The eCrozier

Love your enemies – Jesus
Defeat your enemies – Most of Us

The reason Jesus commands us to love our enemies is because he presumes we’ll have them. Having enemies is an unavoidable part of human life. And it’s naive simply to assume that our enemies will become our friends. I’ve had that happen. It’s glorious when it does. But, more often than not, our enemies will remain our enemies. So, the question becomes not “how can I make friends out of my enemies?” But rather, “how can I love my enemies when they still remain my enemies?”

To get at that answer, I believe we have to focus on the “love” part of the command rather than “the enemies” part of it. Focusing on our enemies will only create a spiral of self-justification and claimed victimhood that leads us away from love. This spirals unabated as each offense by our enemy gets reacted to and internalized. It also leads us to define ourselves by who our enemy is rather than by who we are as Jesus’ disciples. When that happens, we create a symbiotic relationship with our enemy where our identity gets defined more by who we oppose rather than by Jesus’ command to love.

A vivid example that bears this out is the long-standing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Both have come to define themselves symbiotically by who their enemy is. Those in power on both sides have come to literally need the other to be their enemy because that provides self-justification for their own behavior. So Israeli leaders need Palestinians to continue to fire rockets at their cities and bomb crowded buses to justify their own actions, all the while providing cover for their continued settler expansion in the West Bank. And Palestinian leaders need Israelis to bomb civilians in Gaza and to keep the borders closed to commerce in order justify their indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians. Both sides can then point to their enemy as the one responsible for all the death and destruction. They’ve come to symbiotically need their enemies.

But what if they both chose to define themselves, not by who their enemy is, but by who they are when they are their best selves? Both peoples have long histories of compassion and generosity. I know. I’ve seen them first-hand when they are their best selves. Such movement would require both to let go of their claim to be solely in the right (self-justification) and the only true sufferers (claimed victimhood). Like in all cases, “love” can’t be lived out as a sentimental feeling toward the other. Such feelings may never be present. Rather, it must be an act of will to let go of self-justification and claimed victimhood and to embrace a visceral humility and an empathetic love for the other.

And this is true for you and me in our relationships to the enemies who are nigh to us (maybe in the next pew?). The act of love should never only be about our feelings. It must be grounded in our own humility and our empathy for the other, whoever that other is. After all, our actions are the only actions over which we have control. As Jesus stresses it: This is about his command for us to love. It’s not about our enemies.

+Scott