Love Your Enemies

Some say he’s now in paradise, enjoying the ministrations of 72 virgin handmaidens. Others are sure that God has thrown his soul into the depths of hell. Some doubt that he’s dead at all and reckon it’s all a conspiracy cooked up by the powers that be.

Some are pleased that justice has finally been done. Others argue that by killing him in this way, justice has not been done.

The death of Osama Bin Laden last weekend is one of those events that provokes a kaleidoscope of reactions and if you’ve had an eye on the media this week you’ll have seen the colourful fragments of opinion tumbling and forming and re-forming on your screen as the story is given twist after twist after twist.
And for all that it’s being presented as something of momentous importance, I’m not sure that Bin Laden’s death has really changed very much.

The hatred he represented is still at large; the myriad forces that spoil and deform our world are still at work in the boardroom and the corridors of power and the back alleys protected by gunmen.

Few believe that this is the end of anything other than the man himself. But for the few days that this story has been headline news we’ve had a rare opportunity to reflect on a matter of grave importance. A matter on which Jesus had something to say. How do we deal with our enemies? What should we wish for them?
As I’ve thought about that question this week, some other scenarios and images have come to mind.

I thought of the snarl on Neil Lennon’s face as he and Ally McCoist exchanged words after that recent Old Firm game, and the attempts someone’s been making to kill or maim him by sending him parcel bombs.

And I thought of our beloved General Assembly where next week the battle lines will be re-drawn as those gathered in Edinburgh will debate, among other things, the Special Commission’s report on Same Sex relationships and the ministry.

And we’re at a place now where, depending on the Assembly’s ruling, some may decide that they have to leave the Church of Scotland. Some may leave because we’re not supporting gay clergy, others may leave because we are. There’s a genuine possibility of schism next week and we should be facing that prospect with a heavy heart.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s important as your minister to say that I can stay with the Church of Scotland regardless of the Assembly’s ruling, as long as they maintain a ministers’ right to freedom of conscience and interpretation in these matters. If they start enforcing dogma on highly debateable subjects like this, I may have to think again.

But I digress.

We’re thinking about enemies this morning.

How does the world train us to deal with our enemies?

Well, by and large it trains us to return hatred for hatred.

In extreme circumstances, we take the enemy out. You killed our people, so we will put a bullet in your head. You bombed our country so we’ll bomb yours.

But where bullets and bombs aren’t the currency we deal in, we take them out in a host of other ways. We kill them, or their reputations, with our words. We say what’s designed to hurt or threaten or ridicule. We look for opportunities to get one-up on them or make them feel small. We shout down their arguments without actually listening to them.

And when, as often happens, the heat goes out of a situation, but the enmity remains, we settle into patterns of ignoring one another. We avoid, we minimise contact, we close down on conversation. As far as we’re able to, we live as though the enemy didn’t exist.

So that’s the world’s way of dealing with your enemies. A spectrum ranging from a bullet in the head, to doing your level best to ignore them. That’s what we are discipled in from the cradle to the grave. That’s the best we can do by ourselves, it seems.

But there is another way. A way that’s far far harder, but that leads, in the end, to a better outcome.

Even in the midst of the blood and gore of the Old Testament, we see glimmers of that other way, shining like a golden thread: running all the way through the fabric of the story ‘til it reaches its full expression in the life and teaching of Jesus. It’s the glimmer of God’s surprising mercy.

We looked at this one a few months back. Adam and Eve transgress and get banished from the garden as God’s enemies. What does he do next? The author of Genesis tells us that he makes clothes for them! They are not forgotten. They’re still within the compass of his care.


Moses and the Israelites escape from Egypt, leaving Pharaoh and his people floundering in their wake. But in the annual celebration of the Passover event – Israel’s great deliverance - the suffering of the Egyptians is also remembered.


The second cup of wine in the Passover feast is filled only half-way; Israel’s gladness, say the rabbis, is diminished by any human suffering: even the suffering of her enemies.


The writer of the Book of Proverbs says


“Do not gloat when your enemy falls;
when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice,
or the Lord will see and disapprove
and turn his wrath away from him.”


Later in the book of Ezekiel as, God pleads with Israel to live faithfully, he says “Why will you die, O house of Israel? I take no pleasure in the death of anyone”.

So even in the Old Testament, which is so often caricatured as bloodthirsty and unforgiving, we find this golden thread of mercy running through the text. With this God, the enemy is not abandoned for ever; the enemy’s pain and suffering are seen to matter; the enemy’s death brings God no pleasure, and should being us no pleasure too.

Totally countercultural and counterintuitive. But grace always is.

And Jesus takes this golden thread, and with it he weaves the Sermon on the Mount, from which today’s reading is taken. A manifesto for a way to live in the world which is totally countercultural.

Matthew 5: 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your friends, and hate your enemies.’ But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

It sounds so insipid, doesn’t it. Love your enemies? Love these people who are persecuting me? Who day and night make my life a living hell? Are you kidding?
I wrote this sermon earlier in the week and then watched Newsnight which had a report from the families who lost loved ones in the carnage of the 7th July bombings in London. Part of me wanted to scrap the sermon and write about something else.

