Love Your Enemies…Seriously?

Sunday morning breakfast occasioned a conversation about Vlademir Putin. We agreed that we pretty much hated him. Then, as further thought unfolded, we added exponentially to the list. Representative examples included Joe Manchin, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ted Cruz, the majority of the Supreme Court and, well, you get the point.

But the question came up, “What about Jesus’ command to love one another?” We agreed that loving these morons was a pretty tall order. The definition of love, however, needs some expansion.

Love has become sappy unicorns and rainbow sentimentality. This is complimented by cupid zipping around shooting people in the butt so they fall in love with some other poor slob who has also been shot in the butt. Our cultural image of love is that it is primarily an emotion, and a cheesy one at that.

Or, sometimes we can affirm that we love the person and hate their behavior. That’s a cop out, and it isn’t the kind of love to which we are called. It’s not what it means to love our enemies.

We read 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings and think it was written for a couple as they pledge their love to one another. In truth, 1 Corinthians 13 was written to a church, a group of people who came together around their faith in the realm of God as taught by Jesus. Unfortunately, they couldn’t agree on much else. They fought about everything and Paul had his hands full keeping this scrappy bunch on track with the teachings of Jesus. First Corinthians 13 was written for us and the way we live in the world every day. It is a manifesto on what it means to be human and, among other things, to love our enemies.

Loving someone else means desiring for them a relationship with God that makes them whole. It doesn’t have to be the way we believe, but rather to find what is transformative in their understanding of God. It is holding them in the light of Love that is the very element of everything that has ever been created.

Loving someone with whom we disagree doesn’t mean tolerating their bad behavior. It doesn’t mean you have to be best buddies. It means desiring for them the kind of spiritual life that transforms the way they live in the world. We can liken it to the way our faith transforms us and how we live in the world. I suspect most of us will find that less than an ideal example. This means we pray for ourselves the same way we pray for our enemies.

A relationship with God is intended to change us. Such a relationship leads to deep healing of what is broken inside of us. It changes our priorities, what we desire for ourselves and what we desire for others. A relationship with God changes the way we interact with all people. It draws us into a web of relationship with the whole created order and changes the way we live on the earth.

To pray for our enemies is to desire for them the kind of relationship with God that will profoundly shift what makes them tick. Praying for our enemies is not for the faint of heart. It requires courage, patience, perseverance and a true loving ache for the part of them that is deeply broken. One cannot demolish a country, show antipathy toward the people they are intended to serve, consistently obstruct measures to protect our earth, and take away the rights of over half the people in this country without having something deeply broken inside of them.

We know something of that brokenness because it has been at work in us from time to time. We may not be leveling countries and doing all manner of evil things, but we do our share of missing the mark in loving our enemies. When we pray for our enemies, we discover that it changes the way we pray for ourselves. We cannot pray for someone else to be transformed without praying for ourselves to be transformed. Jesus spoke of it as the log and the speck. We cannot go after the speck in another’s eye and miss the sequoia growing out of our own face.

I believe in the power of prayer to change things and to change us. I believe that our prayers join with the prayers of others and have the capacity to shift the energy of the universe. When we genuinely pray, stuff happens.

Praying for our enemies is one thing we can do so we don’t feel so powerless in the face of such rampant evil. Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”