I’m going to focus primarily on one of the texts quoted in this weeks lesson—the toughest one. Possibly it’s the toughest in all of Scripture: "Love your enemies." Just how does one go about doing that? We have a quarterly full of admonitions regarding how we should love our spouses, should love our children, should love our neighbors, should love the mailman, should be kind to street people.…it goes on and on. We all know we should become better people, but HOW?

Mostly, I think we do it by saying "Cheese." We all know how that works. The photographer lines everyone up and even though there’s nothing funny happening—no one is telling a really hilarious joke—we’re all supposed to appear happy. So "1, 2, 3—say cheese!" Now we have a family portrait where everyone is happy. That’s how we go about loving all these people that our leaders tell us we should love. We pretend—go through the motions.

It’s one thing to love my family, but how can I genuinely love my enemies? Is it psychologically healthy to love someone who has sexually abused you? If at night, I’m awakened to realize that someone is about to enter one of my children’s bedrooms, what is the "loving" thing to do? If someone is intent on hurting one of my children, am I to "turn the other cheek" by telling him that the other child’s bedroom is across the hall?

I would be inclined to get my hands on the five-battery flashlight under my bed (I don’t own a gun) and "love" this enemy unconscious by delivering a mighty blow to his head. In this circumstance I think the loving response would be to refrain from choking this person to death—to limit onself to rendering this person incapacitated while dialing 911.

Luke 6:27—"Love your enemies"—is a very hard text, but perhaps the context of the parallel passage in Matthew 5:43–47 helps a bit. Here Jesus seems to be saying that since the Father sends rain on both good and evil people, we ought not to discriminate by loving only those people who are likely to love us in return. Difficult as it might be to love the ungrateful, it seems a bit more "doable" than gritting my teeth and pretending to like someone who is trying to rape me or my family.

Jesus here appears to be cutting across the Pharisaical smugness of "I’m OK because I’m nice to people who treat me well." He is asking for more; he is asking us to see everyone as God’s child—my brother, my sister. This would even include my criminal brother or sister who at the moment may be trying to harm me. I ought to restrain that brother or sister, but not slit his or her throat. In the end, it is only God who ought to decide who is worthy of life.

Let’s get to the HOW. Loving others (family, friends, enemies) is a gift that comes from the Holy Spirit. In the case of family and friends, this gift may be less obvious, as it feels far more natural to care about others when you feel that caring is reciprocated. Notice in Ephesians 4:32 (another of our Sabbath School lesson texts) Paul encourages the Ephesians to be "kind and compassionate to one another." However, the key to how comes earlier. In verses 22–24 he speaks of putting off the "old self" and putting on the "new self."

What is the source of this "new self?" It appears to be more than willpower; something different from grit your teeth and say "cheese." It is the Spirit that "filled the whole house" on the day of Pentecost. It’s the Power that infused Paul’s life and the life of the early believers as recorded in Acts and subsequent epistles. This is not the "shock and awe" approach of Mount Sinai, which successfully induced fear but seemed less than successful in inducing love. How do you "love" lightening and thunder?

When Jesus came as a baby we were treated to a much more "user-friendly" God, and with the coming of the Comforter in the early church we have the opportunity to become infused with the breath of God in a way that was not possible before. It is this infusion that is the source of all non-pretend love.

It’s powerful enough to include street people as well as family. It may not transform me into feeling "warm and fuzzy" about someone who is trying to kill me, but it challenges me to view even this person as one of God’s children. Most importantly, it’s a gift. I can’t make it happen. The best we can do is to long for the Spirit, pray for the Spirit, wait for the Spirit.

When S/He comes it will be possible to genuinely fulfill the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37–38) to love God, others, and ourselves. That’s a three-way intersection. As, by the gift of the Spirit, we forgive ourselves and learn to love ourselves, it will flow out to love for others, and in this God will be honored (loved).

I would like to close with a story of how this happened for a Ms. Barry Stevens. She tells of visiting a friend who was the only non-Indian living in a remote Navaho community. Her friend (who had no medical training) was called to assist in caring for an Indian woman who had gone into convulsions following the birth of her third child:

My friend sent the men to bring a bed and some other things from the government school and put them in the tent. She asked the men to move the woman to the bed. Then she got two pans of water and two wash cloths. She handed one of each to me, and started to wash the woman’s face. She nodded to me to wash the woman’s bloody thighs. I hesitated. It seemed an invasion of the woman’s privacy, this woman who could speak no English, to whom I could not express my feeling, and I did not know how she felt about me. But then my thinking stopped, and my humanness came through. Gently I washed her. I looked into her eyes and saw such trust in me to do what I could, not expecting more, and somehow this trust in me, a stranger from a race which had given her people so much trouble, overwhelmed me. I felt restored to me. All boundaries dissolved, then. There were all these dancing atoms and colors flowing, with shapes only dimly seen, and love was the only feeling that I had or knew. The washing continued but there was no blood, no flesh, only movement. My friend, the Navajo woman and I seemed to be not three persons but one, and I felt whole.1

This is one of the best examples I’ve encountered of Kahlil Gibran’s description of love:

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.2

Love is a three-way dance involving myself, the Spirit, and another of God’s children. When, like Barry Stevens, I am able to focus on the needs of one of his children, the Spirit will join the dance and we may seem to be not three persons but one. Then love will be a "moving sea" between all three of our souls and we will dance a dance of oneness with the Spirit. That’s how we "Walk the walk (dance the dance)" and not merely "Talk the talk."

Notes and References

1. C. R. Rogers and Barry Stevens, Person to Person: The Problem of Being Human (New York: Pocket Books, 1974), 277.
2. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Knopf, 1923), 15.

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