Love Transcending Limits

Desmond Tutu, late South African Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner, recalls a conversation he had in the late 1970s or early ‘80s with Malusi Mpumlwana, himself a future priest (and bishop in the Ethiopian Episcopal Church) but at that time a young activist against apartheid. He was very involved with community health and development work in impoverished black communities, work which drew the attention and ire of the South African government’s security forces. The police spied on him and his wife, harassed them and had arrested them on a number of occasions, holding them without trial and even torturing him. At the time of the story, Mpumlwana was under a five-year ban—a form of house arrest under which one could not speak publicly or meet with more than one person at a time. Tutu recalls, “He had somehow given the security police the slip and had come to Johannesburg and was with me in my office, where I was serving as General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. He said that during his frequent stints in detention, when the security police routinely tortured him, he used to think, “These are God’s children and yet they are behaving like animals. They need us to help them recover the humanity they have lost.” [Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, p. 51]
Mpumlwana refused revenge and responded instead with a spirit of kindness and generosity. It appears he had taken to heart the lesson Jesus taught in our Gospel reading: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”
To hate one’s enemies; to attempt to banish and hurt them; to seek revenge; to get even; to repay an eye for an eye, insult for insult, slight for slight, evil for evil—this is the way of the world. This is the normal way people act. I am reminded of Shylock’s famous lines in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. He, a persecuted and hated Jew trying to live in a Christian land, defends his actions by appealing to the common humanity he shares with his persecutors: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” [3.1.53-72] With those words, Shakespeare has simultaneously struck a blow against the commonplace anti-Semitism of Elizabethan England by underscoring the shared humanity of both Jew and Christian and also illustrated the shared sinfulness of all people. It seems that part of the common humanity that we all share is the capacity for hate and the desire for vengeance. Ironically, part of what we share is precisely the sinfulness that divides us. We are united in possessing that which separates us.
William Willimon tells of an occasion when he and a fellow professor walked out of the Duke Divinity school building and onto the university’s main quad professor. It was a fall day and Willimon recalls, “We had walked into the annual bacchanalian ‘Oktoberfest.’ Though it was early afternoon, the students had already begun drinking and carousing.” Somewhat out of the blue, his colleague asked, “Do you know what, for me, is the great proof of our Lord’s divinity?” Given the scene around them, Willimon was caught a bit off-guard. His colleague continued, “It is that passage where it is said of Jesus, ‘He looked upon the multitudes and had compassion.’ I look upon this pagan riotousness and want to thrash them with a stick!” Willimon says his colleague was kidding but his remark underscored the radical difference between how we view and treat one another and how Jesus viewed and treated people. [Willimon, Fear of the Other: No Fear in Love, p. 16-17]
I could multiply examples of our separation and antagonism, but that would only belabor the point we all understand only too well from watching the evening news and reading our newsfeeds; indeed, a point we very well understand from our own experience, both as the receivers of hate and mistreatment and also as those who, if we are honest, have at times disliked, feared and excluded those whom we view as the “other” or even the “enemy.”
Yes, this sort of fearful division, of antagonistic separation, is a universal human experience. But it is contrary to the Great commandments to love God and neighbor. The reality of our world stands in sharp contrast, indeed in opposition, to the Kingdom of God that Jesus preaches, which is a Beloved Community [MLK] in which God and all humanity are united in mutual care and cooperation.
How can we move toward such community? How can we become more like Jesus and keep his commandments? Only by loving—by being generous, by blessing others; by forgiving them; by praying for them—even, and especially, if they are our enemies. Only love creates community. Only love—seeking the good of others; caring for and valuing them; making space for them in your life and world to be who they are in all their otherness; seeing and defending their inestimable worth to God—only such love moves us toward the abundant life for which we were made. This is so because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly and wisely observed, “love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive powerchanges hearts and builds community. Love is the foundation of the Kingdom for God is love.
I think King has put his finger on exactly what Jesus is talking about in these difficult verses from the Sermon on the Plain. Susan Hylan points out that in first century Roman culture “relationships were built on exchanges of gifts. Friendships were forged between peers who could evenly reciprocate each other’s gifts.” [“Luke 6.27-38: Jesus is suggesting that his disciples should treat their enemies like friends. Instead of responding to insult with insult or violence with violence, do good to them, be generous with them, just as you would with a friend, just as you want someone to do to you. Break the cycle of hate and retribution. Take the first step toward a new relationship. Open the door. Perhaps your kindness will awaken something within the other person, perhaps they will respond in kind. And even if they don’t, we—by lending, loving, giving, forgiving, and showing mercy—are entering “into the very life of God,” the life we see revealed in the words and deeds of Jesus.
