A preacher, upon reading the text we just
heard, set out to write a sermon about loving your enemies. He knew it was a difficult teaching that was
challenging for congregants to accept, so he worked extra hard, giving it all
he had. When Sunday came, he preached a
very thoughtful, inspiring sermon that was persuasive from beginning to
end. At the conclusion, he asked those
present to raise a hand if they had been convinced of the need to love their
enemies. Only about half present did
so. Undeterred, the preacher dove into the
subject for another ten minutes. After
that, he asked for another show of hands.
This time 75% indicated they were now willing to love and pray for their
enemies. Another ten minutes of
preaching and now everyone raised a hand with the exception of ninety-eight
year old Mildred Phlymaldihide. The
preacher asked her stand up and explain why she was not willing to love and
pray for her enemies. In a shaky voice
she said, “Well, I don’t have any enemies to hate.” How could that be wondered the preacher? “Oh, I used to have lots of enemies back in
the day,” she continued, “but, I outlived them all.”
We are forever blessed that the Disciples
asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.
From this one simple question we now have the Lord’s Prayer; a prayer
that has done more to shape human spirituality and action than any other. How I wish one of those disciples had spoken
up in today’s text and asked Jesus to teach them how to pray for their
enemies. Should we pray that they see
their error and come over to our way of thinking? That seems a little self-serving. Should we pray that their efforts against us
be thwarted while our efforts against them succeed? Should we pray differently for enemies of our
country than we might pray for our own personal enemies? When our enemy is not a person, but rather a
thing - say, perhaps something like cancer – how should we pray? I really wish we knew how Jesus prayed for
his enemies, but we don’t.
We do know this, however, Jesus had
enemies. We can divide them into two
basic groups: those he confronted and those he did not. The occupying Roman forces fell into this
second group. Unlike many other
messianic figures in that age, Jesus took a passive approach of non-resistance
with regard to the Romans. He was no
insurrectionist, nor was he going to lead a violent uprising. There is not a single story in any of the
Gospels were Jesus directly attacks Roman rule.
What would be the point? It was
futile to resist such a dominant and ruthless force.
In the face of such powerlessness, Jesus
teaches a way to find empowerment that is now often referred to as ‘the second
mile.’ By law, a soldier had to right to
make any person lug his gear a mile. Can
you imagine setting out on a busy day and getting sidetracked by some Roman
thug too lazy to carry his own gear? Or
what if you were working hard in the field trying to grow food for your family
and was told abruptly to get walking? Jewish men found the practice to be humiliating
and infuriating. You can imagine how
startled people must have been when Jesus suggested that they voluntarily carry
a soldier’s pack a second mile.
Have you ever seen the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke? There is a wonderful scene in the movie where
Paul Newman’s character is working with other inmates at menial labor tarring
and shoveling gravel along a sunbaked country road. It is work they did day in and day out under
the supervision of gun toting prison guards.
One day, feed up with the indignity of the work and treatment, Newman’s character
does something radical… He begins to work with all of his effort and
energy. The entire chain gang responds
in kind and before you know it they have exhausted the day’s supply of materials. They spend the rest of the afternoon sitting
in the shade of a tree waiting for the prison bus to arrive at its scheduled
time. Cool Hand Luke could not change
his circumstances, but he could change how he approached them. That is exactly what Jesus is teaching his
followers to do. “You are powerless,” he
said, “to resist this law, therefore you must rise above it.”
Scholars of church history now suggest
that some of the earliest converts to take the Gospel message of Jesus to the
corners of the Roman world were soldiers.
How many of them do you think might have been converted during a ‘second
mile’? Just imagine how that
conversation went:
Soldier: O.K. loser, you can put down my gear now and
go home.
Christian: No, I’m still good. I’m happy to carry it another mile.
Soldier: What?
Why in the world would you do that?
Christian: Well, let me tell you about Jesus of Nazareth
who was crucified but now lives.
At its heart, Jesus’ teaching about the
second mile was a way of preserving one’s dignity and integrity while accepting
that some enemies hold certain advantages over us that cannot be altered or
challenged. There will be times that we
encounter enemies too powerful for us to confront openly. When this happens, we can wonder what Jesus
might have us do to maintain our own sense of dignity and integrity and how that
might, just might, open the door to something transformational.
As I said earlier, Jesus had other
enemies that he could (and did) challenge... often. Certain religious, legal, and political
leaders were constantly nipping at his heals and he was more than willing to
take them on. He was unimpressed by the
way they took God’s laws and codified them into certain types of external
behavior. To their way of thinking, it
was permissible, for instance, to seethe in the presence of one’s enemies as
long as you didn’t act upon it. For
Jesus, this was not at all what God intended.
The Law must reign in our hearts even as it rules our actions. Anything less than this means while we may
act peaceably enough, we are still being torn apart on the inside. For Jesus, that was no good.
In today’s Old Testament reading we heard
Moses receive from God a series of moral imperatives. It is a wide ranging laundry list: don’t glean
all the food from your field so that the needy have something to eat; don’t lie
or defraud anyone; and my two favorites: don’t scream insults at someone who is
deaf and don’t put an object in front of a blind person causing him to
trip. With each instruction comes God’s
command: “You must be holy for I am holy.”
So in addition to being just plain wrong, when we act in a way
discordant with God’s personality we lose something important about
ourselves. God’s image embedded in us at
creation becomes tarnished, or muted, or perhaps diminished. It is the equivalent to what happens to a
world-class athlete who gives up training.
Each day spent sitting on the couch and each bag of potato chips takes
him farther and farther away from his true self.
The last imperative God gives to Moses is
a direction not to hate in your heart any one of your own kin (and for some of
us that is enough of a challenge, isn’t it).
From there God speaks about neighbors, saying we must love those close
to us as we love ourselves. Jesus
expands this idea of neighbor to include all people, even, and especially, our
enemies. He saw in hatred the cumulative
spiritual effect of sitting on the couch and eating potato chips day after
day. That which is in us which is of God
begins to disappear; being eclipsed by the hatred.
That Jesus had enemies – people who
challenged him in public, mocked him in private, schemed his downfall, and eventually
out-and-out sought to have him killed – suggests that what was godly in him was
always under threat of being overshadowed by hatred. Again, I wish we knew the words he prayed
that led him to love those who sought his ruin.
The Book of
Common Prayer
contains a collect for our enemies. It
reads:
O God, the Father of all, whose son commanded us to love
our enemies: Lead them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your
good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you, through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.
I find helpful its sense of mutuality and
hope for eventual reconciliation. I know
clergy who offered this prayer on the Sunday after the 9/11 attacks on our
country and (as they say) actual results varied. Some found it calming and restorative. Others were outraged.
Perhaps one day we will find our self in Mildred
Phlymaldihide’s position and we will have outlived all of our enemies. Short of that, we have a real challenge on
our hands. The writer Anne Lamont said
that hating our enemies is akin to drinking rat-poison and expecting all the
rodents to disappear. It just doesn’t
work that way. What we lose is our self
and the wonderful way God’s Spirit is intended to shine through our
cracks.
