LOVING OUR ENEMIES?
--Fr. Fausto Gomez
Roberto Carlos sings in his popular song “El Progreso”: I would like to be able to embrace my greatest enemy (Yo quisiera poder abrazar mi mayor enemigo). The Prophet of Nazareth asks his followers: “Love your enemies.” Is it possible really?
Love means wishing good to another, and doing good to others. It helps those who possess it to get out of themselves, of their “fat ego” and selfish love, and be open to others. By nature, the human person longs for happiness. Only real love can make us relatively but truly happy in this earthly life. Human life means learning to love – and to love more in an ever-ascending manner. Indeed, “to be is to love,” and to live is to love: true love makes a person honest, free and responsible, compassionate.
Love is the greatest human value and virtue: love as philia, or friendship (affective love), and as agape, or unconditional generous love (supreme benevolent love). With effective love, we love our relatives and friends: it is natural to love them. With agapeic love, we love our loved ones - the dearest and nearest -, and also with different intensity but truly all others, including the enemies. In Christian tradition, love as charity - God’s love in us - is considered “the form,” the mother and motor of all virtues. In the perspective of the Kingdom, charity gives life to all other virtues and permeates them with peace, joy, and mercy - with universal empathy.
God loves his whole creation. He loves all humans, who are not only his creatures but also his children. God has no enemies because He loves all and hates none. Believers, Christians are asked by their faith to imitate God’s love that is universal, in which all are included: the good and the bad, women and men, children and old, saints and sinners, poor and rich.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God loves all. His followers have a primary commandment: with my love ((cf. 1 Jn 4:19), love God and all neighbors, including the enemies. For those who believe in Jesus, it is a universal love - fraternal love - that excludes no one and is always anchored in divine grace, and strengthened by prayer.
St. Paul writes: You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Gal 5:14). This entails loving also those who hate us. With hatred in our hearts, we cannot love our enemies. Contrarily, with love in our hearts, our enemies cease to be our enemies and become our brothers and sisters in Christ, the Savior of all. St. Thomas Aquinas explains that Jesus’ commandment “love your enemies” means “to hate not the person but his sin.” Hate the sin, but love sinner; hate evil, flee the Evil One, Satan, the Tempter who “like a roaring lion prowl around looking for someone to devour” (1Pet 5:8; cf. Mt 10:36). “Just as brotherly love comes from God, so hatred comes from the devil” (St. Peter Chrysologus).
Jesus asks his followers to love their enemies. His exact words: “It was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:43-45); “bless pray for those who abuse you” (Lk 6:28); “Father, forgive them” (Lk 23:34). Today, then, Jesus asks his disciples, to love their enemies, to forgive them, and to pray for them. Wise words: “No one can pray for another man and still hate him” (W. Barclay).
Given our inclination to selfishness, anger, and impatience, it is challenging for us – with the weak power of our wounded nature - to love our enemies and not to hate them. A member of the incredible Peanut Family says: “I love mankind; I cannot stand people.” A bystander: “I love my enemies, except those who have treated me badly.” Excluding some enemies from love is selective and therefore not Christian: Christian love, and charity is not selective but universal.
The positive formulation of the Golden Rule, the universal ethical norm affirms: “Do to others as you want others to do to you.” Jesus invites all to practice the Golden Rule (cf. Mt 7:12), and goes beyond its ethics of reciprocity to his ethics of agape, or unconditional love, and thus completes and perfects the Golden Rule when he says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44).
Words to ponder: “The highest type of brotherly love is to love our enemies and there is no greater encouragement to do this than the remembrance of the wondrous patience exercised by him who, fairest of the sons of men, offered his gracious face to be spat upon by his enemies… Hearing that wondrous voice, full of gentleness and love, saying, ‘Father, forgive them, who would not immediately embrace his enemies?” The Lod even made excuses for those who crucified him … To love his brethren even more perfectly, he [the disciple] should open his arms to embrace even his enemies” (St. Aelred, Abbot, The Mirror of Charity).
Is it very hard to love our enemies, or the Cains of our time, or particularly this or that enemy? Yes, of course. We have, fortunately, available help, if we truly want it. Christ gave us the commandment of loving our enemies and, therefore, He gives us the grace we need to carry it out, with our modest cooperation, in our life. Jesus told us, “Without me, you can do nothing,” and Matthew closes his gospel with these hopeful words of Jesus: “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of time” (Mt 28:20).
One marvelous example of loving our enemies is martyr Saint Oscar Romero. The then archbishop of El Salvador preached: “I am never anyone’s enemy. But let those who, without cause want to be my enemies, be converted to love… I don’t hate them. I don’t want revenge. I wish them no harm. I beg them to be converted, to come to be happy.”
In his Confessions – always helpful -, St. Augustine writes: Oh, happy is the man who loves you, my God, and his friend in you, and his enemy because of you. (FGB)
