Loving Our Enemies - More Than a Nice Idea

Life has those lingering proverbial statements that seem timeless; those quips and quotes that have that some kind of message that’s just so compelling that you simply can’t ignore them.  Whatever they say, and there’s a bunch of them that say a whole lot of things, they say something that’s so core to us,or who we’d like to be that secretly we’d love to be able to live them out.  It seems that because they have something genuinely real to them they persist indefinitely because they’re indefinitely fresh and relentlessly applicable. 

However, it seems that these timeless, proverbial treasures are so good that they’re too good to be true, or least too good to be achievable.  We’d really love to be able to actually do what they say and live like they suggest, but they’re pretty demanding and rigorous.  In fact, they’re sometimes so demanding and so rigorous that they seem a bit impossible.  Yet, they remain compelling nonetheless, like some precious gem just beyond our reach.

Love Your Enemies

The command to love our enemies is clearly one of those things.  It certainly sounds nice.  It would probably relieve a whole lot of our stress.  It would likely make the world that “kinder, gentler” kind of place.  It would probably diffuse a whole lot of stuff and smooth over things before any real damage is done.  Yeah, but how realistic is that command that really?  Face it; we live in the 21^st century.  Look around.  It’s not a “kinder, gentler” kind of world.  Rather, it’s a place where we need to be on our guard and protect ourselves or we’re eventually going to ‘ground round’ in some situation with someone sooner or later. 

Taking that thinking a bit further, how do we love the people who are beating us up in any number of ways that we get beat up?  In fact, is loving them even remotely reasonable as that seems to imply that we’re somehow giving their actions a degree of permission or legitimacy. Aren’t we telling the offender that their offenses are okay?  It also seems to suggest that we’re up for further offenses and that we’ve become something of the proverbial ‘doormat’ in our relationship with whomever wants to walk on us.     

Oscar Wilde said “always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.” That sounds kind of appealing in a sneaky kind of way because that’s really about a covet kind of revenge.  In actuality, that’s more a sinister way of getting back at our offenders without them really knowing that we’re getting back at them.  That’s not about love. 

I think we move closer to something of substance in the words of an unknown author who wrote, “The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me.”  That should give us pause . . . probably a whole lot of pause.  There’s another proverbial statement that says that what we hate in others is really what we hate in ourselves.  The hatred for our enemies may well be the characteristics in them that we see in ourselves.  It would seem that that should start to reorient our thinking a bit.

The Cost to Our Enemies

What we don’t consider is the cost our enemies pay in being exactly that . . . our enemies.  Being our enemy demands that people do things or carry out certain actions that make them our enemies in the first place.  Our enemies are not enemies without some sort of decision or action that makes them our enemies.  Something was done, or some event transpired, or some situation was initiated that clearly put them in a starkly adversarial position relative to us.  In other words, they had to do something to become our enemies. 

And that action, whatever it was, had to be severe enough to rupture, smash or entirely decimate our relationship with them.  Their actions had to be sufficiently toxic to set them completely at odds with us.  Something pretty significant had to transpire to polarize our relationship with them and put us at the opposite end of spectrum in some sort of adversarial stand-off. Something pretty bad had to have been done by our enemy. 

What we think about is the cost of that action to us.  In fact, we tend to be all over that.  We can easily and quite extensively tell people how bad it was, how much it hurt, how unfair it was, and how uncalled for the actions were. We can recite all of that with great ease. 

What we don’t think about is the cost to our enemy in doing what they did to us. Of course we don’t.  We probably don’t have a whole lot of interest in going over that because we’d prefer to lick our wounds in light of the abuses that were perpetrated upon us.  The abuses levied against us get all of our attention and the majority of our emotional airtime.  It’s not that we shouldn’t deal with those things, but they become our entire focus. 

Yet, perpetrating these things upon us comes with a cost to the person doing those things to us.  In fact, it’s likely that the cost to our enemies for whatever it is they’ve done to us is greater than the cost of those actions upon us.  We don’t see the cost to our enemies because we’re the ones in pain. We assume that the level of pain we’re experiencing reflects the cost, and it’s likely that our enemy is not in pain. In fact, they might be downright happy and somewhat elated about what they’ve done to us. 

However, there are consequences for how we live our lives; deep, profound and devastating consequences.  Many times those consequences aren’t reflected in the pain someone is experiencing and they’re not necessarily reflected in whatever the outcome of the moment is.  Most consequences are much deeper, something like a slow acidic burn that gradually eats away at the edges of our souls; killing us in small degrees so that we die a slow, unrecognized death.  There’s a conscience ignored that will eventually have its day. There’s the reality that nothing that’s ever done in isolation and that when we sow pain, or betrayal, or abandonment, or any other destructive thing it will affect everything else around us.  Then there’s the reality of time and circumstance that simply means that what we visit upon others will eventually be visited upon us.  And finally, there’s the numbing action that occurs when we act in hateful and deceitful ways; a numbing that robs the robber of the essence of their humanity, therefore robbing them of the whole of life. 

There are terrible consequences that are tantamount to the destruction of the offender’s life.  In harming us they are in turn harming themselves in ways that they cannot imagine; ways that they would likely repent of if they could only see it.  And so, we need to attend to our own pain, but in understanding the loss to our enemy we can find a place to love them.