Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity
admin | 27 July 2014“Love your enemies”
You’ve got to be kidding! How utterly impossible and totally improbable! Why, we have the hardest time loving our wives, our husbands, our children, our parents, our friends; only, perhaps, our pets. What can it possibly meant to love our enemies? And yet, this is precisely what Jesus commands. A command, we might say, that is one of the distinctive features of Christianity and reveals the essential heart of the Christian Faith.
Enemies. What does that mean? Who are our enemies? Sometimes words reveal themselves. English is a bit of a mongrel language, taking words and bits of words from everything and everywhere. In its historical development much is owed to two streams: the one, Germanic, as in Old English or Anglo-Saxon; the other, latinate, via the influence of the French language, especially after William the Conqueror, 1066 and All That, as it were. Words like friends and enemies, for instance, derive from each stream respectively. Friend connects with freund in modern German, for instance; enemies from ennemis in French but looking back to the Latin, inimicos. We may speak in English, for instance, of being inimically opposed to something or other, meaning strongly opposed, even hostile.
In the French word, ennemis, you can hear the word amis, meaning friend just as in the Latin, inimicos, you can just make out amicos, again friend. This is even more pronounced in Spanish where the word for enemy is enemigos where amigos is clearly part of the word. What does all this word stuff mean?
We are all part of the digital facebook culture, so you know about the neologism, unfriend, often used as a verb as in “to unfriend” someone and remove them from access to your facebook page. Is that what an enemy is? An unfriend? No or at least not necessarily. After all, someone may ask you if so-and-so is your friend and you might say, ‘no,’ simply because you really don’t know them or don’t know them all that well. There are of course almost infinite degrees of acquaintance and varying degrees of friendship. Everybody who is not your friend is not necessarily your enemy. And one may wonder exactly what friendship means in the facebook world. Can you really have hundreds and hundreds of friends in any meaningful sense of that term?
But what about enemies, then? What and who are they? Again, perhaps, just perhaps, words themselves can help us. In German, as we noted, the word for friend is freund. What is the German word for enemy? Feind, which has its cognate form in English in the word, fiend. Ah, fiend! Now language is wonderfully flexible and variable in its uses but in general one doesn’t ordinarily speak of a fiend as a friend. The idea of fiend carries with it the ideas of malice and ill-will, of hatred and hostility and something, if not frightening, then certainly, evil. And so we get closer to the concept of enemy as someone who hates you and seeks your harm, not your good. Indeed, they may take joy in your hurt and injury, an idea which is captured wonderfully again in a German word which is frequently used in English because there is no one word in English which captures its meaning. The word is schadenfreude – the idea of taking joy or pleasure in someone else’s misfortune.
“Love your enemies,” Jesus commands. Not just once but twice in our Gospel reading. It seems so counter-culture and counter-intuitive. Plato, in his magisterial work on justice, The Republic, relates and counters the common-place and traditional view of justice which largely remains with us still. In that dialogue, Polemarchus claims, on the basis of the poets, that justice is “to do good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” I pretty much think that is where all of us are most of the time. But, as Plato has Socrates argue, that isn’t right or true because justice can never be about harming anyone. It is a virtue of the soul, the greatest of the classical virtues that are altogether about perfection and excellence. There is no room for harm or hatred. There is the question, of course, about how to treat your enemies.
And here, Jesus is very clear and follows a kind of Platonic line of reasoning. After the startling command to love your enemies, Jesus goes on to say “do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.” He goes on, too, with other explicit directions about our actions. Tremendous yet totally counter-culture stuff. Like Plato there is the strong, strong idea that the power of the good is greater than evil and yet there seems to be a different quality of directness and forcefulness in what Jesus is saying. It goes beyond simple moral teaching and goes to the heart of a Christian understanding of our relationship to the goodness of God.
The very radical point, I think, and the one which makes Jesus’ teaching here so compelling is that we are all the enemies of the good. We are all the enemies of God. That is the radical and deep meaning of sin and without grasping this idea in all its fullness and truth we can make no sense of the deep love of God for us in Jesus Christ. We can make no sense of this radical command to love our enemies.
For what it means is that we have to confront ourselves in all of our folly and sin, in all of our selfish unloveliness which wreaks such havoc in our souls and in our lives. We have to recognize our separation from God. It is here that Jesus’ command begins to make sense. For “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” “the just for the unjust.” Unless we can see ourselves in that sentence we can make no sense of the command to love our enemies. What does it mean? It means that there is something more than our animosities and enmities, our hatreds and our desire to inflict pain. Something more than the sad and sorry divisions that belong to our sad and war-torn world where we have lost our humanity. It can only be found in God. Without God we are nada, nothing.
It means placing one another in the presence of God which is what prayer is all about and in so doing placing ourselves with God, too. It means looking at one another and knowing that we are the children of God, “the children of the Highest,” or at least wanting to see one another as God sees us and not just in our animosities and divisions. It may even mean loving the you that God loves. All this puts a complete check on our thoughts and actions and, perhaps, even our feelings. There is, after all, nothing so destructive of our own personalities than hatred and enmity, nothing that perverts our humanity more.
There is something more here as well. Jesus is what he commands. Look up at the central window above the altar here at Christ Church and what do you see? You see Christ crucified. You see the true force of what it means to love your enemies. You see Christ’s love for us while we are his enemies, the enemies of truth and goodness.
In our enmities – our hatreds – we are dead to God and to one another. Our being at war with one another is a kind of death – each is dead to the reality of the other. We are trapped in the grave of animosities and hatreds. Yet as the epistle reading from Romans makes clear, we have been freed from sin and death; it is the radical meaning of our Christian identity through baptism: “buried with him by baptism into death,” as Paul puts it, so that “we should also walk in newness of life;” dying with Christ so that we shall live with him, “alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amazing grace, we might say, but only if we will let it live and move in our own hearts and minds.
It means taking to heart Jesus’ command to love our enemies knowing that he has loved us while we were yet his enemies, too. It means knowing the surpassing love and goodness of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. “On the night that he was betrayed” – betrayed by you and me in the Christian understanding – he gives himself to us and provides the means of his living in us and with us. “O taste and see how gracious the Lord is,” the Lord who loves us in spite of ourselves and who wants his love and goodness to live in us. To put it simply, Jesus wants us to be friends not fiends.
“Love your enemies”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity VI
Christ Church & St. George’s, Falmouth
July 27th, 2014