Loving Our Enemies

A long, long time ago, long before I was baptized in my 40s, I thought that I wanted to be a saint. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, of course, but I had some inkling that it meant more than simply being good. In Luke’s version of the beatitudes,* Jesus gives a list of who will be happy and who will cry “woe is me!” in God’s realm. Those who will be happy, it seems, are the saints. But when Jesus goes on to say “love your enemies” and “do good to those who abuse you,” that’s a challenge for any would-be saint.

For those of us who have lived in relative prosperity and freedom for most of our lives, it is easy to forget that Jesus lived in a country that was ruled by Rome, with heavily armed Roman soldiers patrolling the streets, and a puppet local government that was afraid to contradict anything their Roman overlords decreed. When Jesus said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” he was not talking about loving people we just don’t happen to like, although that is difficult enough. The reality that is all too easy to forget is that Jesus was talking about loving those hated Romans, and praying for the local people who did their bidding.

Today, as I see armed people in uniform walking down the street, and hear our leaders proclaiming that it is now lawful to arrest anyone who looks or talks like an undocumented person from another country, the words of Jesus sound much different to me than they did just a few years ago. Suddenly, the world that Jesus lived in looks a lot like the world that I am living in today. Suddenly, I feel much closer to those first Christians than I ever have before, as they, too, struggled to love as Jesus told them to. Every day I ask Jesus, how can I love my enemies? How can I pray for those who want to harm people I care about? How should I behave towards those who act with cruelty and indifference to the suffering of others? And I am heartened, because I know that generations of would-be saints have asked the same questions, and answered them with love.