Enemies are enemies by the way we exclude them from the love of God. When we love with God’s love we can no longer divide people into those who deserve God’s love and those who don’t. When we come to know God’s first love nobody can be excluded from that love.
Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend…By its very nature, love creates and builds up.” He said, “Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.”
Abraham Lincoln said, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
These are very powerful words.
Indeed, we are called to love our fellow human beings with a divine love, with the love of God. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
“If you love those who love you, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners love those who love them. Instead love your enemies and do good, and lend without any hope of return” (Luke 6:32–35).
Love people as God loves. We can do this when we are solidly rooted in our own love, which is God’s love.
Notice for a moment that the enemy is the one who finally destroys us. Hating the enemy costs us. We often allow the enemy to have power over us.
I have noticed in my own life that people I don’t like have power over me because I am always thinking about them. They preoccupy me and have control over my thinking. I find myself jealous, resentful, and vengeful. I lose peace. I am holding on to these people as my enemies.
Loving our enemies is the way of becoming free of our enemies. We free ourselves by letting go, by loving them, by caring for them.
One of the most beautiful things is that when we let the enemy go out of our heart by love and forgiveness, we are suddenly free to let that unlimited, all-embracing love of God pour into us. We become a new person every time we forgive an enemy, because we let go of the angry person inside who was holding on to fear.
The core of our faith is to be free people—free from the power we give to our enemies, free to love every human being with the divine love that always forgives, seven times seven and seven again.
The enemy remains the enemy only as long as we have not yet fully seen the love of God. Feelings of hatred, rejection, jealousy, and resentment enslave us in our self-made prison of fear. We become the victims of our self-made enemy. But every time we are able to forgive, and no longer define ourselves over and against the other, we enter deep into the House of God, which is the House of Love. Love of enemies becomes the way to knowing God as the God of the first love.
How Can We Respond to Jesus’ Challenge to Love Our Enemies?
There are two very concrete things we can do.
Pray for your enemies.
People are not all that interested in praying for people they don’t like. But try it! Pray for people that you do not like. You really have to work at it.
“Jesus, I pray for him whom I can’t stand at all.”
The enemy is an internal presence, so we are dealing with something very intimate to us.
It is very important. Go to prayer and pray. Pray for your enemies because when you do you are acting out God’s love.
Prayers for our enemy can open the way to a new divine knowledge of the basic unity of the human family.
Do concrete acts of forgiveness and service.
Members of the Christian community, whether it is in marriage or friendship or larger communities, can stay together if they can confess and forgive as a way of life.
Do not wait until you feel better about things. No! You should do it precisely when you don’t feel better. Act ahead of the feelings. Do not let emotions decide what you are going to do.
We have a knowledge of God’s love. We know that God loves this person as much as God loves us. We know that God loves this person as intimately as us. We may not believe it, but it doesn’t matter. We are making concrete actions of forgiveness even when our feelings are ambivalent.
Return to the knowledge of the first love that was there before your feelings got hurt. The act of forgiveness will shake your whole life.
What words do we choose when we speak to a person we don’t like? We are still filled with anger and hurt, but we say a few things to him or her that indicate our desire to restore connection with them even when we don’t get anything in return. We know that God loves this person as much as God loves us. Let’s remind ourselves of that truth, that true revelation. This is where loving our enemy starts.
Loving our enemies starts with small, concrete, particular actions in the direction of our knowledge. It does not start in the direction of our feelings. We can act according to what we know. We know that God loves us. We can trust our knowledge and eventually our feelings will catch up. The feelings follow our knowledge. In a world where feelings have become so dominant this is an important spiritual truth to remember.
Let us think about it. How can we begin to grow in God’s love and love one another with that divine love?
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FOLLOWING JESUS IS a movement away from “just wandering around” or “just sitting there.” A lot of us live a life in which we do a lot of wandering—physical wandering or mental wandering—in many directions, or we sit there not knowing what to do with our life. There is a certain fatigue there. Following Jesus means moving in the right direction. Suddenly we know where we are going, and our lives take on a more regular pattern and we have more focus.
Following Jesus also means something other than being drawn into a movement, even a good one. It can be a very good movement because we can find some help there for our emotional life. But following Jesus is not just about finding a way to handle our emotions or our self. It is a different movement. It is in fact a letting go of our worldly self to find our true self in Jesus.
And contrary to popular opinion we are not called to imitate Jesus. We are called to form a community of people who through different ways reflect the great love of Jesus. Not one of us can reflect the fullness of that love. Therefore following Jesus means something different for each of us. There are many forms and shapes in this pursuit. The exciting thing about Christian community is that we have so many ways to be a disciple; we can be an activist or a contemplative. We can embody both. There are different ways we can live out God’s love. Some of us are very passionate, others are more quiet and hardly noticeable.
