The Difficulty of Love

Matthew 5:38-48

Epiphany 7

Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglorious Basterds is a revenge fantasy set in Nazi occupied France.  In the opening scene, a Jewish family is hunted down and murdered by an SS officer, Hans Landa, played brilliantly by Christoph Walz.  But one of the teenage daughters, Shosanna Dreyfus, escapes.  Traumatized, she finds her way to Paris, takes a new name and identity, and finds work running a cinema.  Years later, the Nazi party needs a place to premier one of Goebbels’ new propaganda films, and they choose Shosanna’s cinema.  So she is confronted again with Hans Landa, who murdered her family.  And naturally, she begins to fantasize about exacting revenge.

On the night of the premier, all the Nazi officials are in the cinema, even Hitler and Goering.  The Nazi leaders watch Goebbels film with glee, laughing and clapping as they watch clip after clip of Nazis killing their enemies.  It is almost impossible not to hate them.  By this final scene you want to kill them.  And Shosanna’s revenge plan unfolds.  A crew of gunmen bursts into a balcony where Hitler and Goering are seated and open fire on them with machine guns.  They continue to unload rounds of ammunition into Hitler’s body long after he’s dead.  While the scene is grotesque, as a viewer you find yourself saying, “There, take that.”  I almost felt like laughing and clapping as I watched.  And then I realized that Tarantino is like an Old Testament prophet.  He shines a light on our own vengeful hearts, and reminds us that retaliation fantasies pull us into a never ending cycle of violence with our enemies.

We come today to a very difficult teaching.  Jesus teaches us to love even those who despise or harm us.  He forbids the practice of retaliation.  And he forbids the practice of loving only those it is easy for us to love.  

You may not want to follow this Jesus.  Today might be a day when you decide to get off the train.  Today you will have to decide whether Jesus has the authority, the right, to ask this of you.  Jesus does not pretend that what he asks of us is easy.  He tells us right up front that the way of love will be hard.

Jesus quotes a familiar verse from Torah: You have heard it said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  This language is found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.  God gives this law to Israel in order to regulate the way Israelites deal with injury and harm.  It is meant both to deter persons from harming others (since they know there will be punishment).  And it is meant to limit the damages inflicted in retaliation (don’t ratchet up the retaliation; limit yourself to mirroring the original harm done).

But Jesus goes even further to limit the violent response to an enemy.  He asks us not to seek any redress at all when others harm us.  “Do not resist an evil person” means don’t even seek financial damages from those who wrong you.  If someone disrespects you in public by backhanding you on the right cheek, don’t take your turn by swinging back.  Instead, tell them to go again - offer your other cheek.  If someone sues you, don’t fight the lawsuit.  Put an end to it right away, not by simply offering the other party what they seek, but heap more on top.  If they sue for your winter coat, take all your clothes off willingly and hand them over, and stand there naked before your opponent.  If a Roman soldier plays a power game with you and conscripts you into carrying something a mile, keep the ball in your court by choosing to carry it two miles.  These are simply examples of what Jesus teaches.  He leaves it up to the imaginations of his listeners to determine how they will respond in many other situations.

Let me address three reasons often used to reject Jesus’ teaching:

1. This teaching is too idealistic and impractical.

Some have argued that Jesus never thought we could love our enemies.  He taught this in order to show us how powerless we are to live out God’s will.  And you do have to admit, what Jesus asks of us looks very hard.  Never defend ourselves with law suits?  Allow ourselves to be slapped by others in public?  Take all our clothes off and give them to our enemies while we stand naked in public?

The examples Jesus’ offers are meant to surprise us and even shock us.  Jesus is saying: Don’t respond to your enemies in ways that deny God’s plan for a world of love.  Jesus wants his followers to experience the freedom to love that characterizes God’s kingdom.  Retaliating, harming and hating your enemies is not a form of freedom.  It’s a kind of imprisonment.

Look, Jesus’ own disciples were fickle and feckless.  They were stubborn and slow to learn.  They misunderstood Jesus as often as they understood him.  So yes, Jesus knows this teaching will be hard for his followers to live out.  But still, he does invite us into the challenging love that characterizes God’s kingdom.  Anytime you publicly display your freedom from cycles of retaliation, you are enacting neighbor love as the reality of God’s kingdom.

