Love Your Enemies

Luke 6:27-38

Imagine for a few minutes that you are in Syracuse, New York, in the fall of 1847. You are one of hundreds of people have travelled long miles to listen to international abolition activist and former American slave Fredrick Douglass.

He has held your attention powerfully, with humor and passion, truth and challenge. You’ve heard him repeatedly expose the sin and evil nature of slavery – both the experience and the institution. He has  shown us the flaws in the Constitution that support the institution of slavery and vividly illustrated how the church has stood hand-in-hand with slaveholders, endorsing the brutality, prejudice, and lack of concern for human suffering embedded in a slave-holding culture.

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that slave-holders are his enemies, along with the great mass of Americans indifferent to their dependence on a slave economy, and the defenders of slavery in pulpits and legislatures. They are enemies of all that is right and good, and opponents of Mr. Douglass’ own humanity, freedom, and activism.

And then you hear him say:
“Since the light of God’s truth beamed upon my mind, I have become a friend of that religion which teaches us to pray for our enemies — which, instead of shooting balls into their hearts, loves them. I would not hurt a hair of a slaveholder’s head.”

That may have come as a surprise to many listeners. Fredrick Douglass makes it clear that he won’t defend the slaveholder from others or enforce slavery for anyone, but he has heard Jesus say to him what we heard Jesus say to us this morning, and to the crowds in the plains of Galilee thousands of years ago:

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

Listen to that again: 

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who abuse you.

Give whatever anyone demands from you; don’t try to recover what the powerful take away.

Jesus doesn’t ask much, does he?

And these are dangerous words.

These are words that were preached to slaves to keep them in slavery. These words of Jesus have been given as peace-keeping advice to abused women and children over many centuries, sending them back into homes full of danger and despair. Words relied on by the powerful to smother any faith-fueled urge to rebel against oppression.

Those words are dangerous when applied by the powerful to the powerless.

And those words disturb the comfort of an effortless faith for the rest of us, requiring that we look honestly at the hatreds and the hurts of our lives that we’d rather not see, and seeing them, return good for evil.

That’s hard for me. I don’t think of myself as a person who has enemies. I have the privilege of education, skin color, wealth, and network that makes me relatively hard to exploit and abuse, so it’s easy to look at the world and see no enemies. And I don’t like disliking people, even though I sometimes do. Maybe you feel the same.

But there are hatreds in my heart. Hatreds that feed and are fed by political rhetoric, and hatreds that come from my fears of those who have the power to take away freedoms, privileges, and rights – or to destroy the image of myself that assumes I earned those freedoms and privileges all by myself.

Jesus wants me to face those hatreds, and actively love those who could hurt me.

And if that’s hard for me, how much harder must it have been for Fredrick Douglass? For all the other slaves feeling oppression in their bodies; longing and working for freedom? For civil rights activists and ordinary African-Americans being beaten or bombed, spit on or shot?  For students facing tanks, Native Americans facing guns and armies and the seizure of their lands, women and girls trafficked into modern day slavery by “boyfriends”?

Loving your enemies is extraordinarily hard.

Turning the other cheek is dangerously encouraging to the oppressor.

Except when we remember that Jesus is not telling us to force an artificial sweetness or peace into relationships of abuse. Jesus is not telling us to romanticize oppression or whitewash systemic evil with tolerant acceptance. Jesus is not telling us to love our enemies out of our own resources.

Jesus is telling us to love with God’s love, not our own feelings and efforts. 

To love with God’s fierce, uncompromising love that will not let our enemies sustain their sin.

Frederick Douglass doesn’t say so in that speech I quoted, but from other words and actions of his that I have read, I believe he learned to love his enemies too much to allow them to continue to hurt and destroy their sisters and brothers. Loved his slave-holding enemies with God’s love that seeks to save them from the grip of that shameful sin. Prayed to God for his enemies that they would be free from the tyranny they imposed and thought was protecting them.

Love your enemies, Jesus tells us, not as sinners do, but "as children of the most High, who is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, as your Father is merciful."

Not because it is nice to be nice.

But because God’s love insists on transforming hatred, evil, and death.
And it is God’s love, flowing through us, not our own feelings and emotions, that Jesus tells us to use to love and bless, give and forgive, and pray for our enemies.

Jesus isn’t telling us to do something he himself hasn’t done.

Over and over in the stories of scripture we hear how God returns good for human evil. Of how God loves us – deniers, takers, demanders and sinners who act as enemies of God through accident, indifference, fear or greed or vicious intent – loves you  and me with a fierce, powerful, persistent and uncompromising love. A love that insists on saving us from the grip of shame and sin – not because it hurts God, but because it hurts us. A love that refuses to let us hurt and destroy, or abuse and neglect, the gifts of our brothers and sisters whom God has given us.

We are loved with a love that wants to be shared, to flow through us, to heal us and to use us to heal others.

Love your enemies, Jesus says, not from your own righteousness, or as if love tolerates and ignores hatred and sin. That’s “love” that’s dangerous and deadly.

Instead, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, because that is the natural result of being loved in that very way by God. The natural consequence of entrusting yourself completely to the divine love that sees the denial, indifference, sin and greed and shame you and I and all of us turn toward God and returns generosity, blessing, abundance and forgiveness to transform our hearts and lives. 

That’s the love that resists slavery, refuses oppression, and raises new life from every death and tomb.

Amen.

Read more speeches and writings of Fredrick Douglass online