“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
This part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain can be summed up in three words: “Love your enemies.” This may be one of the most difficult of Jesus’ commands, not to understand, but to obey. As Peter Marshall once said, “My problem is not with the things in the Bible I don’t understand. My problem is with the things I do understand but don’t obey.”
Well, let’s dig deeper into Jesus’ words and see if we can find some help towards practicing them…
There were at least four words for “love” in Greek. One wasστοργή, which referred to the affection especially between a parent and a child. Then there was ἔρως which meant what we would call “falling in love”. From this we get our word “erotic” which of course has to do with sexual love. Next there was the word φιλία which had to do with the love between friends. But none of these feeling types of love are what Jesus is talking about here. In this place Luke uses the word ἀγάπη. This word is used in the New Testament to describe God’s contra-conditional love for human beings. Jesus teaches that we are to model this same kind of love towards our fellow humans, even our enemies. Jesus recommends not merely a warm affection such as one might have for one’s family, or a passionate devotion such as one might expect between spouses, nor a love such as one might find between friends, but rather a gracious, outgoing, active interest in the welfare of those persons who are precisely antagonistic to us. In short, ἀγάπη means “to will the good of another”.
A key question that arises is: How? How are we to love our enemies? Jesus gives us no less than seven pointers, then he sums it all up with the words that since the 19th century have been known as the Golden Rule. First, let’s look at Jesus’ seven pointers.
The first three cover action, speech and thought. Jesus says, “Do good to those who hate you.” That’s action. Actively do good to the one who is doing evil towards you.
Then Jesus says, “Bless the ones cursing you.” That has to do with speech. To “bless” means to speak well of. We get our English word “eulogy” from the Greek word that is used here.
Have I told you the story of the two brothers who terrorized a small town for decades? They were unfaithful to their wives, abusive to their children, and dishonest in business. The younger brother died unexpectedly. The surviving brother went to the pastor of the local church. “I’d like you to conduct my brother’s funeral,” he said, “but it’s important to me that during the service, you tell everyone my brother was a saint.”
“But he was far from that,” the minister countered. The wealthy brother pulled out his checkbook. “Reverend, I’m prepared to give $100,000 to your church. All I’m asking is that you publicly state that my brother was a saint.” On the day of the funeral, the pastor began his eulogy this way: “Everyone here knows that the deceased was a wicked man, a womanizer, and a drunk. He terrorized his employees and cheated on his taxes.” The pastor paused. “But as evil and sinful as this man was, compared to his older brother, he was a saint!”[1]
Well, when Jesus said, “Bless those who curse you,” I’m not sure that was what he had in mind, but you get the idea…
Thirdly, Jesus tells us to pray for those who insult us. This step extends our love of enemies beyond the realm of action and words to the realm of our thoughts.
I remember a time in my life when I was in conflict with some people. The problem was, they thought I was in the wrong. So how could I confront them about how I thought they were in the wrong? I knew I could not do that, but at the same time I knew I had to do something about the bitterness I was feeling in my heart or else it would eat me up.
A curious thing happened to me around the same time. I was under so much stress, I found that I could not pray in my own words. It was the first time I had ever experienced that. But every day I continued to pray because God was my only recourse. And since I could not pray in my own words, I prayed the Lord’s Prayer.
Every time I came to the words, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” I knew I needed to forgive certain people with whom I was in conflict. But the question was: how to do it? I didn’t feel love and forgiveness towards these people. I felt like they were my enemies. But Jesus’ words were very clear: “if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:15)
So, here is what I did… Every day when I prayed the Lord’s Prayer and came to the line, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” I added these words: “and Lord, I forgive so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so.”
Now, here’s the thing… I did not immediately feel love or forgiveness towards all those so-and-so’s. But by stating before the Lord my commitment to forgive those specific people, and stating it every day in prayer, that eventually led to the bitterness in my heart dissipating. And finally, after many days, or maybe months, I was able to let go…
So, those are the first three pointers that Jesus gives when it comes to loving our enemies: (1) do good to them, (2) speak well of them, (3) pray for them. But then, Jesus gets even more specific. He says, “To the one who strikes you on the cheek, turn also the other.”Jesus’ nonviolent teaching is clear: do not retaliate. In recent times, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. have been the greatest examples of people who have tried to follow Jesus’ teaching on this point.
