Sometimes the biggest obstacle to loving our enemies is recognizing who they are. Enemies are like wildflowers—they bloom in the most unlikely, out-of-the-way places. We're apt to pass them by unless we train our eye and know where to look.
We cannot love our enemies, as Jesus commands, until we know them. Those who pursue the peace of Christ know that we must love those who wish us harm, that we must return good for evil, that we must follow the gospel even unto death. After all, even the most monstrous of our enemies—let us say the Soviets—are made in the image and likeness of God. Christ died for their sins as well as ours.
Those who accept this command have struggled long and hard to love the Russians. It has not been easy for Americans taught from crib to grave of the inhumanity of "godless communism." It is never easy to be called "soft" or "naive" by our friends and neighbors. But with work, prayer, and the Spirit's grace, an increasing number of people are growing beyond their hates and fears to embrace God's likeness in our enemies.
The movements for nuclear disarmament are motivated in large part by Christians doing what Christians should do but find so hard to do—follow their God. We are learning, slowly, painfully, to transfer our trust from the things of this world to the things of God's kingdom. We are learning that our enemies are actually human beings like ourselves.
Yet at times we seem more comfortable loving the Russians than those closer at hand. We may not even think of Americans who oppose our efforts for peace as enemies. Thus we feel no obligation to love them and return good for evil. We may be bitter toward such people. We may fight them at every turn. We may see them as personifications of evil. In our words and acts we may treat them as enemies, while in our minds and hearts we may forget that those we treat as enemies are those we must love as enemies.
Loving our Neighbors at Home
Who are the unseen, overlooked enemies whom we feel no need to love? They can be anyone, of course, but particularly those in the government, military, or media who talk nonsensically of "peace through strength," those who castigate Christians as children who should leave the arms race to experts, or as dupes being manipulated by the Kremlin.
Loving our Soviet enemies seems far easier than loving these American enemies. Loving the Russians exposes us to risk, of course, but they are far away and menace us only abstractly. Those who oppose us at home seem so much more dangerous; they are close, they taunt us, they turn our friends against us, they distort our message and bombard us with lies and statistical gobbledy-gook. In the face of such an attack, it is no surprise that we instinctively cringe from the thought of loving our American enemies.
Unless we are careful, we may fall into the same trap as our opponents. Those who hate and fear the Soviets see them not as human beings with families, friends, hopes, and fears. They rob the Soviet people of their humanity. A quarter-of-a-billion individual lives dissolve into a gigantic beehive of deadly industriousness. Soviet men and women do not exist anymore for them, only the "Soviet menace" or the "Russian bear."
It is just as easy for us, however, to overlook the humanity—the human hates and fears—of those who oppose us. Instead of seeing brothers and sisters made in God's image, we see a ghastly caricature of a fat, drooling general with a lunatic glint in his eyes who sits fondling his guns and polishing his medals. One is no less overdrawn than the other.
We must take pains to draw back before we hear Christ's accusing words:
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye," when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.—Matthew 7:3-5
IT IS NOT just our personal failings that lead us to overlook the planks in our eyes. Love of our American opponents seems almost akin to treachery in the struggle for peace. Does loving the government mean no more marches, no more demonstrations, no more acts of civil disobedience, nothing which drives people apart and exposes our differences?
Does love mean ceasing to struggle?
The gospel answer is a resounding no. Jesus loved the Pharisees, the priests, the scribes. He loved Herod, the Romans, and the temple moneychangers. But love did not mean capitulation. Love impelled Jesus to use harsh words. He did not hide his anger at those who put barriers between God and God's people. If Jesus had seen love as the unwillingness to engage in struggle, he would never have offended anyone. He would never have been killed.
So, too, we are not called to love our enemies at the risk of being untrue to ourselves and to God's call to us. We are called to love, not to like our enemies. As Thomas Green, S.J., reminds us in When the Well Runs Dry, the commandment to like our enemies would be almost impossible, since our "likes" are rooted in our innermost instincts, feelings, and emotions. But Jesus did not call us to do the impossible; he called us to "love even those we don't like, that is, sincerely to desire their good."
Jesus loves our enemies, here and abroad. We must do the same or risk falling into the self-righteousness that brought his sharpest condemnation. We must seek to call them to the gospel, to bring the good news to their hearts, to help them become more than they are now or appear capable of becoming. This may require us to speak harshly at times; it may require acts of disobedience, but our goal is not a cheap political victory but the lasting peace that can be accomplished only by using peace as our weapon. If our end is peace, our means must be love.
We have seen such love. Consider Gandhi. His love for the British meant not passivity but a ceaseless struggle to point out the good in his opponents, to work for the internal transformation of friend and foe alike. Consider Martin Luther King Jr. His witness was not stifled but heightened by his love for his enemies. They could beat and kill him, but only at the risk of beating and killing the divine spark within themselves. Consider the Hebrew prophets. Their struggle to call the Israelites back to God required harsh words at times, but they were always spoken out of a true love for the people, an all-encompassing desire to help them restore their broken relationship with God.
Loving our enemies is at the core of Jesus' teaching. We who wish to follow him can hardly pick and choose some we will treat as friends and some we will treat as enemies. We can hardly justify our failures to love by reference to the political exigencies or the times we live in. Like the good Samaritan, we must stop and comfort not only the wounded Jew—the obvious enemy—but even the wounded Samaritan who hates us for helping the Jew.
Joseph Allegretti was professor of law at the Creighton University School of Law in Omaha, Nebraska, when this article appeared.
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