus for behaving as he taught. Matthew Boulton, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, described Jesus' teaching as “a deeper more radical resistance . . . non-cooperation in the underlying paradigm of hate and brutality . . . active, creative non-resistance to the evildoer.” As it did for Jesus, acting in this way often carries great risk—and sometimes great cost.
This passage from Matthew influenced Mohandas Gandhi in his resistance against British colonial power in India. Others who have taken this path of non-violence are Martin Luther King, Jr. against racism and segregation in our country and Archbishop Desmond Tutu against apartheid in South Africa.
But this gospel is not just for famous leaders of non-violent, peaceful protest movements. This gospel confronts us who are sitting here today to consider how we respond to the teaching of Jesus to love our enemies. It confronts us about our trust in the validity of non-violent resistance or in Boulton's words “creative non-resistance to the evildoer.” The question for us, I think, is do we believe that Jesus knows what he is talking about?
In order to ponder about what Jesus means when he asks us to love our enemies, I want to offer two meditations on this gospel. The first is by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, who resisted the Nazis without violence until he became convinced that Hitler had to be stopped no matter the cost. He was executed by the Nazis for participating in a plot to kill Hitler. The second is by Katherine Jefferts Schori, our presiding bishop.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “How then does love conquer? By asking not how the enemy treats love but only how Jesus treated it. The love of our enemies takes us along the way of the cross into the community with the crucified. The more we are driven along this road, the more certain is the victory of love over the enemy's hatred. For then it is not the disciple's love alone, but the love of Jesus Christ alone, who for the sake of his enemies went to the cross and prayed for them as he hung there. In the face of the cross the disciples realized that they too were his enemies and that he had overcome them by his love. It is this that opens the disciples’ eyes and enables them to see their enemy as a brother or sister. They know that they owe their very life to the One who, though he was their enemy, accepted them, who made them his neighbors, and drew them into community with himself. The disciples can now perceive that even their enemies are the object of God's love, and that they stand like themselves beneath the cross of Christ.”
Was Bonhoeffer correct in saying that the disciples as sinful people were enemies of Christ? (Of course, that means that we are as well.) Was he right in asserting that only because Jesus Christ loved us and died for us, despite our sinful natures, we are enabled to see our enemies as Christ sees them? And to love them?
In 2007 our Presiding Bishop Katharine received an invitation from the Anglican archbishop of Korea to address a gathering in Korea of Anglican from all over the globe about peace-making, an continuing issue for that divided country. Part of her talk addressed our gospel this morning: “The human ability to make war has mostly to do with fear. People and their leaders live in fear of their neighbors or what they may do . . . Living in fear only degrades life, for it leads inexonerably to violence. Living in fear denies the fundamental hope we share, for it condemns us to remain in the grave of the past. Christians are not meant to live in fear. We are born anew in hope for a dream we expect to become reality. That great dream of God is for a restored and reconciled reality. We make peace now so that God's cosmic dream may be made real. Jesus says, 'Love your enemy' now, in the present, so that we might 'be perfect as God is perfect.' That perfection is a becoming . . . luring us on toward the vision of all creation existing in the full presence and perfection of God . . . Loving our enemies means insisting that there is abundance for all in God's great dream of a restored creation.”
Is it realistic to act now for peace in the context of our Christian hope that Christ's coming again will make all things new and all things perfected in God's love?
So here are two views of both why and how we should follow Jesus' teaching to love our enemies—one in the context of Christ's willing sacrifice in love on the cross, the other in the context of our Christian hope in the reign of God, both now and yet to come. Where are we, each one of us? What does each of us truly believe about Jesus' command to love and to pray for our enemies? Where is our head, and where is our heart?
References:
Matthew Myer Boulton quote: Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 1, p. 385
Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote: A Year With Dietrich Bonhoeffer, March 19, p. 85
Katharine Jefferts Schori quote: Gospel in the Global Village, p. 75
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