Walking in the Footsteps of Jesus: Loving Our Enemies

In first-century Judaea, those whom the Jews regarded as “enemies” were close at hand. They were the Samaritan who occupied the former kingdom of Israel; the Gentiles who occupied Galilee, the members of Herodian dynasty that were tetrarchs, or rulers, of Judaea, their officials, courtiers, their soldiers, and their hangers-on; the Roman governor of Jerusalem and the Roman soldiers garrisoned in Jerusalem. Everywhere they looked, there were “enemies.”

It is not so clear in our day. If we ask one person, they will tell us one thing. If we ask another, they will tell us something else. We live in an age where there is less and less common agreement on what represents a threat to our health, safety, and wellbeing; the health, safety, and wellbeing of our family, kin, friends, neighbors, and community; the health, safety, and wellbeing of our brothers and sisters in Christ; to our beliefs and values, to the beliefs and values of our fellow Christians.

Some threats may be clearer than others—the atheistic college professor who ridicules Christians in his classroom, the radical Islamist who persecutes Christians in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, or the Hindu extremist who subject them to persistent ill-treatment in India.

What people may see as threat to themselves and to others may not be in reality a threat to anyone at all. They may not only perceive it as a threat in their own minds but also may blow it out of all proportions. Recently a man murdered his two young children, shooting them with a spear fishing gun, because he had become convinced from the bizarre Q-Anon conspiracy theories on the internet that they had inherited snake DNA from their mother.

As seen through the lens of Jesus’ teaching and example, the real threat was not the children or their mother but those believing and spreading the Q-Anon conspiracy theories, the theories themselves, and whoever cooked them up. They prompted the man to take the lives of his own children. The man no longer saw the children as children but as things and he killed them.

Despite this lack of clarity our answer is found in Jesus’ teaching and example. Whether those whom we may perceive as our “enemies” are in reality our “enemies,” whether they pose an actual threat to us, whether we mistakenly view them as a threat to us for one reason or another, whether we have misinterpreted their words and actions and imagine that they are a threat to us, we should treat them as Jesus taught and showed us.

Jesus taught that we should not just love those who love us. We should also love those who are unfriendly toward us and may want to do us harm. Indeed, they may already be doing injury to us. We should do good to those who hate us, bless those who curse us; and pray for those who treat us badly. We should treat others exactly as we would have them treat us. We should imitate God who is good to everybody, not just to those who are grateful for the goodwill and favor that he shows them but also those who feel no gratitude at all. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus puts it this way.

“You must be kind as your Father in Heaven is kind. Don’t judge other people and you will not be judged yourself. Don’t condemn and you will not be condemned. Make allowances for others and they will make allowances for you. Give and others will give to you—yes, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will they pour into your lap. For whatever measure you use with other people, they will use in their dealings with you.”

Jesus practiced what he taught. He did not say one thing and do another.

Jesus set a high standard for us. It is easy to love someone who loves us. But to love the fellow who mistook us for someone else, with the connivance of a friend pretended to be a sheriff’s deputy, stopped us late at night on our way home, and left us slumped and bloody with a broken nose over our car’s steering wheel is much harder. I am speaking from personal experience: I had that happen to me.

God, however, is not like a parent who has ridiculously high expectations of his children and leaves them to struggle the best that they can to meet them. As the apostle Paul told the Christians at Phillipi, God in his goodwill toward us enables us to will and to achieve what pleases him. It pleases God that we love those whom we regard as “bad people” or who think of us as “bad people.” 

Before Jesus ascended into heaven, he promised to send the disciples a helper to take his place. He kept that promise. The promised helper is the Holy Spirit, God himself present in us. His is the quiet voice in us, which urges us to do the loving thing, to do what Jesus taught and practiced. Through the power of his presence, God enables us to do the loving thing which he is gently nudging us to do.