A Sermon for our Time – for All Time
For Christ, there are no enemies. So said St Silouan, the great elder of Mount Athos who saw this teaching of Jesus as the touchstone of our spiritual health. He said that our deepest states of contemplation are of no worth if they do not lead to love of enemies. This is a hard teaching and one that the late Christopher Hitchens famously described as immoral: for him, enemies are to be destroyed before they destroy us, because they are in the wrong and we are in the right. And it seems that this binary view of the world is gaining ground at an alarming rate – enemies are easily, quickly and decisively identified and we should have nothing at all to do with them.
So where does Jesus’s teaching come from? Surely he is not implying that there is no conflict in the world, that we should all just get along and that our differences of perspective and of values are of no consequence? Jesus is profoundly aware of the distances between us, of the ruptures in our relationships, of the harm that people are capable of inflicting on one another. But he turns no one away. He sits with conmen and collaborators. He praises the Samaritan heretic and the Syrian general. He even asks forgiveness for his torturers. He turns no one away because each one is sick and in need of a physician.
The call to love our enemy comes from the simple truth that no one falls outside the scope of God’s love. So what does it mean in practice for us? Can this ever be a command that could operate in the political realm? I suspect that it is almost entirely directed towards the individual disciple but that doesn’t mean that it has no wider impact. All the same, even at the individual level, this is an enormous demand on us. Those who study human relationships from a purely scientific, and therefore very partial angle tell us that any one of us is only able to love around 150 people in any meaningful way. Their conclusion is that we simply don’t have the time, capacity and energy to form more than this number of significant relationships. But I don’t think Jesus is literally asking us to become best friends with our enemies or take them into our home as a new member of the family.
To love our enemy is to regard them differently. It is to see them in their humanity and their need, and as of no less value in the eyes of God than I am. It is to ask if the standards by which I consider that person to be an enemy align with those of the Gospel. Above all, it is to strive to remove anything that limits our compassion for any one of God’s children. Without the grace of God, this is almost certainly beyond our reach, so we can but strive and pray.
Fr John McLuckie, Sunday, February 23
