LOVING YOUR ENEMIES?

One of the hardest commandments of Jesus is to love your enemies. Jesus said, “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). Johann Arndt in his magisterial book, True Christianity (1606), argues that the Lord gives no other reason than this: that you might be the children of your Father in heaven. When we were enemies God loved us (Rom.5:10). St. John writes, “He who does not love his brother remains in death” (1 John 3:14). Why, because he does not have the true life in Christ. The spiritual, heavenly life consists in faith toward God and in love toward neighbor: we know that we have come from death into life since we love others. Therefore, enmity against the neighbor is eternal death. It is a mark of high, noble and godly mind to forgive injuries. Look at God and note how patient he is, how quickly he forgives (Psalm 103:8).

The Emperor Titus, when he was endangered because two brothers were attempting to gain power and had sworn an oath to get it to kill him invited them as guests one evening and in the morning took them to a theater where they saw a play and he allowed them to sit beside him and he conquered their evil through great grace.

What greater injustice and evil is there than that of the children of men should have treated the one innocent and righteous Son of God so badly, have slandered him, beaten him, crowned him with thorns, whipped him, laid him on a cross, and brought the greatest evil upon him? Yet God forgave everything out of grace and the Lord prayed: “Father forgive them” (Luke 23:34). To this end, your Redeemer and Sanctifier placed his example before your eyes, so that he might be a powerful medicine for your whole life, such a medicine indeed that would press low everything that is high in you, give life to everything that is broken down in you, cut off everything that is unchaste in you, and make better everything that is corrupted in you. How can pride be so great in a man that it is not able to be healed through holy poverty of Christ? How can the search for revenge be so bitter in man this it is not able to be healed through the great patience of the Son of God? How can a man be so loveless that he can not be stirred through the great love of Christ and be ignited by his blessings with love? How can anyone be so hard of heart that Christ cannot soften him with his tears? This the highest characteristic of God to be merciful, to spare, to be gracious, and to forgive.

Finally, the highest step of the virtue is to conquer oneself, to forgive, to forget, and to change wrath into grace. It is as Proverbs 16:32 reads: “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty and he who rules his spirit than he who takes his city.” May the Holy Spirit give us this grace in a world that vilifies ones enemies.