Last week we began to look at what Paul calls the greatest internal force in all creation; love. This week we need to make a rather specific and probably painful application of what we’ve been learning; we’re going to talk about loving our enemies.
We have a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get right to it. Listen with me to the words of Jesus from Luke 6:27 – 36
We should probably begin with a definition; what do we mean by enemy. Jesus gets us started, In vs. 27 when He defined an enemy as someone who hates you. Regardless of how you feel about them, if they hate you, you have an enemy.
In vs. 28 He expanded the word enemy to include those who curse you and mistreat you. People who use their words to hurt you or their actions to harm you are your enemies.
In vs. 29 He said an enemy is someone who uses violence against you or steals from you. They respect neither your property nor your body.
In Matthew’s account we find two more ways to think about enemies.
Matthew 5:41 mentions those who force you to what you do not want to do,
Vs. 44 mentions those who persecute you.
If we stopped right there, we’d have a pretty expansive list. But if we think a little deeper, we can expand the definition even more.
An enemy is anyone who hates you, but he is also anyone you hate. That can be someone you share a house with. Or used to. She could be a stranger in traffic; a rude customer in your store or an unfriendly clerk where you shop.
A neighbor who is hard to live nearby. Your ex-spouse’s new mate. Your ex-spouse. Even you current spouse.
Parents, children or siblings in families with a long history of relational warfare. A boss who treated you unfairly. An employee who accused you.
A teacher who seemed to have it in for you. A student who made your classroom difficult. A colleague who undermines you or takes advantage of you. The other woman. Or man. The person who stole your childhood through abuse or neglect.
An enemy is anyone who has hurt you physically, emotionally, or spiritually.
Ali Ibn - Abu Talib, the son-in-law of Mohammed the prophet, wrote a book titled A Hundred Sayings. One of his sayings was, "He who has a thousand friends has not one to spare. And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere."
So when Jesus talks to us about how to love our enemies, we should listen. But once you hear what Jesus has to say, I wonder if your first reaction is anything like mine? Which was pretty much, "Jesus, have you lost your mind? Love your enemies? Do good to them? Speak well of them? Show kindness? Give to them?" I’d much rather return evil for evil, cursing for cursing, and meanness for meanness. And that’s just for the guy with 21 items in the express lane in the grocery store.
I grew up in a loving Christian home. We had our share of quirks and dysfunctions, but never once did we fear our parents. Except maybe that one time when we took a cattail and put it under my Dad’s pillow to see if he was really allergic to them or not, which he is.
And there was the time I was practicing throwing my Chinese throwing stars into my bedroom wall not noticing all of the little holes that they left behind. That didn’t go over very well.
And there was the time Trae and I skipped the sermon after we served on the table to go to the store and get some candy and a coke, lost all tract of time and showed up 45 minutes after church was over. Other than those moments we never feared our parents.
Maybe you did, though. Or still do. The people who were supposed to guard your innocence, took it. The people who were supposed to be your protectors were, instead, predators. Now here’s Jesus telling you to love your enemy.
So let’s be sure we understand exactly what Jesus is and isn’t commanding us. Jesus isn’t trying to legislate our emotions. He isn’t telling us how to feel. Jesus doesn’t care how we feel and that’s not because he doesn’t care about our feelings -- he cares deeply. It is, rather, that how we feel about our enemies is irrelevant to how we behave toward our enemies. When we let our emotions determine our actions we become slaves to a most fickle, unpredictable god. Jesus wants to liberate us from the tyranny of our emotions. This is a gracious liberation.
Jesus is talking verbs, not nouns. Nouns don’t do anything. They just sit there. Verbs vibrate. They move. They cover ground. They radiate. They initiate. Love is a verb. And verbs don’t feel; they do. Jesus is telling us what to do about our enemies. We are empowered by doing. And in the doing our feelings change.
So what does Jesus tell us to do? Rather than trying to parse the particulars of His instruction, let’s organize what he teaches us into three categories of response.
