Sermon for Sunday, February 23, 2025 || Epiphany 7C || Luke 6:27-38

(Content warning: I talk about the Holocaust in this sermon.)

Love your enemies. This is the most shocking thing Jesus says in the entire Gospel. Love your enemies. We read this and throw up our hands, thinking Jesus must have gone mad. How could we possibly do such a thing? The whole point of an enemy is that you don’t love them. Enemies are to be defeated and demeaned and destroyed, right? The history of our war torn world would say yes. But our savior says differently. Love your enemies, Jesus says. If we’re going to take Jesus seriously – take ALL of what he says seriously – then we need to wrestle with this command to love our enemies. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. What does it mean to love our enemies?

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I’m going to go through three major elements of this in a minute, but first we need to get past the idea that “love” in this context means “have warm squishy feelings.” When Jesus talks about love, he rarely means “feel the emotion of affection.” For Jesus, love is the active force of commitment that compels us to remain in solidarity with those around us, especially those who are suffering. So I hope that by the end of this sermon, you understand that when Jesus says, “Love your enemies,” he doesn’t necessarily mean “Like your enemies.” The demands of love are much greater than just trying to find something to like about someone whose behavior or values you really detest.

Rather, the demands of love compel us along three paths. The first path is recognizing humanity. We love our enemies by not dehumanizing them. We do not engage in rhetoric that calls our enemies subhuman or demons or vermin. We do not caricature. We do not reduce entire groups or cultures down to hateful stereotypes. Instead, we remember that our enemies are human just like we are. They are human even when they do inhumane things. The horror of the Holocaust was the murder of millions. The horror was also the attempt to dehumanize the Jews to justify genocide AND the reality that other people – human people…not demons or devils – pulled the trigger and worked the gas chambers.

Humanizing our enemies when they act inhumanely reminds us that we are just as capable of the behavior we hate as they are. Just as they are not demons, we are not angels. The grace of holding onto humanity is the rejection of death-dealing methods and values even when we gain the power to wield such things. When we remember our enemies’ humanity, we continue to treat them with dignity, even when they trample all over our dignity. Indeed, this keeps our dignity intact when the enemy tries to strip it away.

So the first element of loving our enemies is recognizing their humanity, which keeps our humanity intact. This leads us to the second path: maintaining good boundaries. In all relationships, one of the most effective ways to love is to understand and maintain the boundaries between yourself and the other. Love without boundaries leads to codependency and manipulation. In premarital counseling, I tell couples that to give one’s self wholly to the other, one needs already to be a whole person. If you are hoping your partner will complete you in some way, then you will not practice healthy boundaries in marriage. Being a supportive spouse means helping your partner live into the fullness of who they are, not trying to mold them into something they think you want. Good boundaries help us to state our needs and ensure they are being met, while at the same time negotiating how we might help others to meet their needs without subsuming ourselves into their identities.

When we love our enemies, we maintain good boundaries with them. We do not allow them to override us with their values or their worldview. And we never say, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” We also do not exist under the delusion that we can change our enemies if they aren’t open to changing. We live out our values not to change the enemy, but because staying true to our values is the only authentic way to live. If our example does, in fact, move the needle, then it is a byproduct of authentic living and we rejoice. This happened in the early days of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Captured Russian soldiers were given food and treated with dignity, and they were amazed that the Ukrainians were not the vicious Nazis that the Russian government had made them out to be. Yes, the Ukrainian benevolence served a strategic goal, but it was also simply an outgrowth of the humanity that the Ukrainians would not give up due to war.

So, loving our enemies means recognizing their humanity and maintaining good boundaries. The third path is the path of nonviolence. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. takes on the white pastors who think the Civil Rights Movement needed to slow down and be less extreme. In response, King calls Jesus an extremist for love and then quotes the passage we read this morning. The Movement’s insistence on nonviolence grew out of this extreme form of love. King says,

“There is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood.”

Jesus practiced nonviolence when he told his followers to put away their swords and when he healed the ear of the high priest’s servant. The strength of conviction Jesus showed as he walked to the cross demonstrates that nonviolence is not weak or cowardly. Indeed, think of the strength of character it took to sit at a lunch counter when people spit on you and punched you and called you the most hateful names. Nonviolence is the key to recognizing the humanity of the other and maintaining boundaries. It keeps us from fighting fire with fire. And, as Dr. King says,

“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue… But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”

In our world today, enemies abound. We are told to hate certain groups. We might despise the actions of certain individuals. But Jesus commands us to love our enemies. He commands us to this seemingly impossible love so that, in recognizing the humanity of the enemy, we remain human ourselves; so that, in maintaining our boundaries, we do not turn into everything we despise; so that, in practicing nonviolence, we uncover the tension that leads to positive change. I invite you, this week, to pray with this command to love our enemies. With God’s help, contemplate how you live out this commandment. And trust that Christ is present, walking with us down this difficult path of love.

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Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash