WELCOME & INTRODUCTION
THEY MET AS ENEMIES IN WWII AND BECAME FRIENDS 50 YEARS LATER
[excerpt taken from The Des Moines Register by Daniel P. Finney]
The day was May 19, 1944, and the world still burned from the death and destruction of World War II. Howard Linn, then a 21-year-old from Radcliffe, took off in a B-24 Liberator bomber from an Allied airbase in England. The destination of the 10-man crew was munitions plants in Brunswick, Germany.
Linn worked a gun in the waist of the plane. Anti-aircraft flak buffeted the bomber groups as they got closer to Brunswick. A group of German Focke-Wulf 190 fighters attacked their bomber "from 12 o'clock high," said Linn, now 94 and living in Iowa Falls.
"I fired a few rounds from the left waist gun, but the German fighters went by like a streak when they came at us head on," Linn wrote in his self-published memoir "World War II and My Prisoner of War Experience."
Yellow paint coated the hubs of the German fighters. They were called Göring's Yellow Noses after Hermann Göring, the Nazi leader in command of the German air force. Linn heard machine gun rounds hit his plane as the Yellow Noses made their second pass. The Liberator's No. 3 engine burst into flames.
Shortly, Linn saw fire coming from the edge of the left wing. He called on his throat microphone to the pilot. The commander asked him if he could get to the flames with a fire extinguisher.
It was impossible, Linn said. The fire was inside the wing.
"In moments, it was like a blowtorch coming back … and it was as hot as an oven," Linn wrote. "I called the pilot again and said we have to get out."
Linn ripped off his throat microphone and oxygen mask, unplugged his electric flying suit and grabbed his chest pack parachute, snapping it to his harness. He opened a door in the floor of the plane and jumped out.
Linn laid on his back during his free fall and spun wildly. He finally got control of his spin. His ears popped as he plummeted from about 20,000 feet. He passed through the clouds and craned his neck to see fires on the ground, likely from downed aircraft. He pulled his ripcord when the trees seemed to be coming up fast. He landed in a clearing and slipped out of his parachute but made a critical mistake.
Linn stuck to the timber and used his compass to make his way west.
He eventually spotted some Dutch windmills in the distance and wondered if he was lucky enough to have landed in territory where the underground would hide American and British flyers.
At noon the next day, he came to a small village. Shortly after he walked into the village, a 15-year-old boy noticed Linn walking down the street in his flying boots. The boy spoke a little English. Linn asked him if he was in the Netherlands.
The boy told him he was in Germany. The boy took him to his house, where his mother and grandmother made coffee and sandwiches. Linn ate the sandwiches while the boy and his family decided what to do about the American airman. They decided to turn him in. The boy flagged down a passing German police officer riding a motorcycle. The policeman pulled up next to Linn.
"That was it," Linn said. "I was captured."
Eventually, Linn was taken to an interrogation center in Frankfurt, Germany, with other captured Allied fighters. They interrogated Linn and his fellow prisoners for about two days, but he only gave his name, rank and serial number.
The Germans forced some 2,000 Allied prisoners to march for 87 days in a row. They received minimal rations. Maggots often crawled over their meat. Linn estimates about a quarter of the men he marched with died of dysentery and other ailments.
When they finally reached the prison camp near Hanover, Germany, they lived in barracks built 2 feet off the ground to prevent prisoners from burrowing out. Linn remembers many men worried they would not survive the experience.
"I never worried if I was going to survive," Linn said. "I don't know why. All I can say is the Lord has been very good to me."
On May 8, 1945, a Jeep with four English soldiers rolled into the camp. The prisoners were free men again. Howard Linn, the farmer from Iowa who became an airman shot from the sky and marched 87 days in a row, was finally free after nearly a year.
"Freedom is so precious," Linn said. "People don't realize."
Linn returned to Iowa after the war and resumed life as a farmer, first renting a farm, then buying one of his own.
In May 1994, a man named Russell Ives contacted Linn. Ives was the grandson of one of the men in Linn's bomber group. He was researching his grandfather's history, tracing his steps through Europe. Linn told Ives his story. Ives, who worked with military historians in the U.S. and Britain, contacted a man named Wilfried Beerman, who was 65 years old.
Beerman was the same boy whose mother and grandmother had made him coffee and sandwiches and who had turned Linn in to the German police.
Beerman wrote in a letter to Linn in November 1994. "We saw no chance to hide him." Linn and his wife eventually traveled to Germany to meet Beerman, who took them to a fancy restaurant.
"They treated us like royalty," Linn said. Beerman confessed that he felt deep guilt about turning Linn in to the authorities. Linn said the younger man had no reason to feel that way.
"It was war," he said. "I forgive you."
Beerman died in 2010, but ever since Linn met with the boy who turned him in, a big parcel from Germany arrives each Christmas season filled with German chocolate and other goodies. These two men had become friends.
Human beings are strange creatures. We invent new and terrible ways to kill each other seemingly every day. Yet, in the worst conflict this planet has ever known, two men forged an enduring friendship despite being on opposite sides of the war.
What a lesson Howard Linn and Wilfried Beerman are for our own country in this divided time. In a time when the world burned, these men found love, dignity and respect. Surely we owe it to both to do the same.
And that is what we read in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Returning evil for evil is wrong. It’s what many people do. Returning good for evil—now, that is divine! That is the perspective of Jesus in the sixth and final in the collection of antithesis passages. These passages have informed us of the kind of righteousness that supernaturally emerges from within the citizens of the kingdom of God that we have read about from the get-go of Jesus’ infamous Sermon. People who are salt of the earth and the light of the world will act this way.
