Love your enemies
One of the three great untruths of our times, according to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), is “the untruth of us versus them” where life is seen as an endless conflict “between good people and evil people.” This is really “a pathological dualism,” as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks points out (Not in God’s Name (2015)), which divides our humanity into “the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad” and in which “you are either one or the other.” This kind of conflict narrative is endlessly divisive and gnostic. You begin and end with division, with difference as hatred of the other. The awareness of difference leads to division which in turn leads to the demonization of the other. It is static and dogmatic. All there is is difference. Sadly such polarizations largely determine the tenor and character of our current social and political discourse.
While in evolutionary terms this may be explained away as an aspect of tribalism and of our tendencies to favour those in ‘our group,’ in a deeper sense it betrays all and every sense of our common humanity. It is ridiculously reductive and utterly destructive of our souls and of our life in community for the simple reason that we begin and end with our enmities, with our divisions as hardened into hatreds. In the face of such things, today’s Gospel is profoundly and wonderfully counter-culture and redemptive. It also connects to the rich traditions of wisdom in many of the great religions of the world.
Arjuna, a great warrior prince in the Hindu tradition, stands in the middle of the battlefield between two competing armies. They are all his relatives, sort of like the Maritimes. Why should I fight? he wonders. This is his ethical dilemma. How to transcend the enmities, the animosities, and the divisions that we encounter? It can’t be by denying that they exist because they are there. It has to be by some other way of thinking grounded upon a deeper understanding of our humanity. The Bhagavad Gita, reflecting the teachings of the Upanishads, offers a way of transcending such dilemmas. In that work, Arjuna is taught by Sri Krishna to follow his dharma, the law or duty of your being. A wonderful illustration of the meaning of dharma is found in the story of the Guru and the Scorpion. The scorpion falls into the river and the Guru rescues it from drowning only to be stung by the scorpion who falls again into the river only to be rescued again and again by the Guru who continues to be stung. Those looking on ask the Guru why he keeps rescuing the scorpion who keeps stinging him. He replies: it is the dharma of the scorpion to sting; it is the dharma of the human to save.
Something of that logic appears powerfully and wonderfully in this Gospel. It belongs to Luke’s account of Christ’s Sermon on the Plain which complements Matthew’s account of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. In both there are the beatitudes: four in Luke’s account, eight in Matthew’s. Luke gives four beatitudes or blessednesses along with four woes, or warnings. The Gospel reading about loving your enemies follows immediately upon these as a moving illustration of the radical meaning of the precept of charity, the precept of love, as the defining feature of our humanity, our dharma as it were.
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” Jesus famously tells us. To be sure, but he goes even further with the command to love our enemies. As one of the great Latin doctors of the Western Christian Church, Ambrose, in his commentary on Luke, notes: “he would have us extend our kindness even to those who have wounded us.” He commands us to love our enemies in strong and compelling terms even as he himself embodies that teaching. “For while we were yet enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son,” as Paul puts it elsewhere in Romans (Rom. 5.10). And perhaps that is the real insight here. Our enemies are rarely the other, the stranger, the outsider. We are the enemy. We are the enemies of ourselves and, thus, the enemies of God.
Does love your enemies then mean love ourselves? Yes, but not the ugliness in ourselves which separates us from ourselves, from God, and from one another. We are bidden to love what God loves in us, to love God in us, we might say. “Love your enemies and do good,” Jesus says. As such we cannot help but see others in an entirely new and different light; namely, to see them in the light of God and in the light of what God seeks for us all. Thus, Ambrose observes that Luke frames Christ’s Sermon on the Plain by two miracles of healing; the one of a Jew, the other of a Gentile. In other words, the blessings that belong to our paying attention to the radical demands of love concern the healing and perfection of our wounded and broken humanity in its totality. It is not about our tribal identities or groups. It is about who we are in the sight of God. That makes all the real difference and transcends the differences that necessarily divide us.
When we lose sight of that we remain stuck in our animosities and differences. In so doing we betray ourselves. It is we who are at enmity in ourselves, clinging to our sense of difference, our sense of righteousness, our sense of outrage, our sense of resentment. As Ambrose notes “to love your enemies is a better thing than not to be envious of them.” This goes a long way towards countering ‘the age of anger,’ to use Pankaj Mishra’s descriptive term for our discontents, the resentments which we so easily allow to define us. We are caught in the contradictions of the autonomous self, constantly free, on the one hand, to re-invent our identities, sexual or otherwise, and to pursue whatever we determine, but, on the other hand, always claiming to be the victims of someone or some system of power. We are constantly at enmity with ourselves and with one another especially when we assume this abstract primacy of the self in its isolation and autonomy.
Ambrose sees Luke’s treatment of Christ’s Sermon on the Plain as proclaiming the precept of radical charity or love. It begins, as he notes, with Jesus “raising up his eyes” understood as “opening up the inner vision,” with parallels to Christ’s raising of Lazarus by “lifting up his eyes” to heaven and to Christ “lifting his head” in the story of the woman caught in adultery. This suggests the interplay of the human and the divine in Christ. That inner vision is an opening to the classical virtues as radically transformed by divine love. Luke’s four beatitudes, in this way of reading, correspond to the four cardinal virtues: temperance, courage, prudence, and justice.
“Blessed are the poor” is about temperance since it acts as a check upon our attachments to worldly goods. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst” relates to the desire for justice in its different forms. “Blessed are those who weep” concerns prudence which “weeps for this transitory world,” in which “worldly things make war with one another,” and instead, “sighs for what is eternal”; in short, it “seeks the God of peace.” “Blessed shall you be when people hate you” is seen in relation to fortitude or courage that is found in suffering. The virtues are all linked together but undergo a certain transformation by grace to become forms of love. “Love is set in order precisely when we are told to love your enemies,” Ambrose says. Set love in order in me (ordinavit in me caritatem) is a phrase drawn from the Song of Songs, the great love poem of the Hebrew Scriptures which exercises such a profound influence upon the traditions of spirituality, particularly in medieval and western Christianity and its inheritors.
This precept of charity goes beyond the law and nature by giving blessings in place of revenge and injury. As such it is really about how grace perfects nature. Ambrose’s whole treatment of the virtues in relation to the beatitudes is viewed through the lens of Paul’s great hymn of love in 1st Corinthians. “Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity,” love, the love which is made visible and whole in Christ. As Ambrose puts it, we “give him the Cross; in return, he gives grace and salvation.” Christ’s first word on the Cross is the word of forgiveness, the word of love towards us in our enmities. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” His love moving in us allows us to be more than our endless divisions and enmities, more than mere difference. Love your enemies is about the radical love of God alive in us which binds us together in God.
Love your enemies
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 6, 2019
Christ Church & St. George’s, Falmouth