Our nation has been deeply divided these past decades, and each year this division grows deeper and more hateful. Many people see those on the other side of our great political divide as their enemies. On this weekend that we honor Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) we would do well to pay attention to his message of forgiveness, love, and reconciliation. This was King’s constant theme, it is the way of life that King learned from our Lord Jesus Christ, and it changed America. Once again, we need change and healing, and once again, we need Jesus. We all, always need Jesus. This sermon (with some editing) was one of many that King gave on the subject. It is from his book Strength to Love, a collection of his sermons published in 1963 (pp. 47-55). The sermon was written while King was in jail; one of seventeen times he was put in jail by his enemies for refusing to obey unjust laws.
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Matthew 5:43-45 — (Jesus said), “Ye have heard it said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.’ But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be children of your Father which is in heaven.”
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Probably no admonition of Jesus has been more difficult to follow than this command to “love your enemies.” Some have sincerely felt that its actual practice is not possible. It is easy, they say, to love those who love you, but how can one love those who openly and insidiously seek to defeat you? Others have said that Jesus’ exhortation to love one’s enemies is testimony to the fact that the Christian ethic is designed for the weak and cowardly, and not for the strong and courageous. Jesus, they say, was an impractical idealist.
In spite of these objections, this command of Jesus challenges us with new urgency. Upheaval after upheaval has reminded us that we are traveling along a road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the impossible words of a dreamer, the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love, even for enemies, is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.
I am certain that Jesus understood the difficulty inherent in the act of loving one’s enemy. He never joined the ranks of those who talk glibly about the easiness of the moral life. He knew that every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God. So, when Jesus said “Love your enemy,” he was not unmindful of how tough that would be. Yet he meant every word of it. Our responsibility as Christians is to discover the meaning of this command and seek passionately to live it out in our daily lives.
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Let us be practical and ask the question: How do we love our enemies?
First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who does not have the power to forgive, will not have the power to love. It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one’s enemies without the prior acceptance of the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us. It is also necessary to realize that the forgiving act must always be initiated by the person who has been wronged, the victim of some great hurt, the recipient of some tortuous injustice, the absorber of some terrible act of oppression. The wrongdoer may request forgiveness, but only the injured one can really pour out the warm waters of forgiveness.
Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness creates the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden, and the cancelling of a debt. The words “I will forgive you, but I’ll never forget what you’ve done” never explain the real nature of forgiveness. Certainly, one can never forget, if that means erasing it totally from his mind. But when we forgive, we forget in the sense that the evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship. Likewise, we can never say, “I will forgive you, but I won’t have anything further to do with you.” Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no man can love his enemies.
Second, we must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy. Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. A persistent civil war rages within all of our lives. Something within us causes us to lament with Ovid “I see and approve the better things, but follow worse;” or to agree with Plato that human personality is like a charioteer having two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in a different direction; or, to repeat with the Apostle Paul, “The good that I want to do, I do not do: but the evil which I hate, that is what I do.”
This simply means that there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness, and we can know that the viciousness and evilness of his acts do not represent all that he is. We see him in a new light. We recognize that his hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God’s image is still etched in his being. Then, we can love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love.
Third, we must not seek to humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding. Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy, and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by impenetrable walls of hate. (continued…)
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