Love Your Enemies

The concept of loving our enemies is a very difficult one. I am going to bear my soul now and tell you that it is very difficult for me. I come from a culture of people who have a long history of being persecuted. I can point to specific groups of people who have participated in the destruction of my ancestors. When I hear people spew the type of ideology that led to evil that was perpetrated against my ancestors, my very blood boils within me. I hate evil and I hate injustice. However, I am not supposed to hate the bearers of that evil. This is where my humanness trips me up and has the potential to lead me astray. I am confessing this to anyone reading this with the hope that God works on me and helps me to love my enemies in a way that He wants me to.

We humans can rationalize and justify the hate and anger we feel towards those who hurt us. I did not always understand how evil people could be forgiven. Many years ago, I met a Holocaust survivor who shared her story with my congregation. She said it took her many years, but she could say definitively that she has forgiven the Nazi soldiers that killed her family and brutalized her. I remember thinking, “How on Earth can she forgive those monsters? Why should she?!” The anger I felt filled me to the point where I felt myself shaking. I realized that to hold on to that type of anger would be completely destructive. She needed to forgive so she could let that destructive anger go.

It is one thing to forgive our enemies, but loving them is quite a different story. This is precisely what God wants us to do. It is instructed from the Old Testament through the New Testament. The message has never changed. For example, in Proverbs 25:21-22 it says, “If someone who hates you is hungry, give him food to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. For you will heap fiery coals [of shame] on his head.” Yeshua (Jesus) continued to teach this message when he said, “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). It sounds as if it should be easy, but it is not. In our righteous indignation, we hold onto hate as if it somehow hurts the other person or punishes them, but all it does it hurt us.

I continue to grapple with this. My human side wants to continue to hate the people who hurt other people. That is how I feel about injustices. However, the side that is devoted to my creator knows I cannot hate the evil bearer. I have prayed about this issue. I have discussed this with my soul sister Linda, who always strives to love all people. I have searched in various places for examples of those who have overcome their hate and I came across this quote from Martin Luther King, “When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.” Linda always reminds me to understand that when a person does evil, it is the spirit, not the person, who is evil. This quote from Dr. King reminds me that ideology can be evil, but the person caught up in that ideology is just a person, a broken, flawed and sinful person, but a person who God can still redeem if He wants to, and we know He wants to redeem all of His children.

So, I will continue to pray that God helps me separate the person from the spirit and the person from the ideology. I will try to remember to pray for those who hate me, or who hurt others. I have met people in the past who have had a complete transformation because of God’s love. These were people who were white supremacists, former criminals, and former religious extremists who targeted specific groups of people. If I had met them before their transformations, I might have wanted to hate them, but I met them afterwards and I gave the glory to God for redeeming them. He did not give up on them and He does not want us to either. So, I pray that God does not give up on me and that He forgives me for allowing my humanness to get in the way of what He wants me to do. I continue on my quest to love my enemies and pray for their redemption.