First, Jesus instructs us to respond to our enemies with practical assistance.
Stephen Olford tells of a Baptist Minister during the American Revolution named Peter Miller, who lived in Pennsylvania and was friends with George Washington. But Miller had a bitter enemy named Michael Whitman, who did all that he could to frustrate and humiliate the good reverend. One day Mr. Whitman was arrested for treason and sentenced to die Peter Miller walked seventy miles from Philadelphia to plead for the life of the traitor.
General Washington said to Miller, that he was sorry but their friendship was not enough to pardon the life of his friend Michael Whitman.
“My friend!” the old preacher said, “He is the bitterest enemy that I have.” And when Washington realized that Miller had walked 70 miles to offer practical assistance to an enemy, he granted the pardon. Miller and Whitman didn’t become bosom buddies after that. But they were no longer enemies.
Jesus gets specific when he talks about offering practical assistance to your enemy. In VS. 30 he says to give. In VS. 35 he says to lend. He isn’t talking about wishing good things on our enemies or feeling happy if something wonderful happens to them. He sets his teaching in the concrete of life experience.
You don’t have to feel good about someone to do good for them. But doing good has a strange effect on how you feel. About them. And about yourself. Offer practical assistance to your enemy .
Second, Jesus insists on verbal affirmation. “Bless those who curse you.”
Let’s be honest. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good insult.
John Jacob Astor’s wife once said to Winston Churchill, "Winston, if you were my husband I should flavor your coffee with poison."
Churchill replied, "Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it."
Congressman John Randolph and Henry Clay met on a sidewalk in Washington. Clay said, "I, sir, do not step aside for a scoundrel." To which Randolph replied, "On the other hand, I always do." And stepped aside.
An envious actress congratulated another actress on a book she had recently written. "I enjoyed it," she said, "who wrote it for you?" The author answered, "Well, I did and I’m so glad you liked it. Who read it to you?"
If you can be ready with the right quip at the right time you feel very fulfilled but all to often we spend the next 4 hours thinking, boy if I had the opportunity again I would look them straight in the eye and say…
You see that’s the kind of response we usually love to give when someone insults us, but it isn’t how Jesus responded to his enemies.
Peter says, "When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate." 1 Peter 2:23
Instead of verbal retaliation, Jesus commands us to engage verbal affirmation.
He uses the word “bless." I think: we hear the word “complement”. It’s not quite enough to respond to an insult with, "Hey, nice tie."
Besides sounding like a smart-alek comeback, it doesn’t even approach the significance of the word "bless.”
In their wonderful book, The Blessing, Gary Smalley and John Trent define a blessing as “ a spoken message of high value, a message that pictures a special future, and an active commitment to see the blessing come to pass.” (p. 27).
When you bless someone you communicate to them that you recognize their value as a human made in the image of God. You not only wish for them a positive future, but you actually picture it. And in doing so, you affirm that you will do all in your power to see that special future come true for them.
It’s tough to respond to an enemy with verbal affirmation. It requires me to do the hard work of looking for something good in a person I’ve determined to be the very incarnation of evil. But there is enormous power and dignity in replying to an insult with a blessing.
We’re not dragged down to our enemy’s level. We take the emotional heat out of the moment and create an atmosphere where tempers can cool. And we emulate Jesus who prayed for the forgiveness of his enemies even as they danced around his cross cheering his death.
This would probably be a great time to insert some discussion about a specific verse in Luke 6:29. "If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also”
Few verses have been more misunderstood than this one. Jesus is not commanding us to stand there and let someone pummel us with fist after fist to the face. In fact, this verse isn’t even about physical violence. It’s about an insult.
Matthew 5:39 reports Jesus words here more specifically "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
Okay, follow me here. Most people are right handed. So a right handed punch is going to land on the left cheek Jesus isn’t envisioning an Evander Holyfield jab here. For a right handed person to strike you on your left cheek, he has to back hand you. A back handed slap isn’t intended to do physical damage. It is intended to insult. Jesus is talking about how to handle insults. If someone insults you, don’t insult them back.