Following Jesus does not mean to be carried by Jesus either. Following Jesus does not mean that Jesus picks us up from the ground. Oftentimes we say, “I follow Jesus, so everything is fine,” or “I have prayed to Jesus and you’ll be fine.” But, as many of us know, it’s not that simple.
Sometimes there is an eagerness in us, or around us, to turn Jesus into a problem solver. We think he will solve all our problems, and if all our problems are not solved we don’t have enough faith. That is not really Jesus’ intent. At least that is not what is in the Gospel. Jesus is not there to get us out of hot water. He is not the cure-all for our difficulties. Jesus is not the end of the hard times in our lives. That is not what Jesus is.
To follow Jesus means that we do the walking. We are the ones doing the talking, living life, getting involved. We are the ones struggling, the ones who need to work hard. Jesus, in a way, does not take away the difficulties of our journey. I even dare to say that, following Jesus means everything changes while everything remains the same. You know very well that followers of Jesus—disciples—are people who live real human lives. The work of life does not come easier to them because they are disciples.
Life, as many of us know, can actually become more difficult—more painful—when we choose to follow Jesus. Yet at the same time we gain a certain strength because we no longer live our life or our agony alone. We no longer live our struggle in isolation. We no longer live our
pains as if nobody cares. Indeed, following Jesus means walking in his path, taking steps behind the One who shows us the way in our dark, broken, painful world.
Following Jesus means to live our life in companionship with the One who understands us fully. “Companion,” from the Old French compaignon, literally means “one who breaks bread with another,” based on the Latin com, “together with,” and panis, “bread.”
Following Jesus means a life in communion, with a guide.
It makes an enormous difference whether we struggle alone or together. To know that our life is still a struggle but no longer a lonely struggle is a new experience entirely. Following Jesus makes life very different and very new.
When we walk with Jesus we can know that we have a fellow traveler, someone-with-us. Jesus is God-with-us, the one we can trust with our whole life, the one who shows us the way.
Lord Jesus,
Free me from the many things that occupy and preoccupy me. Help me just to be with you. To pray with you, glorify you, thank you, worship you. I want to be attentive, more ready to hear you, more willing to understand the mystery of your birth and life, your dying and your rising. Make me still, Lord, make me quiet, and speak to me in that silence.
AMEN
* Nouwen uses the word “guts” in the Greek meaning of the word. In Greek, splagchnizomai means to be moved as to one’s bowels, hence to be moved with compassion, have compassion (for the bowels were thought to be the seat of love and pity).
CHAPTER FOUR
THE COST
“Take Up Your Cross”
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
MATTHEW 11:28–30
All that exists, heaven and earth, was created by God’s word. There is nothing that is not spoken by God. God has spoken the Word and through the Word of God everything has life.
All that exists is created by the Word of God. God has spoken to us.
The Word of God—Jesus—became flesh, became one among us, living in a small town in a small country, somewhere on one of the planets in our solar system. The Word through which all is created became a person called Jesus.
What this means is so beautifully expressed by St. Paul when he says that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, did not cling to his divine privileges of being the One in whom all is created, but emptied himself and became as one of us. And more than that, he not only became as one of us, but he was obedient to death, a death on the cross.
God in whom all is created stripped himself of his divinity. That is, he didn’t cling to divine privileges; he chose to become One among us. He was One who wanted to live our life to the full extent of what that means. That is, One who wanted to die with us. One that wanted to experience our human condition in the body. One that wanted to go with us to the absurdity of death.
Death is so absurd. Who of us can really grasp it? We want life and yet there is a certainty of death. God wanted to enter with us into that absurdity of death and feel the human condition more fully and more totally than we ourselves can.
He made it visible by dying the most absurd death. The Holy One nailed naked on a cross between two criminals. That is the unspeakable mystery that we as Christians believe.
But do we really?
God in whom all is created was hung as if he were a sinner on the cross. He is cast out and destroyed. And, in that way, God became more deeply united with humanity than we ourselves can believe.
I want you to hear this one sentence. It is very important. It comes from the Gospel of John. “When I am lifted up from the earth,” Jesus says (as on the cross and also as lifted up in the resurrection), “I shall draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). This means that the divine movement of death and resurrection is a movement in which all human flesh has been lifted up. It means that all humanity has been drawn into that mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. It means that in Jesus’ death all human mortality, brokenness, illness, sickness, confusion, agony, and loneliness have been embraced. It means that there is no human being anywhere in the world who is not lifted up on the cross with Jesus.
