Love Your Enemies

I was a first-hand witness to someone else’s anger. It wasn’t a pretty picture, in fact, at that moment it seemed more than just a little bit dangerous. I don’t blame the guy for being upset. Had the other car come as close to me as it did to him, I would have been pretty upset too. Still, upset is one thing, pulling out a gun is another matter entirely.

I have told you before, the favorite current television show at the Broyles house is The Big Bang Theory. Cindy and I both enjoy the show, not everything about it but we enjoy most of it. One of the show’s central characters, Sheldon Cooper, has a list of “mortal enemies.” Many of the people on Sheldon’s list know nothing of Sheldon or their status in his life. The good news of Sheldon’s list is, he never seems to do much about them. The bad news of Sheldon’s list is, he never seems to do much about them.

At best, most of us are a lot like Sheldon. We have our enemies, we may refer to them in other ways, but they are people we want as little to do with as possible and it would bring us great joy to see them have to suffer, even if it isn’t by our own hand. After all, in some way, they made us suffer. That is probably how they got to be enemies to start with. But, we aren’t going to do much about it either.

Some of us may be like Alex in the story I told you a few minutes ago. I hope there are few of us like the guy I saw on my way to the gym.

The thing is, for all of us, there are people in the world around us we just don’t like for any variety of reasons. They may not be people we would call enemies but without question we don’t like these folks and for the most part, however we can, we try to keep our distance from these folks. I am not so sure that is such a bad thing. Jesus didn’t say we had to like our enemies.

He did say we have to love them. “Keith, aren’t you splitting hairs there?” I don’t think so.

In our lesson this morning Jesus gives us another of those radical sayings we have talked about since the first of the year. During the course of this series we have talked about things like selling all our stuff and giving to the poor. Another week we talked about being a servant. Still another week we talked about denying ourselves and last week we talked about Jesus’ instruction to forgive.

This week we are turning to what may be the most difficult of all these sayings, “Love your enemies.” Really? Who wants to do that? Most of us, perhaps not in what we say but somewhere in the deepest recesses of our minds don’t want to love these folks. What we really want comes a whole lot closer to wanting to hurt these folks. We may not follow through on the feelings. Most of us don’t follow through on the feelings but that doesn’t mean those feelings are not there. Most of the time, our enemies did something to us or to those we love to become an enemy to start with. But, at least the threat of some kind of legal punishment keeps most of our more aggressive emotions in check. Instead of hurting this person we consider an enemy, we settle for pretty well ignoring their existence, at least to the degree such ignoring is possible. If your boss is one of your enemies, ignoring probably isn’t such a good idea.