In his book, Engaging the Powers, Walter Wink tells the story of a South African mother who was walking with her children down the sidewalk one day. A white man approached them and, as he passed, spat in the woman’s face.
Without an ounce of bitterness in her voice the woman said, “Thank you. And now for the children.”
The man was so ashamed of his behavior he apologized and hurried away. I’ll bet he never spat in a black woman’s face again.
Far from being a command that makes us vulnerable targets of vicious enemies, Jesus command to turn the other cheek, to respond to insult with blessing, actually empowers ’us. We behave with dignity and those who would curse us have no choice but to treat us that way.
Finally Jesus commands us to Spiritual Intercession.
Pray for your enemies. There is no more powerful response to an enemy and his insult than to say, "I am praying for you.”
What you are really saying is, You know I could take this matter into my own hands and respond to you in all the ways humans commonly respond. I could lash out in a verbal attack or a physical assault. I could find a hundred different ways to hurt you. But I choose, instead, to place it in the hands of God. And because he is the impartial judge of all who live and breath, He will do what is right.
Now that’s not a threat. But it is a frightening thing to think that your enemy is talking to God about you.
And it’s also a hopeful thing. God was able to build a bridge of mercy between his holy self and sinful humanity. If He can bridge that gap, he can span the short distance between two sinners who are at odds with one another.
So what happens when we Follow Jesus’ commands on responding to our enemies in love? Jesus promises two things:
First, he says, "Your reward will be great." He doesn’t specify what the reward will be, but I’ll bet we can trust Him that it will be better than we can imagine.
Second, he says, “You will be children of the Most High.” When you respond to enemies with love, you are acting like your father in heaven.
Choosing retaliation over mercy, violence over blessing, or hatred over love is to choose to win the game of survival of the fittest over humbling yourself to Christ.
When we strike back at our enemies, when we respond to evil with evil, we identify ourselves as disciples of Darwin, rather than as disciples of Jesus. Walter Wink, again, says “If we wish to correspond to the central reality of the universe, we will behave as God behaves -- and God embraces all, even handedly." (p. 267).
Another author who’s written quite a bit about responding to violence and enemies is Miroslav Volf. He knows what he’s talking about He’s from Croatia and the greatest test of his faith has been how he responds to Serbs.
In his book Exclusion and Embrace, he asks a stunning question: "What if, on the last day, the question we are asked isn’t, ’Have you followed the rules,’ but rather, ’Have you shown mercy?’"
We are not for sure what questions God will require us to answer about our lives here, but we do know that we will have to give account for every idol word spoken.
We read in Matthew 12:36 "And I say to you, that every careless word that men shall speak, they shall render account for it in the Day of Judgment.”
Ten years after World War II, a West German Christian met with some Christians from Warsaw, Poland. He wanted to know if it would be possible for a group of Christians from Germany to come to Poland to apologize for the brutality inflicted upon the Poles during the war.
The Polish Christians, to a man, refused to even consider such a meeting. "The wounds are still too fresh," one of the men said, with considerable pain in his voice. "Every stone in Warsaw is stained with Polish blood from a German bullet or bayonet.”
The German Christian accepted their answer, and asked, “Before I go, could we say the Lord’s prayer together?” and the agreed to his request.
They all began to recite the beautiful prayer found in Matthew 6, but when they got the part that says, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive…," there was silence.
No one could go on. Then, the Polish Christian who had been the most vehement in his rejection said, "This is difficult, but if I cannot begin to forgive, I cannot pray the prayer.”
A year later, the groups met. The healing had begun.
Jesus’ teaching found in Luke 6 is some of the most difficult teaching in the Bible. It goes against everything that the world has taught us about sticking up for ourselves, and being a man. But to harbor a hatred toward an enemy is not only unlike Christ, it is soul killing. It’s like choosing a poison for your enemy, then drinking it yourself.
We have been called to be better than the world. We have been called to imitate Christ.
