Loving Our Enemies: A Divine Task

The second condition in the text states, "as far as it depends on you." Paul is making it clear that though we have a responsibility to love our enemies, we do not have all responsibility to love our enemies. We are responsible to love with a pure heart as best we can; but for the sake of the enemy's soul, he or she also must learn to take responsibility to love others. By setting an example through loving, we can help our enemies—even provoke them into taking responsibility to love others. Yet no one can make them become responsible and/or loving. It must be an act of individual will.

Fifth, we must accept that loving our enemies is one of the most difficult things we ever will do and is only possible through the grace of God. We must not minimize this difficulty nor neglect the emotions in loving our enemies. One day I found out just how difficult it is to love our enemies when I went with a parishioner to get her 14-year-old daughter who had run away from home to live with her boyfriend.

We arrived at his house. There was a large, noisy party going on. Her boyfriend came to the door, a skinhead with a swastika tattooed on his forehead. I thought to myself, "He looks just like Charles Manson." I wanted to do two things. First, I wanted to get out of there because I was scared for my life. He stood at the door with several others standing behind him. At some level of my being I was wishing I could beat him up, because I did not want him to be with this young girl I knew. Why did I feel like this? Why did I not care if I hurt this person? What was it that I was missing? What was it that I could not see about him? What could I not see about me? Most importantly, what was it that I did not know about God, who is able to love His enemies?

I did not see this young man as a person created in the image of God. I saw him as my enemy. I saw him as a problem to be removed. I lacked compassion because I did not know how much God loved him as someone created in God's image.

Loving our enemies is not just a cerebral exercise, though we do need to think about what it means to love our enemies and have a plan to affect it. The truth is that loving our enemies is costly and must be worked out in the world. This love works in the world of flesh and blood, as this story clearly depicts.

The scene is a courtroom trial in South Africa. A frail black woman stands slowly to her feet. She is more than 70 years old. Facing her from across the room are several white security police officers. One of them, a Mr. van der Broek, has just been tried and found guilty in the murders of the woman's son and husband. He had come to the woman's home, taken her son, shot him at point-blank range, then burned the young man's body while he and his officers partied nearby.

Several years later, van der Broek and his cohorts returned for her husband, as well. For months, she heard nothing of his whereabouts. Then, almost two years after her husband's disappearance, van der Broek came back to fetch her. How vividly she remembered that night. She was taken to a river bank where she was shown her husband, bound and beaten but still strong in spirit, lying on a pile of wood.

The last words she heard from his lips as van der Broek and his fellow officers poured gasoline over his body and set him aflame were, "Father, forgive them…"

When the woman stood in the courtroom and listened to the confessions of van der Broek, a member of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission turned to her and asked, "So, what do you want? How should justice be done to this man who has so brutally destroyed your family?"

"I want three things," began the old woman calmly, but confidently. "I want first to be taken to the place where my husband's body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and give his remains a decent burial." She paused, then continued. "My husband and son were my only family. I want, secondly, therefore, for Mr. van der Broek to become my son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the ghetto and spend a day with me so I can pour out on him whatever love I still have remaining in me."

"Ffinally," she said, "I would like Mr. van der Broek to know that I offer him my forgiveness because Jesus Christ died to forgive. This was also the wish of my husband. So, I would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so that I can take Mr. van der Broek in my arms, embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven."

As the court assistants came to lead the elderly woman across the room, van der Broek fainted, overwhelmed by what he just heard. As he struggled for consciousness, those in the courtroom—family, friends, neighbours—all victims of decades of oppression and injustice—begin to sing softly but assuredly, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."

We are familiar with the benediction: "Now go in peace to love and serve the Lord." This includes loving our enemies. So may His grace sustain us for this most high calling.