LUKE 6:27–35
“Love your enemies” is probably the call that is most central to the whole Christian message. It touches precisely that place where the New Testament is really new. It is an idea that breaks through history through Jesus. It is a challenge that Jesus presents to us. But we have a very poor and somewhat distorted view of what love is. To talk about loving our enemies, we must first speak about loving our friends.
Love
When I think about how I live my life, and how others live theirs, I am amazed by how enormously needy I am. I am in need of affection. I am in need of attention. I am in need of affirmation. I am in need of praise. I am in need of influence, power, and success. I sense how strong these needs are in me and how strong they are in others.
They are, in fact, so strong that often we find ourselves setting up our lives to satisfy them. There is a tragic quality to living this way. You might have noticed it yourself. As soon as a need is satisfied we discover it is not enough. As soon as we get the praise that we prayed for and someone says, “You are the most beautiful person I have ever met,” we think to ourselves, “Is that really true? Does she say that to everyone?” Or if someone says, “You are wonderful. That thing you did, the movie you produced, the paper you wrote is fantastic,” it creates anxiety, because now we have to live up to an expectation. People become more and more nervous the more famous they are. They are afraid to lose what they have carefully built up.
I spent time in San Francisco and Los Angeles with filmmakers and people who were in show business. I was amazed at how everyone was in constant need of hearing how great they were. It seemed like there was no end to that need. If you told them they were great it was never enough. Even people who were at the top of their success, who had won Oscars and other prizes, were still not happy. They had still not received enough affirmation. You say to them, “You are the greatest of all!” and they say, “You say that today, but what about tomorrow?”
Even people who are immensely praised and have made an enormous amount of money, who have awards, success, and applause, can be deeply depressed. If you get closer and you prick the balloon, you realize they are just as insecure as everyone else. Underneath all that wealth, all that success, and all that praise, they are still a little person who asks, “Do you love me?”
We hear about people who die by suicide at the top of their careers. You ask, “How could that happen? They are rich, famous, and successful,” and you realize that he or she was living in a way that was so tense that it became unbearable.
Our needs are enormous. The need for affection and success is very deep for many people. It is amazing how strong it is. I often wonder if people really like me and if they like what I am doing. It’s awful! I can’t get away from it. I give a sermon about humility and the first question I ask myself is whether people liked it!
Why are we so needy?
Where does the neediness come from?
It comes from an experience of woundedness. We are wounded people. We have been wounded in such a way that we question our worth. We have doubts about ourselves. We ask, “Am I worthy of being?” “Am I making a contribution to the human family?” “Am I part of anything?”
We might not express it this way, but somewhere we feel rejected. Somewhere very deep we feel we are not quite acceptable. We point to our mother, father, brother, church, or school and say, “I am so angry about what happened to me,” “I am still struggling for self-respect because my father always put me down,” “My mother didn’t have a great affection for me because she liked her other children more than me,” “The church made me feel bad about myself.”
Out of that feeling of woundedness we become very needy. We are desperately looking for that final feeling of being okay. We have a deep feeling that we are not acceptable. We point to certain events or people to blame while we know in our hearts that there is another explanation.
There is a problem with this need. It can become violent. Our loneliness, our self-doubt, and our inner anguish can be so great that we try to force people to love us. “Please love me. Please tell me that I am okay.” Then, what is meant to be an expression of affection can become demanding. In a world where people are so in need of affirmation they can start grabbing, biting, slapping, and hitting out of their need. Prisons are full of people who committed crimes just to get attention, even if it is the most negative kind.
Our needs can lead to wounds. We can wound people with our needs because we often force people to give something they do not have. We force people to be God for us. When we make other people into God we become demons ourselves. That is where the struggle is. Needs lead to wounds and the wounds create new needs, and on and on it goes. If we ask, “Where do my needs come from?” we realize that our wounds come from someone in the past who hurt us because that other person was so needy.
In response, we might say, “I am not going to do anything with my needs in that way.” We don’t want to hurt anybody. But before we know it, our children say, “I feel unseen by you.” Or our friends say, “I am disappointed in you.” Or our partner says, “You don’t give me all I really need. After so many years of marriage there is still this unfulfilled place between us.” There is enormous pain, because the people who feel hurt by us are those we love deeply. Somehow we couldn’t avoid it. We feel sad about it. We see that the interlocking network of wounds and needs goes into the future too.
But what exactly is the wound we experience?
