Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity
“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?
