"Who is My Enemy?" It's those.....
Once when Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” a person wishing to justify himself asked the follow-up question, “Who is my neighbor?” In response to this question, Jesus replied with a parable, a story that illustrates the answer to the question. That story is now called The Good Samaritan. In it, a man is beaten and bloodied and left for dead on the side of the road. Several of his countrymen pass by without helping him, but then, the most unlikely of characters, a person from a hated people group, stops and helps the wounded man. He brings him to care and safety, even paying for his needs and promising to check up on him. So, even though he was from the “wrong” group of people, he actually was the person of all those mentioned who acted in a neighborly fashion, who acted as if it was his friend that was hurt and in need. He stopped, and he cared for the man as a person in need. That story gets me every time.
Today, if Jesus were physically among us, and He began teaching us “Love your enemies,” as He did back then, I wonder what He would answer if someone asked him, “Who is my enemy?” What would He say?
I think He would come up with a much better answer than I can muster, but I imagine He might draw attention to some of our words and attitudes about others. Certainly there are those we consider our personal enemies, people who have hurt us directly. These must be loved. But I believe we often overlook our other enemies, the people that we lump together by some viewpoint or characteristic that we don’t like or agree with. These might sound like:
“We need to stop white oppression.”
“If it weren’t for those greedy rich people…”
“Those BLM jerks are burning down our cities.”
“People on the right are idiots.”
“All the people coming over the border are a real problem.”
“The gender benders are so messed up.”
“Those people just expect everything to be handed to them.”
“Men have oppressed women for centuries, nothing new about that!”
“The ________ are to blame for the violence.”
“People in the city are so stupid. We’d be better off if we could cut the cities out of our nation.”
“Liberals are ruining our country.”
“Every atheist I ever met has been argumentative and condescending.”
“If people have gone to college, then you can be sure they have been brainwashed,” or its evil twin, “People like that think PragerU is a real university. All they listen to is misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
The list goes on and on and on.
Are you struggling to love any of these? Probably. Probably some of these hit a nerve and you feel very justified in opposing them. But are you loving your enemy when you do so?
The issue is that you can and should OPPOSE IDEAS or POLICIES but you must still LOVE PEOPLE, even the ones who hold differing ideas or do truly awful things. And when you think of a group of people, whether it is Islamic terrorists or white supremacists or child molesters, you must hate the sin and love the sinner, because each group is made up of individuals, and each individual is created and loved by God. Jesus died for each individual in those groups. Reducing someone to their group identity alone strips them of their individuality and can lead you toward hatred rather than praying for them in love and speaking to and about them with love.
So I ask, “Who is your enemy? How can you fulfill the command to love them?” It’s something I need to ponder for sure.