Rejection. The wound is the experience of not being fully loved. A wounded person is a person who deeply in his or her heart doesn’t know that he or she is truly loved.
The words of Jesus speak directly to this human condition. Jesus wants to free us from the chain that imprisons us. He wants to free us by revealing that we are loved before we can give or receive love from anybody. Jesus came to reveal to us the first love. The original love. We are called by Jesus to come in touch with that first love.
The first love says, “I loved you before you could love anyone or before you could receive love from anyone. I have accepted you. You are accepted. You are loved no matter what mother, father, brother, sister, school, church, society does. You are born out of my love. I have breathed you out of my love. I have spoken you out of my love. You are the incarnation of my love and in me there is no hatred, there is no revenge, there is no resentment. There is nothing that wants to reject you. I love you. Can you trust that love?”
The original love is the original blessing.
The original love is the original acceptance.
Long before we talk about original sin or original rejection we should speak of God’s original love.
It is God’s love that allows us to love one another. It is that first love that is the basis for all creative human relationships. It is that love that we want to make visible to each other, among each other, and with each other.
Jesus said, “Love one another because I have loved you first.”
The whole spiritual life is a life where we come in touch with that first love. As soon as we touch that place of the first love we begin to slowly become free from the chain of needs and wounds that holds us imprisoned.
The spiritual life is really a life that wants to make us free. Free to love.
Jesus meets the woman who pours ointment on his feet and wipes them with her hair. Jesus says she must have been forgiven because she loves so much (Luke 7:36–48). What this means is that she has understood how much she is loved, and this knowledge has set her free to love Jesus with all her heart.
When we come in touch with the first love we come in touch with that center of our being where we feel totally loved without condition or limits. When we come in touch with the first love we are free to love people without asking for anything in return.
That is not what worldly love is all about.
Worldly love is a transaction. The transactional quality of worldly love is precisely why people are always in trouble. If they give something they expect something in return. This is where the conflicts come from. This is where the hostility comes from. This is where the anger, jealousy, resentment, and revenge come from. This understanding of love is where the whole human chaos comes from.
Jesus says, “Give without expecting anything in return” (Luke 6:34–35).
Jesus doesn’t want us to be masochists who do nice things for others and say, “Oh no, you don’t have to give anything back. I’ll just be miserable about it.”
No. Jesus says, “You are loved so much that you don’t even have to think about little returns.”
How do we know this love?
Through prayer. We have to pray in order to let the first love touch us so that we can know it again.
We pray to know not only in our head, but in our heart, and in the center of our being that we are fully loved. That is why we pray. We pray so we can walk around this world and not be so needy, not be wounding others, and not be giving so we can get something in return. We pray to be free.
If we really hear this, if we can really feel this somewhere in our guts,* then we are really getting somewhere, because this is, I think, where Jesus is most challenging.
Following Jesus means to live a life in which we start loving one another with God’s original love and not with the needy and wounded love that harms others. Original love is a love that has the power to love enemies as well as friends. It is a divine love that makes us “sons and daughters of the Most High, who is kind to the grateful and the wicked…who causes the sun to rise on bad people as well as the good, and the rain to fall on honest and dishonest people” (Matthew 5:45).
How do we participate in this divine love?
Let’s try to answer that by exploring some ideas about marriage, friendship, and community. I sense that for many people their interpersonal relationships are what count the most but can also be what can cause the most harm.
Love of Friends
Marriage often goes like this: “I love you. You love me. I feel very attracted to you. Let’s get together. We really are quite compatible. Why don’t we try to live together and maybe we can form a team. Maybe we can even get married.”
After several years, one of you says, “I really want to get to know you. I still have this feeling that you haven’t let me know all about yourself.” The other person might say, “I am trying really hard and I have shared all I have to share. I have given all I have to give.” And the other says, “I am feeling quite lonely with you. Somehow you are not taking our marriage seriously enough.” Then stresses and tension increase and one of you says, “Well, maybe we should have a little distance.” Then one of you says, “Let’s try again. We should ask for some help…”
There is a kind of hopelessness to this kind of love. We cling to one another and our demands become oppressive and desperate.
We tend to think that love begins and ends with our interpersonal relationships. This is not true according to scripture. Love of others begins with our relationship with God.
We can love others because the “I” in our innermost self has heard the first love—which is God’s unconditional, unlimited love. When we come together in relationships, we recognize that others are also loved with the first love. The first love incarnates in different ways in every person and calls us together to build a new home, a new community, a new dwelling place for God in this world. This is what marriage is all about. This is what friendship is about. This is what community is about. True relationships among people point to God.
