loving the enemy
Last Sunday, February 18, I read Luke 6.27-38 and then the following reflection (which I wrote):
I’ve heard it said that all theology is at its very heart autobiography, and that what the theologian is attempting to do is to examine the various circumstances and experiences of his or her life and express the truths they’ve discovered about God and human existence in logical, reasonable terms. And this makes a lot of sense, and not just for theology—also: poetry, philosophy, psychology, artistry, biology, etc. Whatever you happen to think about begins within the borders of your own mind, begins with the basic assumption that I am thinking in the first place. And so, I suppose, to think about God is to think about myself. What all this has to do with the passage I just read may seem obvious once I say it, but please bear with me: I am going to say what I think about this passage.
The most striking thing about Jesus’s words is the thing that everybody seems to be talking about, namely, the impossible suggestion that I love my enemies and treat the people who hate me and abuse me and curse me as nicely as I can—maybe even better than that. While I have a very difficult time just trying to figure out what it means to love my neighbour, it seems that everything just gets more complicated when Jesus asks me to love my enemy. And it doesn’t really help me to make the clever observation that often times my enemy turns out to be my neighbour and vice versa because really, the only thing I know about my neighbour is that they are the person who ends up close to me, whether they live next door or have taken the empty seat next to me on the bus, whether they are the person asking me annoying questions while I’m trying to read in a coffee shop or the person I wake up next to every morning. That’s neighbours for you: they are hard enough to love simply because they’re always there next to me, but they’re nothing compared with my enemies.
Enemies, on the other hand, are the ones out to get me: they don’t like me and they tell me so, usually without saying anything to me at all. They say offensive things and act cruelly. They make me feel unlovable. And so, they are enough to make me yell and scream, even though that takes an awful lot of provocation, for me to tell someone what I really think of them—although there are a few people who have heard about the time when I (rather explosively) told someone that they needed to exercise more patience in their life. But aside from very rare outbursts, I try to practice a civilized enmity: that is, in my free time I smolder with rage and nurse bitter feelings against all the mean and hurtful people in the world. If someone hurts me or cheats me in some way, I’m much more likely to bear it as a grudge and silently label that person “my enemy,” than I am to scream at them—although the screaming and shouting does feel good from time to time. So when an enemy mounts a surprise offensive on my usually well balanced, equitable sensibilities, it stops me in my tracks. I’ll be humming along all tickety-boo and suddenly, as if out of nowhere, someone will begin telling me about how homosexuals are going to hell because they are deviants and they celebrate their sin unashamedly. Or how Hindus are misguided people who are actually worshipping demons and not the Almighty. And immediately, my back goes up and I want to shout swearwords and kick over tip-able, breakable things; but instead I nod my head and smile a little, and make some vague comment about how grace is a lovely idea, isn’t it?—and then I carry away all my hurt and I label that person as an enemy in my mind. And the very strangest part is that I feel entirely justified—and even a little bit giddy with pride—in condemning that person and calling them an ignorant, unloving hypocrite. I strut my stuff in my head and quote scripture to myself, saying, “O woe is you, my enemy—for the scriptures proclaim thusly: ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.’” And so on. But, of course, it doesn’t take much to realize that that’s exactly what I’m doing, and I’m also really enjoying my glorious judgments. I am treating people in just the way that I deserve to be treated, and maybe that’s the whole problem here—there is no mercy, there is no grace.
I guess the real question is who is doing all the real damage here. If I’m the one carrying around all this anger and all these bitter feelings then it seems that my enemy didn’t have to do all that much to hurt me—I’m doing it all to myself. I’m carrying around all the hurt and all the pain. I’m the one who’s becoming angry and mean and annoyed with everyone. I’m becoming more judgmental and less giving. I’m the one who is shriveling up. And so I think, in the end, I am turning out to be my own enemy—perhaps more than anyone else. While I seem to be loving myself, I am simply caught up in my own self-absorbed—maybe self-obsessed—thoughts, and so I am hating myself by carrying all that anger and hurt around. And it’s truly damaging because I don’t even notice I’m doing it. I direct all the awful, volatile feelings inwards because I think that it’s more pious and makes me a better person, but I have forgotten that the anger persists—it grows stronger and it goes deeper. So the trick in all this is to find some way to deal with all my hurt and injury, all that enmity and hostility—find a way to let it go. To forgive myself and other people. To extend mercy and grace. And I think that can only be done inside myself—by being a little kinder and gentler and more tender with that injured part of me. At the end of the day, the more I am myself, the better I will be able to love other people.
