KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 October
Love your enemies
This powerful passage, read in Chapel this week, from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain complements Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. The latter begins with The Beatitudes. In the last Beatitude, Jesus says “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” and, as if to drive the lesson home, he adds “blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” Or, as Luke more simply puts it, “blessed are you when men shall hate you.” Wow. Yet how is this even remotely possible to think let alone do?
How do we deal not only with “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Shakespeare, Hamlet) but with slander, with character assassination, with those who seek to harm us? In short, with enmity? Well, it is, to be sure, not at all easy especially when you are such a target. Yet here is one of the most radical of all ethical teachings. We are bidden not to be indifferent, not to ignore the enemy, as if they did not exist, nor to succumb to the pressures of subservience by giving in to bullies and cowards. Neither are we to retaliate in the spirit of revenge, the false justice of ‘getting even’, as it were. We are bidden instead to love our enemies. Why?
It is not just that we are to see a blessing for ourselves in being persecuted, itself a troubling concept. It is much more radical. The command to love our enemies bids us seek the good of those who seek our harm. This is a complete reversal and completely counter-culture though it belongs to the wisdom of other spiritual traditions. There is, for instance, Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindu tradition, caught in an ethical dilemma about fighting those who are his own relatives, and there is Plato, in The Republic, arguing that justice cannot mean ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies’. Doing harm to any ‘other’ negates justice and truth. You remain caught in the binaries of contradiction, of them versus us.
The American writer and social, gender, and anti-racist activist, Roxanne Gay, notes that we have made “a fetish of forgiveness.” She has in mind, I think, apologies that are not really apologies. What does it mean, after all, to apologize for the faults of others while ignoring your own? We don’t need to worship “at the altar of forgiveness,” she says, “to live full lives”. Yet this is the opposite of what Jesus is saying. He counters the phenomenon of nemesis, the idea of retribution. In its place is the radical meaning of forgiveness. Instead of seeking the harm of another we are bidden to seek their good even in the face of their enmity towards us: “to do good to those who hate you.” Wow.
