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.
In an article “The Pleasure of Clapping Back,” Gay celebrates and promotes the idea of retribution. Nemesis is the ancient Greek God of retribution who “punished evil deeds, undeserved good fortune, and hubris,” as illustrated in the story of Narcissus whose arrogance Nemesis punished by his being enraptured by his own reflection in a pool of water. He drowns in himself, we might say, in the illusion of his self-image reflected back to him. He is his own nemesis which is the deeper meaning for the ancient Greeks and a profound commentary on our contemporary ‘selfie’ and image culture with its bitter divisions. Narcissism is our nemesis.
But Gay wants to hold onto her nemeses and to use them to motivate her in her work and life. She says, “I have ten nemeses – people who have slighted me in ways both real and imagined who are now mortal adversaries I must defeat.” This is essentially confrontational and oppositional. It is to persist in the illusion of the enemy, the other, as the one over and against whom you define yourself. It is to hold on to resentment and hurt whether real or imagined. This is the problem which Jesus is addressing. It is essentially negative.
What does he mean? To love your enemies does not mean that they cease to be your enemies. They may still seek your destruction and harm, after all. What it means is to recognize that in seeking your harm they are actually harming themselves. In the ethical understanding, as Plato’s Socrates says, it is far worse to do wrong than to suffer wrong. From there, it is but a short but important step to the idea of loving your enemies because that means that you insist on seeing them as essentially human beings and, in that sense, not the ‘other’ of our current conflict narratives but actually as ‘br-other’, as one with us, as neighbour and not as alien. It means to see ourselves in the other and thus to seek their good.
This turns everything around at least inwardly and spiritually. It is a strong reminder of the dangers of seeing everything in oppositional terms. Here is the true transcendence of love: it transcends the walls and barriers and oppositions, real or imagined, that we erect over and against one another. It means honouring those who have sought your harm as human beings in spite of themselves but whose animus is self-destructive. Hence the enormous power and poignancy of Jesus’s first word on the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
There are no words more gentle yet more powerful, no words more moving and poignant, than these words of the crucified Christ. They are words spoken in the midst of the evil that our humanity in its disarray inflicts on Christ and on one another. They convict us of our own unloveliness.
Yet to be so convicted frees us from the negativity of hatred and animosity. It belongs to the beginnings of forgiveness as something which is sought for ourselves and for one another. It means forgiving even as we have been forgiven. There is no other ‘kindness’.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy