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Week of August 24, 2019

How to Love Your Enemy

by Melissa Florer-Bixler

When someone shares with me that they have an enemy, it is often in pastoral confidence, whispered as a confession. Having an enemy, they intuit, is a botched form of discipleship resulting from failed reconciliation. The language of enemies is seen as the end of a conversation—or the end of a relationship.

We assume everyone is doing their best, or failing on some things but not everything, or that people are cogs in a complex machine over which they have little control. We let systemic oppression be the problem.

Yet Christians follow scriptures in which enemies are named with clarity and vigor. The third chapter of Luke begins by naming the names of the tormentors of the Jews of the first century: Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, and Herod. Right up front we are introduced to the full swath of political actors who oppress and terrorize the common people of Judea.

Tiberius was the emperor known for his extreme paranoia and wrath that spread like a disease across his territories. Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judea, executed political enemies without trial and was infamous for his bribes and insults. Herod Antipas imprisoned and executed his enemies over personal slights.

Luke sets the scene for the gospel in a tyrannical, volatile, and oppressive political climate. And he wants us to know who is in charge, who makes this repression possible. He doesn’t reduce the problem to “good people who do bad things.” He doesn’t blame systems. He names enemies.

Rightly having enemies is an unsung discipline of the Christian life. More often than not we abandon the task before we get started; we wrongly assume we should not have enemies. But the expectation of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that we will have enemies. We know this because Jesus gives us a command to love our enemies. And in order to love your enemies, you first have to know who they are.

Held up by people

Often people outside the church tell me how they are drawn to Jesus, meek and mild. This caricature misses out on the actual Jesus of the Bible, who lashes out against the religious teachers whom he calls false prophets, blind guides, whitewashed tombs, and hypocrites. Jesus’ anger drove the moneychangers from the temple with a whip.

This Jesus teaches us that there are right and wrong ways to have enemies. When we look at Jesus’ life we see that enmity is born when we recognize that the structures of terror and injustice are held up by people. Oppression is enacted by individual human beings, who collectively wash their hands of the matter. Without the participation of people—individuals doing the work—these systems would collapse.

Enemies are not the people we dislike or those who are different from us. In the gospel, enemies are those who make camp on the far side of the line that is justice. And God is beckoning us—all of us—to join God among the oppressed.

In this way Jesus reorients our way of having enemies. We do not arm ourselves with weapons to coerce or threaten enemies of God’s liberation into submission. Instead we create the world we want.

The enemy within

On December 8, 2018, Jakelin Caal Maquin, age 7, died in El Paso, Texas, 2,000 miles from the home she fled in Guatemala. She and her father were detained at a remote border crossing in New Mexico. We have yet to see anyone take responsibility for her death. Instead, individuals and agencies wash their hands of Jakelin’s death.

But there are many individuals who contributed to Jakelin’s death. Doris Meissner is the enemy of Jakelin. She is the commissioner who signed off on the 1994 plan to strategically push migrants into remote parts of the desert, making the desert a weapon. President Dwight D. Eisenhower is responsible for Jakelin’s death. He oversaw the coup d’etat in Guatemala orchestrated by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected president and install a puppet administration.

The architects of the Central America Free Trade Agreement that decimated the Guatemalan economy are responsible for Jakelin’s death. White House staffer Stephen Miller is responsible for Jakelin’s death, by whipping up anti-immigration sentiment in the U.S. The border guards who refused to respond to her father’s cries for help are responsible for Jakelin’s death. . . .

We cannot be former enemies until we first name our enmity, both that we have enemies and that we have been the enemies of others. This is why the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in post-apartheid South Africa began with confession. There could be no hope for forgiveness unless enemies were named first.

To love your enemies is to call them out of the world of denial and oppression, of despots and executioners. To love your enemies is to help them see the truth about themselves and show them something else is possible. To love your enemies is to tell them the story of how we once too were enemies of God and that through the love of God who lived, died, and rose among us, we are now called friends. We have enemies because we hope that one day we might call them friends. There is nothing emotional or psychological about this change. To turn from enemies to friends means our lives must change. And sometimes this means our jobs, how we make money, how we act in the world must change.

—Condensed from Sojourners magazine Sept./Oct. 2019

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