Christ Church

“Love your enemies”

It remains to be seen for whom this shall be harder, for Silas, for you, for the grandparents, or even a great grandmother? It is, after all, all theology, as it must be. At least there is a party after!

“Love your enemies.” Is this one of the so-called values of the so-called West? If so then hardly one which we live up to in a world of ‘them’ and ‘us’, whoever ‘them’ and ‘us’ are. A hard saying, and yet one which articulates with remarkable directness and clarity an insight fundamental to the various traditions of philosophical religion. It speaks profoundly to our common humanity, to what transcends the tribalisms of culture, nation, family and religion and to the problems of identity and belonging that divide us into ‘them’ and ‘us’. A hard saying but no less true for being hard. Hard sayings are de rigueur.

The hard sayings of Jesus challenge us about belief as distinct from belonging. “I am the bread which came down from heaven”, Jesus said but the response? “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”, they said. The consequence was that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.” Enmity and division where truth and unity are sought. Yet, “love your enemies”!

Hard sayings trouble us. But they belong to the truth of our humanity. “Ye must be born again”, Jesus tells Nicodemus in the great gospel for Trinity Sunday. “How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks. Is not birth hard enough on its own? But to be born again? “How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb?” Nicodemus takes the statement literally to which Jesus responds by explaining the difference between flesh and spirit and their relationship. “Ye must be born again” means something of another order just as the wind blows where it wills and you cannot tell “whence it cometh and wither it goeth; so is everyone born of the Spirit.” This, it seems, is the hard saying. “How can these things be?”

And so for Silas Barry King today. He is born again. Born into the mystery of God with us. And such a rebirth, such a new birth, is of another order and one which transcends all of the divisions and enmities of our world and day. “Love your enemies” is the Scriptural phrase which captures the great and powerful logic of reconciliation and unity that belongs to philosophical religion. It means an entirely different outlook, an entirely different way of thinking. It has entirely to do with our incorporation into the mystery of God. It means being born upward into what has come down to us. Such are the motions of grace about the heavenly things that have been told to us. “No one has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven,” as Jesus patiently but firmly explains to Nicodemus.

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“Love your enemies”

“Love your enemies”, Jesus says, not “Don’t worry, you don’t have any enemies”. For he knows only too well about our enmities and hatreds. Yet, “love your enemies”, he says. How absolutely impossible! How utterly improbable!

Why, we have the hardest time imaginable loving the more obvious and, dare one say, more ordinary objects of love: our friends and family, our country and world, our God and Saviour. How can it be that we should be commanded to love those that have set their faces, even their hearts, and souls and bodies against us? Yet, the demands of the Gospel are precisely impossible because our ordinary loves are equally impossible. They are all the places of our enmity, too.

Our enemies, after all, are rarely far-off and faceless. They are frequently only too close at hand. Their faces are only too often mirrored by our own. It is we who are at enmity with ourselves, with one another and with God. It is no good pretending that our hearts are not touched by such enmities when our hearts are precisely the places of enmity. But it is precisely in the face of these enmities – these animosities in the soul – that we are bidden, indeed, commanded to love.

The demands of the Gospel are just so radical because they take us to the root of all love without which we cannot love. They take us to the root from which we must learn to love. And that is why Jesus can demand such impossibly high standards of perfection for our lives – because he takes us to the root of all love which must blossom into the perfection of fruitfulness in our lives.

The command to love our enemies is not just an heightened expectation, something more added on, an optional extra, as it were. To the contrary, it belongs to love’s very nature. It is where love most shows itself to be love; where love shows itself to be most free; where love shows itself to be most perfect and complete. For as the Epistle reminds us, “love your enemies” takes us to the Cross as the place of death and life; “love your enemies” recalls us to our baptism by which we are identified with Christ in his Cross-given grace for us. This radical love is nothing less than Christ’s love in us. What is impossible for us on our own account is made possible in us. “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

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“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing;
nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net”

Nada, nothing, nichts rien. A powerful word, it captures something of the dilemma of modernity – the sense of nothingness, of emptiness. Is “at thy word” the counter? Or does it reveal a deeper problem? Does “at thy word” mean that suddenly we will have everything? Yes and no. The danger lies in what we think “at thy word” means.

The danger is in our thinking. If “at thy word” means a logic by which we acquire things then reason has become something merely instrumental, a means to an end. But what kind of end? An end where everything is turned into things. We not only get things – a full net of things – but our thinking turns us into things. And this is a greater nothingness, our greater nothingness, the loss of our humanity. It is a betrayal of the deeper kind of thinking that this Gospel along with today’s Epistle presents to us. If we think “at thy word” means getting things then we have missed Peter’s command to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”.

In the Christian understanding, Christ is the Logos, the Word and Son of the Father. But as Word, he is not the means to our domination and manipulation of the world. That is exactly our contemporary problem. It is a problem about how we think about thinking. If we turn reason into a tool, then we become things at the expense of our humanity. We dismiss and ignore all the qualities of life signalled in the Epistle that are true blessings, blessings rooted in the compassion of Christ, the truth of God who is the author and meaning of all life. Life is more than things. It is our evil to turn reason into a machine-making thing.

The point of the Gospel is that Christ wants more for us than a net full of things. Ultimately, he has come that we “might have life and have it more abundantly.” That abundance of life does not mean an abundance of things. It has entirely to do with the quality of our life with one another that turns upon our life with God in Christ. It has entirely to do with the power of the Good alive and at work in us. It is altogether about a meaningful life, a life lived to and for God and with God.

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“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”

It is a familiar image and one which appears in the New Testament both in Luke and Matthew; in Luke in the form of a question and in Matthew in the form of a statement. The context of Matthew’s use of the image is the tension between Jesus and the Pharisees. His statement is an indictment about leadership which is also the common way in which this image is understood. We use it to talk about a lack or a problem about leadership. That implies that reason and understanding are important qualities when it comes to political life and to the life of institutions.

Luke’s interrogative use of the image is more intriguing since it is set in the context of mercy and forgiveness and serves as the entry point to the problem of hypocrisy, the problem of judgement. In a way, as his interrogative approach suggests, the image is being applied to all of us – to our judgments that stand over and against others and reveal our blindness. For Luke, the blind leading the blind is not simply about others; it is about us.

The idea and image are not limited to the Christian Scriptures. It is an important aspect of Buddhism in its reaction against and rejection of Sanatana Dharma, Hinduism. The Buddha comes to reject the leaders and teachers of Hinduism directly. The Canki Sutta, recalling, it is claimed, Buddha’s rejection puts it this way. “It is like a line of blind men, each holding one to the preceding one; the first one does not see, the middle one also does not see; the last one does not see. Thus, it seems to me that the state of the Brahmans is like that of a line of blind men.” It is a devastating critique of the Brahmin class, the teaching class of Hindu religious philosophy which is found in the Pali Canon, in a text set down before the time of Christ but sometime after the actual life of Siddhartha Gautama.

And yet, within Hinduism itself there was, far earlier, its own self-critique found in the Upanishads which speaks about the blindness of those who claim to know. “Fools, dwelling in darkness, wiser in their own conceits, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.”

The idea and image receives its most moving visual expression in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous and unique 1568 painting of The Parable of the Blind leading the Blind. (more…)

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