2. This teaching demeans us.

We might reject Jesus’ teaching because it is demeaning.  It makes us look powerless.  Jesus is teaching us to be doormats.  It looks like Jesus advocates a kind of helplessness or passivity for his followers.  But something else is going on.  Each scenario is a little dramatic vignette in which Jesus’ followers act out the superior power of God’s love.

When you slap me or insult me, you, and everyone watching, expects me to slap or insult you back.  Yet what happens if I gather myself, smile, and offer you a go at my other cheek?  What happens to your expectations?  What happens to those watching?  We cannot know, of course.  But what emerges in my offering you the other cheek is a symbolic ending of hostility.  By offering you the other cheek, I enact a little theater piece that destabilizes and unravels you as my assailant.  My gesture announces that the arriving future is the future of God’s love, the future in which all enemies become neighbors.

Jesus’ teaching can be demeaning if it’s misused.  Suppose a husband who abuses a wife uses this teaching against her, “Remember, your Jesus teaches you to turn the other cheek.”  Or suppose a defenseless child is urged to stay quiet and passively accept the abuse of an adult.  Does Jesus teach that all victims of abuse and violence, in every situation, should turn the other cheek?  Of course not.  He expects his followers to engage in a process of discernment regarding how best to respond to difficult situations.  Let’s remember, Jesus is talking to a community of people engaged in an ongoing conflict with other Jews and Romans.  You cannot simply take this teaching and uncritically apply it to every situation of abuse.  It should never be used to block someone from being treated with respect and dignity. 

3. This teaching isn’t effective.  It doesn’t work.

Jesus quotes from another passage of the Law (Leviticus 19:18), “Love your neighbor and hate your enemies.”  But wait, the Jewish Law doesn’t say “hate your enemies.”  This part was added to the Law by some politically left Jewish radicals called “Zealots.”  Some Jews interpreted “love your neighbor” to mean that we can hate our enemies, like our Roman oppressors.  Jesus rejects this path and teaches a different way forward.  “But I tell you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”  

It is difficult to know what it means to “love our enemies.”  But it’s safe to say that Jesus isn’t talking about our “feelings.”  He isn’t urging us to manufacture warm feelings for people we dislike.  At the very least it means that we are forbidden from drawing circles around people we like and declaring everyone outside the circle to be our enemies.  Jesus’ invitation to “pray for those who persecute us” gives us a concrete practice to take up.  Far too often, I fail to practice this simple teaching.  But when I do, it has always worked.  When I pray for God to bless those I do not like, those who have harmed me, those on whom I dream about revenge, something happens.  To pray for the other person is to begin to imagine them as God’s beloved creatures.  In my prayers, the enemy is no longer simply that person who harmed me or shamed me or stole from me.  That person is now transformed, even against my will, into the creature God made and loves, that creature whom God wants to renew and bless.  In our prayers, the enemy ceases to be the object of our angry revenge fantasies and becomes instead the miserable creature who desperately needs the love and blessing of God.

But is loving our enemies effective?  Does it work?  What kind of strategy is it?  First, we might think that Jesus teaches us to love our enemies because it will change our enemies.  Jesus never promises or suggests this.  And our own experience shows that this is rarely the case.  Of course it’s always possible that our surprising behavior changes our enemies, but that is not our motivation.  Second, we might think that Jesus teaches us to love our enemies because this is a form of spiritual self-improvement.  The real change will be in us.  Well, this too might happen of course.  But Jesus never promises or suggests this.  It will likely be as hard to do the second and third time as it is the first.  Jesus is not offering us a self-help or self-development plan.

Here is what Jesus teaches: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”  Here it is, the deepest mystery of the Christian faith.  God creates us, empowers us, blesses us, so that we can be as much like God as its possible for puny creatures like us to be!  The human task is to learn to love like God loves.  Jesus can go as far as to say, “Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.”  This whole passage is about the love of enemies.  And that’s what God does perfectly.  God loves perfectly.  And perfect, full, complete love is love for those who do not, and cannot, love you back.