Scripture tells us that human relationships, whether in friendship, marriage, or community, mean that two people discover that they belong to a love that is greater than each of them can contain and to which they both point.
Relationships point away from ourselves to the larger love that embraces us. In marriage we say, “We have a bond together not just because we have a good interpersonal relationship, but because we have recognized that God has called us together as a new way of making God’s love visible in this world. By coming together and building a home we can receive new people, we can be hospitable. We can create space for children, for friends. It is a space that points to the One who calls us together.”
Marriage is not that two people love each other so much that they can find God in each other, but that God loves them so much that they can discover each other as living reminders of God’s presence.
Marriage is the mystery that God loves us so much that we can discover together how God’s presence can be made visible here and now by our commitment to each other. Our faithfulness becomes possible not because we stay the same or stay together, not because we are compatible or that we have the same life goals, but because God holds us together in that first love.
Let me try to say it differently. Love, as Jesus reveals it to us, is a relationship between persons. The word “person” is a wonderful word. It comes from the Latin words per, which means “through,” and sonare, which means “to sound.” A person is someone who is sounding through.
What are we sounding through? We are sounding through a greater love than we ourselves can contain. When we say to somebody, “I love you,” that really means, “You are a window through which I can get a glimpse of the infinite love of God.” If we say, “I really love you,” it doesn’t mean that the person gives us all that we need; it means, “You bring me in touch with the God that I have already met in the depth of my heart. You are sounding through to me the love that I have in my heart. I am sounding through for you the love you already recognize in your heart.” This is really what all intimate relationships are about.
Love between a man and a woman, between a man and a man, between a woman and a woman, and between people in communities is a love among persons who are sounding through God’s infinite, unlimited, unconditional love. We broken, limited persons are windows on the unlimited, unconditional, unbroken, perfect love of God.
Some people say, “You have to see God in the other,” or “You must see God in the world.” I don’t think we can see God in the world. I, Henri Nouwen, can’t see anything! However, if I have discovered God in my heart and God in my solitude, then the God in me can discover the God in you. It is a whole different way of seeing. We discover that we are both loved by the same God and can come together to celebrate that love in whatever way God calls us.
If we know that first love, if we dwell in the House of God, then the presence of God in us can recognize the presence of God in the other. Conversely, if we have a demon in our heart we will see demons all around us. If we have dark forces in us, we will see dark forces all over the place. People with a dark heart see other people with a dark heart. Darkness speaks to darkness. Evil speaks to evil. But love speaks to love and God speaks to God.
The Christian life—following Jesus in a life of discipleship—is about discovering how God’s presence can be made visible here and now by our love for each other. Friendship, marriage, and community are all different ways to reveal to one another the original, all-embracing love of God.
Love of Enemies
It has been said that the love of enemies is the criterion of holiness. It’s true. If we love our enemies we are on the way to holiness. Staretz Silouan (1866–1938), one of the famous orthodox monks living on Mt. Athos in Greece, kept saying that. He said, “If you pray for your enemies peace will come to you, and when you love your enemies take for certain that Grace brings Divine Love to you.”
Love of enemies is a dominant characteristic of Jesus’ life. Remember what he said on the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34). Remember St. Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity, who in death asked God to forgive his enemies. He said, “Lord, do not hold this sin agai
nst them” (Acts 7:60). Speaking words of forgiveness is where the love of enemies becomes visible.
What is an enemy?
An enemy is someone we have defined as being against us in contrast to someone who is for us. Many of us have a strange need to divide the world up into people who are for us and those who are against us.
Even more strange is that our identity is often dependent on having enemies. We don’t exist without an enemy. We define ourselves by what we are opposed to. We define the enemy and the enemy is there to define us.
This kind of self-identity is built on the great illusion that we are what people say to us or what people do to us. The great illusion is that our identity, our selfhood, depends on our friends and our enemies, on those who like us and those who don’t like us. This is the great lie.
The good news of the Gospel is that God has no enemies. The Gospel tells us that God loves every human being the same way and with the same intensive love. God’s love touches “not only the good but the wicked” (1 Peter 2:18). “The rain falls on those who are good and those who are bad.” God does not make distinctions. God’s love is universal.
We Are Challenged
It is very important for us to realize that if we indeed want to love one another with God’s love and not with our wounded, needy love, then we are called to make our enemies, again and again and again, into friends.
Following Jesus Page 4