If it is true that Jesus on the cross is the Word in whom all is created, then we are all lifted up with Christ on the cross. All of human flesh—whether we are children, teenagers, young adults, mature people, elderly people; whether we are from the United States, Russia, Asia, Africa, Ireland, Nicaragua; whether we are prisoners or free people; whether we are people at war or people at peace; whether we are poor people or rich people—are all lifted up in that event on Golgotha. Not just people of this world here and now, but also the people of the generations, people from the centuries before Christ and also centuries ahead of us, of which we don’t know the end. All the people—past, present, and future—have been lifted up in that mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.
All of humanity has been nailed on the cross. There is no suffering, whether it is loneliness, anger, pain, or rejection, that has not been suffered by God. Because of that, we, with our anger, with our pain, with our struggles, are in God and lifted up through the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Risen Lord is the Lord in whose body we have been gathered. All of humanity.
There is great hope in this understanding. This is the secret to seeing Jesus as the manifestation of God’s compassion.
Do you know where the word “compassion” comes from? It comes from the Latin com, which means “with,” and passio, “to suffer.” “To suffer with” is compassion. Jesus manifests to us that God is a God who suffers with all of us. There is no human suffering in you or anyone else in the world that has not been suffered by God. Consolation begins with this knowing. God is suffering all human suffering.
In the Old Testament the Hebrew word for compassion is rachuwm. That word is taken from the root word rechem, which means “womb.” God, hence, is a mother who suffers the suffering of her children in her womb.
In the Gospel, in the original Greek, when Jesus says he had pity, the text really says he had compassion. He felt the agony and pain of the people in his guts, in his viscera, in his interior organs. He suffered so deeply, he was so moved, that when he saw the widow of Nain and her child who was to be buried, he had compassion (Luke 7:11–17). He experienced the agony and pain of this mother, this widow, this lonely woman, so deeply that he raised the child from the dead. His compassion became a movement of life.
The great event in Nain is not so important because Jesus performed a miracle. The great event is that Jesus felt the suffering of that woman—as deeply as that woman herself felt it—and therefore it became a movement, a movement of life. It was a suffering with this woman in unity that was life-giving and that brought the child back again as a gift to his mother.
God’s compassion for all human suffering is exactly what becomes visible on the cross. What this means is that we are called to see God’s suffering in the people. Every time we see someone in pain and we wonder how that person is going to live through it, know that God suffered that pain and is suffering that pain with that person. In a way, the whole of history is the showing of the depth of God’s suffering. From a Christian perspective, history is the unfolding of the intensity and immensity of God’s suffering, but also of God’s resurrection, because in the midst of all the suffering, you can see signs of hope again and again and again.
Our Cross
If we follow the news in the morning we might wonder how anyone can eat their breakfast and go to work. There is so much pain in all the reports. I think to myself, “If I take this really seriously how can I ever do anything?” I hear about war, famine, terrorism, and environmental disasters, and I think, “If I focus too much on this, how can I live?” Some
times the only way to survive is to become numb and say, “I can’t pay attention to all that. It is too much. It is beyond my control. I’ve got my own problems.”
Or there is anger. If, for example, on Sunday morning the minister talks about all the problems of the world and all week long we have been hearing about them, and then on Sunday morning they are there again, we feel powerless. “What do you want us to do about it?” We get upset, nervous, and angry, and it doesn’t help anyone and often leads to inaction on our part. We might even want to shout, “Why can’t you say some nice things instead?”
Confrontation with human suffering does not lead to compassion. It leads to anger, numbness, irritation, and rejection, because we don’t know how to deal with it all. It is too much. It is a heavy burden—more than we can carry.
Then there are the small sufferings that become a heavy burden. These sufferings can sometimes be worse and have more power over us.
These are the small things that can just get to us and bother us the whole day. They can occupy us—an irritating boss, traffic, an unfriendly gesture, a word of rejection, mistakes at work. These are small things, but they can take our joy away. The little things become heavy burdens because they occupy us and take a place in our heart.
Then we feel overburdened. We often say, “If I just had that thing gone I’d be fine.” But there is always just one thing. Everybody has some thorn in the flesh. Everyone has something that makes them suffer in some way. Though it may not be apparent at first, every human heart carries a deep pain. Sometimes the small crosses seem even harder to bear than the large crosses. The church is supposed to be so full of love, but sometimes in a church there are people who hate each other. In your circle and community there is jealousy and anger and it seems to be unbearable. Just where you expect love there is conflict and pain.
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