An impossible love?

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Luke 6:27-31

“Enemies? But I don’t have enemies! I just have friends who don’t like me...”

“Ha-very-ha” is my response to that witticism. All credit to the speaker (a well-known modern poet, I believe) for his self-deprecating humour. But the fact is that one of the battles of life is working out how to handle, if not actual enemies, certainly relationships in our lives that are not easy.

At a fairly everyday level, the difficult situation may simply be a head-on difference of opinion, or a grating personality clash, or a perceived wrong done. For some, of course, it may be far worse: a serious hurt or injury. For Christians in many parts of the world it is outright persecution or injustice. But the fact is that “enemies”, in whatever form they come, can’t just be shrugged off with a wisecrack. Would that they could!

Well, Jesus has an answer to the question, How should I treat my enemies? Love them. Yes; no ifs, no buts: love them.

My wife and I were mulling over these verses in Luke 6 recently and we discovered – not by any means for the first time – that what seems very simple advice is in fact far from so. Here are some of the things we pondered…

First, loving and liking are very different things. You can love someone even when you don’t like them.

How so? Well, liking is an emotion, a feeling, something that you have no control over, something that comes into you from outside; loving, on the other hand, is an act of will, something you choose to do, something that comes from within you.

It’s hard to imagine Jesus liking the soldiers who nailed him to the cross, yet he chose to pray that God his Father would forgive them (Luke 23:33-34); which means, surely, that he chose to love them. (Have we, by the way, ever pondered whether that wonderful prayer was actually answered? I imagine we just assume it was, for at this point the Father and the Son were still in perfect harmony; and that must be right. Well, what clearer example could we want?)

But second, forgiveness can be tricky.

Jesus’ enemies, when they heard him pronounce forgiveness of sins, condemned him: “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (for example, Mark 2:6). This, surely, is a fair question: who indeed? If nothing else, Jesus’ words point to the fact that he was God in the flesh.

But in many other places Jesus instructs his followers not only to love their enemies, but to forgive them. Right here in Luke 6 he teaches “Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (verse 37). But we are not God!

Perhaps this is a puzzle we can never fully resolve, beyond saying that while of course the ultimate decision to forgive belongs to God and God alone, the  willingness to forgive must be there on our part. If – or when – we reach the point of saying “I forgive you”, it can only be on the basis of an authority delegated to us by God.

Third, looking at the passage as a whole, we concluded that loving enemies boils down to two basic responses on our part: first, wish them well, and not ill; and second, do them good, and not harm.

Experience suggests that even that can be desperately hard: “But how do you expect me to wish well to that person who has hurt me so badly, never mind do them good!” To which the honest answer may well be, “With great difficulty”.

But this is where the grace of God within us makes the impossible possible. Once we make up our minds to love that person, and pray for the help of the Holy Spirit to do so, a wonderful thing begins to happen: we begin to see them through new eyes. At the deepest level, we begin to see them as God sees them - not just as nasty or spiteful or whatever, but as really rather pathetic and pitiful. We may not have changed our enemy; but we have undergone change ourselves – and that may be far more important.

At this point my wife and I felt that we had come about as far as we could.

But we did then recognise that - well, wonderful though all this is, is there a danger of seeming soft on sin? We reminded ourselves that there are such things as rights and wrongs, and that the wrongs need to be “called out”, to use the modern expression. God isn’t a heavenly grandad who always smiles benignly and says “Oh, don’t worry, I’m happy to turn a blind eye”. That isn’t the kind of God he is. He is perfectly pure and holy. So casual indifference to wrong isn’t an option.

But we came to the conclusion that that is, so to speak, God’s problem, not ours. If our enemy remains hard and antagonistic, well, that’s for God to deal with as he sees fit.

As far as we are concerned, our Christlike duty is plain: Love your enemies. Just that: let’s say it again; no ifs, no buts.

(And remember, by the way, that in difficult relationships, the fault, ahem, is unlikely to be all on one side…!)

Lord Jesus, thank you that even as you hung dying on the cross you chose to demonstrate your love for those who killed you by praying for their forgiveness. When I feel that I have been wronged by someone, please help me to see them with your eyes – and to love them with your love. Amen.