When Jesus tells his disciples to turn the other cheek, to do good, and to give expecting nothing in return, he is not telling them to allow others to walk all over them. He is not telling them to be passive in the face of abuse or aggression or injustice. Jesus is telling them, and us, to respond differently than expected, to seek by our actions to redefine the relationship. Most of Jesus’ original audience—and, indeed, most of Luke’s audience decades later—had very little in the way of social or economic power. But to forgive is an act of power, because it opens new possibilities. To do good to the enemy who has wronged you rewrites the narrative; the one who does good to an enemy takes the initiative in shaping the future story of the relationship instead of allowing the offender to dictate and direct the course of the story. We are to act not out of anger, but out of love. We are not to seek vengeance, but to seek the good of the other. This is revolutionary: loving the outcast, the stranger, the enemy is an act of resistance to and protest of the world as it is, an act that opens the door to God’s Kingdom.
Of course, Jesus’ examples presuppose a first-century cultural context and even within the same context every situation is unique. These verses should not be taken as a one-size-fits-all-situations playbook. Rather they point us toward what should be the controlling principle of all our interactions: love. Exactly how to love must be worked out, with the help of the Holy Spirit, according to circumstances.
And that is key: we cannot do this on our own. We need God’s help. After all, God is the reason we should love our enemies. Children are those like the parent. If we are to be children of the Most High God, we must act as God acts. And how does God act? God, Jesus says, is merciful and “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” to those who have done nothing to deserve kindness. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, makes it clear that “ungrateful and wicked” doesn’t simply apply to “them” but to all of us. He writes, “God proves God’s love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.… 10while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” [5.8, 10] We are all sinners, yet God shows us mercy and reaches out to us in love. “God loves [God’s] enemies,” and, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, “that is the glory of [God’s] love.” We, as God’s children, must do the same.
On the back of your bulletins, you will find a brief sketch of the life of Corrie ten Boom. Beginning in 1942, her family, Dutch Christians, hid Jews in their home to protect them from the Nazis. They were caught in 1944. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to Ravensbrück. Betsie died there and Corrie only survived because of a clerical error that resulted in her release a mere 10 days before the other women of her age were all murdered. Throughout the ordeal, Corrie and Betsie tried diligently to keep Jesus’ commandment to love everyone and made it their goal to spread love of God and neighbor.
This essay on our bulletin reminded me of a story about Corrie ten Boom which Susan Robb related in a book we used for our Lenten Study several years ago. Just a few years after the war, in 1947, Corrie was speaking at a church in Germany. She told the congregation, “When we confess our sins, God casts them into the deepest ocean. Gone forever.” As folks were leaving the church, she was approached by a man who extended his hand to her and said, “How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”
Then, to her horror, he said, “I was a guard [at Ravensbrück], but since that time I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well.” He again extended his hand to her and asked, “Will you forgive me?”
Corrie ten Boom said that responding to his request was the hardest thing she had ever done. She did not feel like forgiving the man. A part of her didn’t want to do so. She had suffered greatly at the camp and her sister and many others had died. But she prayed silently, “Jesus, help me. I can lift my hand…You supply the feeling.”
Though it was forced, as she reached out her hand toward the guard’s, and as they touched, she said something remarkable happened. A healing warmth raced down her arm and flooded her entire being, bringing her to tears. “I forgive you, brother! With all my heart!” Corrie said she had never experienced God’s love so intensely as she did in that moment
To forgive and seek the good of those who have wronged us, that is Christian love.
Loving our enemies, like Malusi Mpumlwana and Corrie ten Boom, is not easy. It is not our natural or normal way of acting. Loving our enemies is the hardest thing Jesus teaches us to do. It is also the most quintessentially Christian thing to do. Indeed, the great scholar of world religions, Huston Smith, claimed that love of enemies was the ethical teaching which makes Christianity unique from all other religions. Loving the other, loving and forgiving the enemy—this is simultaneously the most difficult and the most Christ-like thing we are called to do. We can only do it with God’s help. So let us pray that the Holy Spirit might dwell in us and transform us, by pouring the love of God into our hearts, filling us with courage, and inspiring us with creativity so that we may love as God loves. Let us seek the grace to be merciful to even our enemies, giving generously, forgiving freely, and blessing them with words of kindness and deeds of friendship. For then, we will have truly learned the lesson Jesus taught; then we will truly be children of our Gracious, Loving, Merciful, and Generous God. Amen.