Beyond the Borders of the World’s Love (Week 25, Feb 12)
Reading
Matthew 5:43–48
Silent Reflection
Remarks
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.
Matthew 5:44–45 (ESV)
What is it that sets Jesus apart from other rabbis? What is it that sets the Christian faith/religion/tradition apart from the best that a world without Jesus can muster?
What is the best that a world without Jesus can muster? I submit that it is love, which is, as it turns out, also the best Jesus has, too. But I think the problem is that love in the world always reaches a limit, the boundary beyond which it will not go. There is a tribal love in the world that seeks and protects its own. Its objects are those who are like me or belong to me, whose prosperity and security I have a vested interest in. This is a love the world has likely always known.
Then there is a wider love in the world, a love that reaches out to the stranger and the widow and the orphan. It is a love whose objects are those who are in need, who have nothing to offer me, who are different from me—where for me to love them would come at some, perhaps considerable, cost to me. This is indeed a very beautiful and inspiring and expansive love, and it is quite Christlike. But I do not know that one needs to utterly trust Jesus to pursue it.
What it is that sets Jesus apart from anyone else is his love that demands radical inclusion and forgiveness. But what makes this inclusion and forgiveness radical is that they take not just friends and strangers as their object, but one’s enemies. We see it rarely, and when we do see it, it inspires us. But as soon as I am the one in the driver’s seat, as soon as I am being asked to love my worst enemy, it shifts from being inspiring to being deeply offensive.
Love the immigrant and refugee, the homeless, the widows at the nursing home, yes. But love my abuser? My betrayer? No. What are you even talking about, Reed? We have no natural categories for this. The love of the world draws its boundary here. There’s no logic for this kind of love. The existence of God may be rational (as the apologists tell us), but the love of God is not. You don’t need to look any further for evidence of this than to consider your own worst enemy, whoever you genuinely believe the world would be better without, whoever has taken from and destroyed the most of you, and observe your own visceral reaction as you imagine yourself reaching out to embrace them or sacrificing yourself for their good.
If it doesn’t offend us, we either haven’t come to grips with who our enemies are or haven’t come to grips with what love is.
But Jesus says that to enact (to incarnate!) this love is what it means to be in the family of God. It is at the very core of who God is. It is in God’s DNA. Love for the enemy is what gets passed on inherently—genetically—to God’s children. To be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect is essentially and inextricably a matter of how we regard and treat those we think the world needs least.
I’m not blaming us for reacting against this. For some of us, I would guess the notion of loving our enemy strikes us not just as offensive, but as something more—a threat to our very existence. We don’t see how the world can really go on being, how it could ever be a truly good place so long as both of us continue existing in it. We feel as though our lives are somehow weighted against theirs, so that in the end one of us has to win out. To choose to desire and work for their good feels like a sort of suicide.
So it makes sense that we don’t want it or can’t tolerate the thought of it. To avoid loving our enemy may be all we can do to survive the pain they have given us. And I believe God knows this more than anyone and that He has compassion for us. But, as Frederick Buechner observed in his essay “Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain,” while this may be a good way of staying alive, it is not a very good way to grow into the fullness of what God wants us to be.
What God wants us to be are His own children. He wants His own blood to flow through our veins and beat in our hearts. His blood is His love, not just for friend and family, not just for the stranger and the vulnerable, but for His enemies, as well. He has gone ahead of us in this, and He is up there calling us forward, patiently and compassionately waiting for us. Fix your eyes upon Jesus, the song says. Look full in his wonderful face. Do that long enough, though, and you will notice his gaze looks not only on you, but on the one behind you—on the one who has stabbed you in the back. To look full in his wonderful face is, eventually, to turn and look full in their terrible face, and to see them as he sees them, by the same love with which he sees you.
God help us.
Silent Reflection
Response
Read Matthew 5:43–48
Read Matthew 5:43–48
Read Matthew 5:43–48