But it’s there in the text – Love your enemies – and in the face of the sheer brutality at work in our world that sounds like so much simpering do-goodism until you remember who it was who said it.

A man, the manner of whose birth allowed his enemies to label him a bastard, even if they didn’t dare call him that to his face; a man who lived out his life in the sweltering tension of a country under military occupation; a man whose teaching was so threatening to the religious establishment that they thought it best to have him killed.


A man who was beaten, flogged and crucified for no good reason, and was mocked by those who came to watch him die. He knew a thing or two about enemies, did Jesus.

And he gives us this instruction to love our enemies not to weigh us down under the burden of an impossible command, but to remind us that if we take upon ourselves the name of God and claim to be of the family of God, it behoves us to mirror the character of God. And you know what, God loves his enemies, and it’s a good job he does because sin makes all of us enemies of God, including you and me.

I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

WHY? So that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil.

The shocking truth is that the God we worship, far from being in the tit-for-tat business, the eye-for-an-eye business, is in the business of showing unmerited kindness to the ungrateful and the wicked. Not my words – Jesus’s words.

God bears with the enemy, not because he likes their behaviour or because he’s soft on sin. He is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked because he knows that love is the only way in which broken people are mended.

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – words of Martin Luther King.

Love your enemies, says Jesus. Why? That you may become children of your Father in heaven.

A Father who looks at us, and our enemies, and sees us for the people we are: half-formed, confused, wedded to our pet sins. But he sees further than that. He sees right down to the flickering core of his own image that’s buried deep within every human being. And he refuses to give up on us. He has determined to love us into submission. It’s the only way.

Again, some words of wisdom from Reverend King, speaking to the white supremacists whose racist thuggery was drawn out of the backwoods into the glaring light of day by the Civil Rights movement.

“We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

Love your enemies, says Jesus, Pray for them. Pray not just to defeat them, but to convert them so that they recognise the divine image within themselves and within the people they profess to hate.

Hell for Osama Bin Laden? Perhaps hell for Osama Bin Laden is not the traditional lake of fire, but a long, long corridor with thousands of doors leading off it to the left and to the right. And behind every door is a husband or a mother or a sister or a son who was in one of those planes, or working in one of those towers, or enjoying a night out in one of those clubs, or travelling through one of those cities, or serving in one of the armed forces, when death came brutally, suddenly and obscenely.

Maybe hell for Bin Laden begins with the long walk down that corridor, spending as long as it takes in every single room with every single person, hearing their testimony, learning the names of their families as they show him photograph after photograph, sitting in silence before the awful monument of their pain and loss until he gets it into his atrophied heart that every single man and woman and child he had murdered bore the image of the God he claimed to be serving.

Could that kind of hell mend him? God alone knows.

All I know today is that Christ, against all our intuition, commands us to love our enemies.

And it’s important to say that that doesn’t mean we have to like them or approve of what they do. At its simplest, loving your enemy means dealing with them in the faith that somewhere deep within them there still burns the image of God, no matter how hard it might be to recognise it.

So who are your enemies this morning?

Do you hate them? Do you ignore them?

There is a better way, says Christ. Learn to love them. Learn to pray for them. It’s the only way we can break the vicious circle of hate, though it may end up costing you all you have.


I watched a remarkable film just before Easter and I think that next Easter I’ll try to find an appropriate time in Holy Week for us to watch it together. It’s called “of Gods and Men” and it’s a true story of a small community of Trappist monks living in the mountains of Algeria in the early 1990’s.

Though they are Christian they’re accepted and fully integrated into the lives of their Muslim neighbours in the local villages. The monks help with education and medicine, and in turn they’re welcome guests at weddings and birthdays and village festivals. It’s a happy picture.

But with the rise of fundamentalist Islam, the monks come under increasing threat and they reach a place where they have to decide whether to stay or to leave. And after much debate over many months, each of them comes to a peace about staying, even though they know it will not end well.

Anticipating the end, the prior of the monastery, Christian de Cherge, wrote these words to be read by his family in the event of his death. Listen out particularly for the last paragraph which anticipates his death and addresses the man who would kill him. De Cherge and six of his fellow monks were taken from the monastery and murdered by extremists in May of 1996.

Obviously my death will justify the opinion of all those who dismissed me as naïve or idealistic. “Let him tell us what he thinks now!” But such people should know that my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At last, I will be able – if God pleases – to see the children of Islam as He sees them, illuminated in the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences.


I give thanks to God for this life, completely mine, yet completely theirs too: to God, who wanted it for joy, against, and in spite of, all odds. In this Thank You – which says everything about my life – I include you, my friends past and present, and those friends who will be here at the side of my mother and father, of my sisters and brothers – thank you a thousandfold.


And to you, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you too I wish this thank you, this commendment to God, whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father.

Love your enemies, said Jesus. And pray for those who persecute you, that you may become the children of your Father in heaven.