In order to make his point, Jesus appeals to the way the sun shines and the way rain falls to the earth.  “God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”  I have read past this line hundreds of times in my life and have never really heard it.  If this is true, then I will have to learn what God is like all over again.  The sun’s rays shine in a way that’s indiscriminate.  The sun just shines, and its rays fall on everyone.  Same with the rain - it doesn’t come in patches, searching for the fields of the good, the gardens of the righteous.  No, rain comes indiscriminately upon all.  That’s what God’s love is like.  Indiscriminate, profligate, wildly unpredictable, and inclusive.  

Now this teaching is going to leave some of us confused.  We had assumed that God loves some people and hates others.  We assumed God has favorites.  We assumed God blesses some and curses others.  Jesus teaches that God is the one who loves all that God has made, including those who resist, insult, and hate God in return.  When you look into the face of Jesus Christ, the one betrayed, mocked, humiliated, tortured, and crucified - you will not see the lust for retaliation.  You hear, “Father, forgive them.”

Berry’s Man in the Well

Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow is about an orphaned young boy who wanders into life as a barber, grave digger, and church janitor in a little farming town called Port William, KY.  Through the course of his life, Jayber finds himself dealing with two enemies -- Cecilia Overhold and Troy Chatham.

Cecilia Overhold despised Port William and the people who lived there.  This hick town was beneath her.  She was too good for it.  She had traveled some, and she knew, unlike her neighbors, that there were more exciting places to live.  She know that most important things were happening somewhere else.  She wanted a better life, a better place to live, better work to do, and better friends.  Cecilia had, on numerous occasions, aimed her bitterness at Jayber in the form of insults.

Troy Chatham was Jayber’s other enemy.  Troy hated the idea of being just another small time farmer in Port William.  He thought of himself as more talented and more ambitious.  He went to agribusiness conventions in big cities and learned how to make something of himself.  Jayber never did like Troy Chatham.  But late one night at a bar in a nearby town, he saw Troy Chatham with a woman who was not his lovely wife Mattie.    

In the end things go badly for both Cecilia and Troy.  Cecilia’s children eventually took her to LA to put her in a nursing home, where she died alone and angry.   Troy swindles and short cuts his way through life, bent on being successful.  But things go bad, and he looses all he has.  Troy makes of his life a living hell, and does great damage to his family and his community.  He winds up lost, and trapped down in a well with no hope of escape.  The novel ends with Jayber relaying a parable.  He imagines a city dweller who has taken a vacation day to hunt alone in the farmland around Port William.  By chance he steps on the rotten boards covering one of the many deep wells and falls to the bottom.

I’ve thought a considerable amount about a friend of mine (imagined, but also real) I call the Man in the Well. . . . 

How does this story end?  Does he save himself?  Is he athletic enough, maybe, to get his boots off and climb out, clawing with fingers and toes into the grudging holds between the rocks of the wall?  Does he climb up and fall back?  Does somebody, in fact, for a wonder, chance to pass nearby and hear him?  Does he despair, give up, and drown?  Does he, despairing, pray finally the first true prayer of his life?

Listen. . . . A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost.  He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. . . . He believes that the child in the womb is not lost, nor is the man [like Troy] whose work has come to nothing, nor is the old woman [like Cecilia] forsaken in a nursing home in California.  He believes that those who make their bed in Hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray [from the cross, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me]  (356-7).

Who are the people you imagine at the bottom of the well?  Tarantino reminds us that the Nazis are there.  We could add other dictators -- Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.  Maybe if you lost your retirement savings you imagine Alan Greenspan and Bernie Madoff down in the well.  Maybe there were kids who gave you a hard time in school.  Maybe someone at work has thrown you under the bus.  Maybe you were betrayed by someone you loved and trusted.  Maybe you have a family member you still don’t speak to.  Can you imagine that these people, our enemies, down at the bottom of the well -- can you imagine that in the darkness they pray their first true prayer?  Can you imagine that they are not lost?  Can you imagine them awash in God’s mercy?  This is the terrible and wonderful secret of God’s kingdom: Heaven is not another place.  Heaven names the future when the last two enemies have finally embraced, when all the world has become the world of love.