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote about this divine act in his work called Strength to Love when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Is this easy? Most certainly not. It’s why I am titling this lesson “A Most Difficult Love.” This kind of love is not easy. It does not come naturally. And it isn’t something that the world is used to giving—citizens of heaven move toward this type of love and are willing to give it a try. Let’s read our passage this morning.
MATTHEW 5:43-48
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
YOU HAVE HEARD THAT IT WAS SAID
Once again, Jesus begins with that familiar phrase: “You have heard that it was said…” Jesus took these teachings of the Law and would flip them into an antithesis of what was said to what he is now going to say about them. This last one is a strange one.
MATTHEW 5:43
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
This phrase is from the old law passage in Leviticus 19:18
LEVITICUS 19:18
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Jesus himself knew Leviticus and quoted it and wanted people to live by it. When people say that you should only go by the red letters in the Bible, here is Jesus quoting other parts of the Bible—in fact parts that the red letter Christians don’t like—Leviticus. However, Jesus knew the scribes and Pharisees had added to the commands in Leviticus. Interestingly, the scribes and Pharisees would alter this law and omit the part that says, “as yourself.” This subtle revision transformed a command about how God’s people are to love into a command about whom they are to love. But it gets worse. The scribes added to this saying. The last part of Jesus’ teaching here from the Sermon: “and hate your enemy” doesn’t come from anywhere in the Old Testament. The scribes decided that they would interpret this differently and add this phrase. The scribes’ conclusion about loving a neighbor meant ONLY love your neighbor. So they added the natural corollary to hate your enemy. What is more logical than this? But what could be more unlike God? This attitude is NOT Godly.
Jesus would issue their error a corrective stance in his Great Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says, “but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
We are to love our neighbors. We are to love our family and friends. AND we are to love our enemies and those that would mistreat us. What a way to flip this law on its head!
Jesus uses this opportunity to point out that generally, people are okay and ready to love those that already love us. In verse 46 he says that even the tax collectors do this. Wow Jesus! I thought he loved the tax collectors. He called Matthew Levi the tax collector to come and follow him. He told the chief tax collector Zacchaeus that he wanted to go to his house and stay with him. He used an example in a parable of a tax collector humbling himself to pray to God with a Pharisee mocking him nearby. How could Jesus say this about the tax collector? Unless, he isn’t denigrating tax collectors at all but using an example of someone the Jewish audience wouldn’t have loved to show how to love.
Do you want to be like the tax collectors? Then love your enemies. Then he says, the Gentiles also do the same thing. And in the same way, he is asking, Do you want to be a Gentile? Then love your enemies. Jesus uses two different groups of people that they would not have loved to say be different than them; be better than them: love your enemies. I could just imagine how a Hebrew viewed a “Gentile tax collector”! They would have been filled with hate stacked on top of more hate.
WHY THIS IS DIFFICULT
Why would this love that Jesus is talking about be such a difficult love? What makes this so hard to do?
LOVING YOUR ENEMY ISN’T NATURAL
Loving an enemy isn’t a natural inclination. It takes effort and self-sacrifice to love someone you would typically hate. When we are slighted and treated unfairly, we want to run from anyone or anything associated with them. We may see someone as an enemy and to not further be exposed to them, we would stay away. But Jesus says that loving them means we might need to get closer. Loving an enemy brings us into the possibility that we might spend MORE time with them. It is said a person can only have one or two close friends. So making time for an enemy is breaking this rule and just isn’t natural.
I remember a couple of guys from my youth group growing up who were night and day different. They even came to blows once to fight. I don’t remember the result of the fight, but I remember that afterward, they became close friends and spent a lot of time together.
LOVING YOUR ENEMY MAKES YOU LOOK BAD
The second reason this kind of love is so difficult is that loving your enemy can make you look bad in the eyes of others. There are people who are going to judge you based on who you spend time with. Jesus dealt with this! When he spent time with the tax collectors at Zacchaeus’ house, what did the people say? Why does he eat in the home of sinners?! How else is Jesus going to reach the sinners of the world if he doesn’t spend time with them.
We often insulate ourselves from sinful people and don’t want to spend time with them as I mentioned before. If you do, people will judge you. They will talk badly about you. But this is what Jesus is calling these people and us today to do. How will the world know Jesus unless they encounter Jesus? We have to soften hard hearts in order for others to understand.
It's easy to be in our closed-up groups and cliques. It’s easy to spend time with people who are already like us and already agree with us. Jesus says no, you can’t do that. The world is already doing that without him. Be different. Be like Jesus.
What did Jesus say to those who grumbled about him eating with Zacchaeus?
LUKE 19:10
For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.
In order to save the lost, he sought them out. He spent time with them. He opened up his life to them and lived life with them. It should tell us something if Jesus intentionally looked for the sinner. He didn’t run away from them nor did he shun them and shame them.
LOVING YOUR ENEMY MAKES YOU PERFECT
That’s the most difficult part. Jesus says to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. When was the last time you were perfect? Never?!?! OH….what is he saying? The Greek word for perfect in this passage is teleios. The word means to become mature and complete and perfect. We are never going to be perfect in the world’s standards, but Jesus says we can achieve a maturity and completeness and perfection by his standard.
Become so mature that you have achieved this kind of perfection. Be mature and the bigger person and treat others with love even when they hate you. Be like Mr. Linn in the WW2 story and become friends with the person who turned you into the German police as a war criminal. Forgive. Forgive those who treat you wrong and love them. You will expose their hearts and maybe make a disciple of Jesus out of them.
ROMANS 12:17-20
17 Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 20 To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”
What we often fail to realize is we all…you…are an enemy to someone. How would you like them to treat you? God did the same for you. We were all enemies of Him in our sin. Yet he forgave you. He loved you. He sent his son to die for you. While we were still sinners.
INVITATION