Jesus’ next pointer is: “From the one taking your garment, don’t prevent him from taking your tunic as well.”The garment referred to is the outer garment. The inner garment or tunic would have been the one closest to the skin. So, if you give someone your outer andyour inner garment, you end up naked.
When we dig into Jesus’ teaching, we see just how radical it is. “To everyone who asks you: give. From the one taking your things, do not ask back.”
And then Jesus sums it all up by uttering what some have called the Golden Rule, though Jesus did not call it that. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
This was, in a sense, not a new teaching. Hillel, one of the great Jewish Rabbis, was asked by someone to teach him the whole law while he stood on one leg. Hillel answered, “What is hateful to you, do not to another. That is the whole law; all the rest is commentary.”
The thing that stands out about Jesus’ teaching when compared to all other teachers before him, is that his command is stated positively. William Barclay writes, “It is not unduly difficult to keep yourself from such action; but it is a very different thing to go out of your way to do to others what you would want them to do to you. The very essence of Christian conduct is that it consists, not in refraining from bad things, but in actively doing good things.”
So, Jesus is very specific about the “how” of loving our enemies. But there still lingers the question in the mind: Why? Why should we love our enemies? Jesus gives two reasons.
First, Jesus suggests the goal of our life should not be to measure up to our neighbors. Barclay sums up Jesus’ statement this way: “It is not our neighbor with whom we must compare ourselves; we may well stand that comparison very adequately; it is God with whom we must compare ourselves.”
Secondly, Jesus is not afraid to appeal to our self-centered interests. Jesus suggests we should love our enemies because of how it will benefit us, not just how it will benefit them.
Jesus says, “Do not judge and you will not be judged.” In other words, do you want to experience mercy from God on judgment day? Then start doling out mercy to others now. Jesus says, “Do not condemn and you will not be condemned.” In other words, do you want to avoid condemnation from God? Then don’t condemn others. Do you want to experience forgiveness? Then forgive others.
Jesus ends this section of his sermon with a beautiful picture: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
It’s like when I am baking something, which I do every once in a while. When a recipe calls for brown sugar, it usually says that the brown sugar should be packed. I like brown sugar, so I make sure I fit as much as possible into the measuring cup. What Jesus is saying is: when it comes to measuring the love that you give to others, don’t be skimpy.
One of the greatest examples, outside of the Bible, that I have ever read of loving one’s enemies comes from the pen of Corrie ten Boom…
It was in a church in Munich that I saw him—a balding, heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear. It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.
It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown. ‘When we confess our sins,’ I said, ‘God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. …’
The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.
And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights; the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor; the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were!
Betsie and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland; this man had been a guard at Ravensbruck concentration camp where we were sent.
Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: ‘A fine message, Fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!’
And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course—how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women?
But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. I was face-to-face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.
‘You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk,’ he was saying, ‘I was a guard there.’ No, he did not remember me.
‘But since that time,’ he went on, ‘I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein,’ again the hand came out—‘will you forgive me?’
And I stood there—I whose sins had again and again to be forgiven—and could not forgive. Betsie had died in that place—could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?
It could not have been many seconds that he stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.
For I had to do it—I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. ‘If you do not forgive men their trespasses,’ Jesus says, ‘neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.’
I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.
And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion—I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. ‘… Help!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.’
And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.
‘I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With all my heart!’
For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely, as I did then.[2]
When it comes to loving our enemies, or anyone for that matter, the problem is not with God; it is with us. Who has ever really lived the kind of life described in the Sermon on the Plain? Who has ever loved like this not just on one occasion, but always? Only one person I know of has loved like this through his whole life. And when they struck him on the cheek and stripped his clothes off, and nailed him to a cross, at that moment he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” (Luke 23:34) That’s a person worth following. And that is a person who can empower us to love… even our enemies.
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