Weekly Devotion: Love Your Enemies?
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No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”
-Romans 12:20
Politics is rather strange these days. More and more partisans on both sides are animated not by certain ideas or philosophies, but on negative partisanship. Long story short, we are animated politically because we hate the other side not because we think our side is better.
A few weeks back, New York Times columnist David Brooks opined that while he disagreed with supporters of former President Donald Trump, maybe those who opposed Trump need to consider that these supporters might have chosen Trump because of the massive changes taking place in America that benefited Trump’s critics and hindered those who became his supporters.
His answer wasn’t received that well by Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. For them the answer was simple: these were people who didn’t like who America was becoming more diverse and saw Trump as a way to take us back to a “simpler” time.
It’s human nature to not want to understand, let alone love someone who is deemed an enemy, and yet in our passage from Romans, Paul is calling the church to do just that. Paul doesn’t say “hate who is evil,” but “hate what is evil.” But we SO want to hate those who aren’t like us, or who can hurt us or who offend us. Paul is calling the community to live as Jesus lived, who in Matthew 5 on the Sermon on the Mount tells the crowd to love their enemies and pray for persecutors.
Hating what is evil is hating the attitudes and ideas that can hurt and oppress others. But as we hate things that can cause evil, we hold to loving the evildoer not because their sin doesn’t matter, but because they are a child of God.
To get to that point means understanding the nature of, well, human nature. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” Paul writes in Romans 3. We have all sinned and if we understand that we have all sinned it might change our attitude towards enemies.
“Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good,” said Martin Luther King in a 1957 sermon. “When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals.” The Olympic runner Eric Liddell, whose story was part of the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, became a missionary in China and was later imprisoned by the Japanese. He started to pray for camp guards, remembering the passage from the Sermon on the Mount on loving the enemy. Why he did do something like pray for his jailer? It was as much about the state of his own soul as the soul of his jailer: “I’ve begun to pray for the guards and it’s changed my whole attitude toward them. When we hate them, we are self-centered.”
Hating our enemies is natural because they hurt us and those we love. But Paul reminds us that as followers of Jesus, we are called to a higher standard: to love our enemies even as we oppose what they do. It’s a tall order, but through the power of the Holy Spirit, it can be done.
-Dennis Sanders, Pastor