Throughout the passage I just read, the frame of reference is myself: “…do good to those who hate you… Do to others as you would have them do to you… Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Everything seems to begin and end with me. And so maybe that’s the place to start. Maybe it’s less about the enemy “out there” and more about finding out who I really am in here. I think a lot of times we get so hung up on defining who our enemy is that we forget that we are meant to be loving them. At the root of all this, we aren’t only loving the people who love us, but we are also loving the people who make us feel unlovable—maybe, strangely, that turns out most often to be ourselves…
I’ve heard it said that all theology is at its very heart autobiography, and that what the theologian is attempting to do is to examine the various circumstances and experiences of his or her life and express the truths they’ve discovered about God and human existence in logical, reasonable terms. And this makes a lot of sense, and not just for theology—also: poetry, philosophy, psychology, artistry, biology, etc. Whatever you happen to think about begins within the borders of your own mind, begins with the basic assumption that I am thinking in the first place. And so, I suppose, to think about God is to think about myself. What all this has to do with the passage I just read may seem obvious once I say it, but please bear with me: I am going to say what I think about this passage.
The most striking thing about Jesus’s words is the thing that everybody seems to be talking about, namely, the impossible suggestion that I love my enemies and treat the people who hate me and abuse me and curse me as nicely as I can—maybe even better than that. While I have a very difficult time just trying to figure out what it means to love my neighbour, it seems that everything just gets more complicated when Jesus asks me to love my enemy. And it doesn’t really help me to make the clever observation that often times my enemy turns out to be my neighbour and vice versa because really, the only thing I know about my neighbour is that they are the person who ends up close to me, whether they live next door or have taken the empty seat next to me on the bus, whether they are the person asking me annoying questions while I’m trying to read in a coffee shop or the person I wake up next to every morning. That’s neighbours for you: they are hard enough to love simply because they’re always there next to me, but they’re nothing compared with my enemies.
Enemies, on the other hand, are the ones out to get me: they don’t like me and they tell me so, usually without saying anything to me at all. They say offensive things and act cruelly. They make me feel unlovable. And so, they are enough to make me yell and scream, even though that takes an awful lot of provocation, for me to tell someone what I really think of them—although there are a few people who have heard about the time when I (rather explosively) told someone that they needed to exercise more patience in their life. But aside from very rare outbursts, I try to practice a civilized enmity: that is, in my free time I smolder with rage and nurse bitter feelings against all the mean and hurtful people in the world. If someone hurts me or cheats me in some way, I’m much more likely to bear it as a grudge and silently label that person “my enemy,” than I am to scream at them—although the screaming and shouting does feel good from time to time. So when an enemy mounts a surprise offensive on my usually well balanced, equitable sensibilities, it stops me in my tracks. I’ll be humming along all tickety-boo and suddenly, as if out of nowhere, someone will begin telling me about how homosexuals are going to hell because they are deviants and they celebrate their sin unashamedly. Or how Hindus are misguided people who are actually worshipping demons and not the Almighty. And immediately, my back goes up and I want to shout swearwords and kick over tip-able, breakable things; but instead I nod my head and smile a little, and make some vague comment about how grace is a lovely idea, isn’t it?—and then I carry away all my hurt and I label that person as an enemy in my mind. And the very strangest part is that I feel entirely justified—and even a little bit giddy with pride—in condemning that person and calling them an ignorant, unloving hypocrite. I strut my stuff in my head and quote scripture to myself, saying, “O woe is you, my enemy—for the scriptures proclaim thusly: ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.’” And so on. But, of course, it doesn’t take much to realize that that’s exactly what I’m doing, and I’m also really enjoying my glorious judgments. I am treating people in just the way that I deserve to be treated, and maybe that’s the whole problem here—there is no mercy, there is no grace.
I guess the real question is who is doing all the real damage here. If I’m the one carrying around all this anger and all these bitter feelings then it seems that my enemy didn’t have to do all that much to hurt me—I’m doing it all to myself. I’m carrying around all the hurt and all the pain. I’m the one who’s becoming angry and mean and annoyed with everyone. I’m becoming more judgmental and less giving. I’m the one who is shriveling up. And so I think, in the end, I am turning out to be my own enemy—perhaps more than anyone else. While I seem to be loving myself, I am simply caught up in my own self-absorbed—maybe self-obsessed—thoughts, and so I am hating myself by carrying all that anger and hurt around. And it’s truly damaging because I don’t even notice I’m doing it. I direct all the awful, volatile feelings inwards because I think that it’s more pious and makes me a better person, but I have forgotten that the anger persists—it grows stronger and it goes deeper. So the trick in all this is to find some way to deal with all my hurt and injury, all that enmity and hostility—find a way to let it go. To forgive myself and other people. To extend mercy and grace. And I think that can only be done inside myself—by being a little kinder and gentler and more tender with that injured part of me. At the end of the day, the more I am myself, the better I will be able to love other people.
Throughout the passage I just read, the frame of reference is myself: “…do good to those who hate you… Do to others as you would have them do to you… Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Everything seems to begin and end with me. And so maybe that’s the place to start. Maybe it’s less about the enemy “out there” and more about finding out who I really am in here. I think a lot of times we get so hung up on defining who our enemy is that we forget that we are meant to be loving them. At the root of all this, we aren’t only loving the people who love us, but we are also loving the people who make us feel unlovable—maybe, strangely, that turns out most often to be ourselves…
posted by chris at 21:18
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