Enemies: Don't Deny It, You Do Have Them

Who is your enemy?

Who is your enemy?

You are probably going to reply to me “I don’t have any enemies….” Afterall it hardly seems very nice to have enemies?

“Live peaceably with all” said our reading (at least if I cut out the words that came before)

Surely if I am a Christian I am not allowed to have enemies? It’s not very Church of England to have enemies…

While I was on holiday I visited a Church where they sang a worship song I rather like which includes the line “I raise a hallelujah in the presence of my enemies” - only in the Church I visited they changed the words to “I raise a hallelujah in the presence of the mystery”. Perhaps they didn’t think it was very Christian to have enemies… We are nice people! We don’t have enemies.

I bet you do!

Perhaps its just the word you don’t like - but if you think about it I bet you do have enemies.

- 29% of people have experienced bullying at work (1) and that’s only full on bullying - that doesn’t include people taking credit for your work so they get the promotion you should have got or passing the buck for their mistakes or other nasty workplace practices

- Over 33% of members of ethnic minorities in the UK (as well as over 17% of the population as a whole) have experienced a physical racist assault (2) and that doesn’t include verbal racism or attacks on grounds of your religion

- 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men had experienced some form of sexual harassment during their lifetime. (3)

- 20% of people in the Uk are estranged from a close relative - parent, child or sibling (4) - and that only includes those who are actually estranged, not those who have a really a difficult relationship with each other.

- I have not been able to find out how many people have been cheated on by their partner - But in all relationships (not just marriages) around 70% of people admitted having cheated on a partner - so even if you are now in a relationship that is wonderful - many of you will have been in a relationship in the past where you had a partner who cheated on you. And given it takes two to tango, that’s an awful lot of people who slept with other people’s partners knowing but not caring how much pain it would cause them (5)

- 84% of women and 74% of men have reported having a “toxic friendship” - you don’t have to watch many TV dramas to see this as a common trope - and perhaps you have experienced having a friend who was jealous, controlling, gaslighting or otherwise toxic. (6)

- Oh and that’s excluding people trolling you on the internet, if you have been a victim of a burglary, international things like if your country has been threatened or invaded by another country or just simple things like people deliberately cutting you up on the A40....

Shall I ask the question again? Who is your enemy?

Romans 12:18 doesn’t say “live peaceably with all.” but “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” Because God recognises the reality of life.

God is not a God of pretense and covering things up, he is realistic. The bible is a very realistic book. That is why the word enemy is one of the most common words in the bible. The different words that can be translated enemy occur 373 times, more if you include the books in the so-called Apocrypha. (7)

Jesus doesn’t say “pretend you are nice and don’t have enemies”- he says something far harder- “love your enemies”. And what does it mean to love your enemies? Well Jesus goes on to say “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you might be children of your father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43).

And Romans 12 goes on to give us even more explicit instructions about what it means to love your enemies.

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So what practically can we do to love people who have done bad stuff to us?

Jesus’s advice is “pray for those who persecute you”. The simplest thing you can do for those who have treated you badly is to pray for them. That sounds hard “but I don’t feel like praying for them”. I was once advised when you have someone who you find it really hard to feel nice things about - write a prayer for that person (it can be very short) - something like “Lord Jesus, you know how much hurt I feel towards (their name). I find this really difficult to say but turn the anger I feel towards (their name) into blessings on them. Amen”