Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 23rd February 2014

Love your enemies?

These are dangerous words in Matt. 5:38-48, words to divide the world. Ever since they were uttered, followers of Jesus have disagreed about what they mean and how, if at all, they should be practiced.

They set Jesus and his disciples apart from other religious and political movements of the day. The Zealots wanted to liberate God’s people with the sword, smashing the power of their Roman overlords. The Qumran community, living separated from the world, emphasized loving the children of light, those within the community, but left those outside to their darkness.

In vv. 43-44 Jesus is doing some creative theologizing. ‘You have heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ His Jewish hearers could not read that in their Scriptures because it did not exist. In several places in the OT, God commanded his people to love their enemies. So, as usual, the rabbi of Nazareth was faithful to his Bible; he had come to fulfill the law. By his day, however, human aggressiveness had gradually produced more narrow and exclusionary readings of God’s command to love: we love the people of God but not the godless; or, at Qumran, our fellow children of light; or, if a zealot, the true patriots who liberate God’s people by killing colonizers. So Jesus here suggests that the actual commandment by which most people live is ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ He is deliberating distorting the language of Scripture to make a provocative point.  

How do we read passages like these? Have we heard these words so often that they barely register? Has familiarity bred indifference, even contempt? ‘Turn the other cheek.’ Yeah right. ‘Love your enemies.’ Nice thought .... A second response takes Jesus words more seriously, but considers them not just impractical but dangerous. ‘Love your enemies.’ You can’t be serious? And get treated like a doormat?

There is an issue here. It’s not difficult to see devout wives thinking that such verses require them to submit to violence and abuse from their husbands. That loving your enemies requires endlessly submitting to abuse. Jesus commands, on this view, are not just foolish but dangerous, ideals that it would be crazy to practice in the real world. Yet everything that Jesus says and does suggests that he utterly opposed violence of the domestic as well as every other kind. In teaching such as this, Jesus is not laying down a program to be blindly and systematically followed in every situation no matter what the circumstances. That’s not the way to read this passage. I’ll say more about that shortly.

In the modern world, the cultured despisers of Christianity have dismissed teachings like these with contempt. According to Ayn Rand, political philosopher, literary bestseller and darling of the libertarian right, ‘If civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that we have to reject.’ On the left, Karl Marx, father of communism, condemned the ‘social principles of Christianity’ for preaching ‘cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness.’

Similarly, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche despised the ‘slave-morality’ he thought passages like this inculcated; he dismissed Christianity as rooted in ‘ressentiment’—the secret hatred of the weak for the strong. Such critics are partly right. Turning the other cheek and meeting hatred with love are no way to get ahead. The rules for success in this world are well-known. It’s dog-eat-dog, the strong, wealthy, bright and beautiful flourish, and the little, the lost, the poor and the ugly struggle to survive, if they can. Isn’t NZ, God’s Own Country, growing a bit more like this every year, as the gap between rich and poor yawns wider than ever? Is this one of the consequences of the decline of the churches and the steady secularization of our culture over the past half century?

But Jesus isn’t trying to modify the rules of this world. He’s starting a revolution by rejecting the rules of his world—and ours—altogether. Relationships in the kingdom of heaven on earth must be governed not by power and fear but by love.

What do these passages mean to me?

e.g. basketball team-mate.

e.g. I easily turn hurt into anger, and find all sorts of ways to justify and legitimize why the mean and selfish ‘other’ deserves to be punished.

But loving enemies liberates from their power. They no longer get to set the rules in the relationship. Jesus wants to liberate us from the fear, anger and hatred that so easily rise up and dominate us, creating hell inside, and tearing relationships apart.

‘We love because God first loved us.’ I find I need God’s help to love those I find it hard to even like. I’m not alone. Martin Luther King in civil rights struggle, exhausted and terrified by white hatred. Alone, in his kitchen, desperate, he turns to God. He is given a calm and courage which stays with him the rest of his life, as he is beaten, jailed, stabbed and finally shot dead.

Are there certain sorts of people that we find it hard to love and easy to justify not loving? How about fundamentalist Christians? Destiny Church? You may be able to think of people who fit the bill at work, at home, or in your local community. As someone said: there are two sorts of people in the world: those who divide the world into two sorts of people; and those who don’t.

John Stenhouse