Loving the Enemy in Real Time

Today's Reading

Read Matthew 5:43-48 one more time. The command is the same. The hardness is the same. The grace is the same.

Read Psalm 137, one of the most disturbing prayers in the Bible. It ends with a wish that the children of Babylon be dashed against rocks. This is not a recommendation. It is a cry of grief from people whose own children have just been killed. It is in the Bible because God's people, in the worst extremity, have a way to bring even this to him.

Read 1 Timothy 2:1-4: "First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions." Including, Paul means, the kings of empires that persecute the church.

Read Ephesians 2:13-16, where Paul says that Christ has, on the cross, "broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility" between Jew and Gentile. The reconciliation is not a hope. It is a finished work that the church is called to live into.

Reflection

The previous days have been, in part, an argument about ideas. Today is the day to test whether any of it has gone deeper than ideas.

In every generation, there are wars happening. Right now, somewhere in the world, soldiers are killing one another, civilians are dying in cellars, refugees are walking with children on their backs. The names of the wars change. The pattern does not. The Christian's question — and not just the Christian thinker's question, but every Christian's question — is whether what we have been studying for nine days has any traction in the actual world where these wars are happening.

The answer the New Testament gives is concrete. We do not love our enemies in general. We love them specifically. We love them by name. We love them in prayer.

Jesus's command in Matthew 5 is exact. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Not feel charitably toward, not hold no grudges against — pray for. The verb in Greek, proseuchesthe, is the same word used for the prayers of the synagogue and of the early church. To pray for the enemy is to bring the enemy before God in worship — to ask God's good for the person whose harm you might more naturally desire.

This is harder than it sounds because it is concrete. It is one thing to pray "God bless our enemies" in a general sense. It is another thing to name a specific person — a soldier in an army you fear, a politician you despise, an adversary who has hurt your family — and to ask God for their good. The difference is roughly the difference between loving humanity in the abstract and loving the actual neighbor across the hall.

Take a current war. Any current war. There are people on both sides who are dying, killing, leaving home, burying parents, holding children. Some of them are professing Christians. Some are not. Some are convinced their side is right. Some are convinced of nothing except that they are afraid. The Christian discipline is to pray, by category and where possible by name, for both sides — and especially for the side it is hardest for you to pray for.

If you find yourself praying only for the side your nation supports, the discipline has not yet begun. If you find yourself unable to pray for the enemy soldier without adding "and bring his cause to ruin," you have not yet prayed Matthew 5:44. If you find yourself relieved when the enemy dies, the question Augustine asked of his soldiers is asked of you: what is in your heart?

There is a place in the Bible where the rage that real wars produce is allowed to come out — and where, by being given to God, it is taken out of human hands. The lament and imprecatory psalms.

Psalm 137 is the hardest. The psalm begins beautifully — by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept. It ends with the wish that Babylon's children be dashed against rocks. Christians have struggled with this psalm for centuries; some have refused to read it in worship; some have allegorized it into something gentler than it is. But the psalm is in the Bible because the people of God, in their worst extremity, were given a language for the worst that was in them. The psalm is not an ethics of revenge. It is the surrender of revenge to God.

To pray a lament — and even an imprecatory psalm — is not to recommend its content as policy. It is to do what David and the exiles did: bring the rage, the grief, the bitterness, into God's presence rather than acting on it in the world. The same psalter that gives us the cry against Babylon gives us "I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken" (Psalm 16:8). Both are real prayers. Both are part of how the people of God have walked through war.

N.T. Wright argues that the lament psalms function, in part, by releasing the disciple from the work of vengeance. The cry against the enemy is given to God. God will judge. The disciple will not. This is the same logic Paul gives in Romans 12:19: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God." The vengeance does not disappear; it is reassigned. The disciple is freed to love the enemy precisely because the disciple is not responsible for ultimate justice.

There is a particular practice the local church can offer the world that almost no other institution can offer. It is the practice of citizens of warring nations sitting at the same table — and the table is not a metaphor. It is the Lord's Supper.

In every generation, the church has had members on both sides of the wars its nations have fought. In World War I, German and English Christians prayed for victory in their respective countries while still — when the rare opportunity came — sharing communion across the lines. In World War II, Confessing Church Christians and American Christians worshiped the same Lord while their armies killed one another. In every modern war, there are believers in the Lord's Supper on both sides. They cannot all be God's chosen instrument; only Christ is. They are united, despite the violence between their nations, by the body and blood that ends the dividing wall of hostility.

When your church gathers at the table, it is gathered with believers in the country your country considers an enemy. The table is the visible refusal of the church to let national lines define ultimate fellowship. Miroslav Volf has spent his career writing about this — about the Croatian Christian's calling to commune with the Serbian Christian in the years when their countries were killing each other; about the practice of forgiveness as the church's specific gift to a world running on revenge.

This is what makes the church's witness different from any peace movement. The church is not a movement that hopes for reconciliation. The church is a reconciliation, already accomplished by the cross, that the world is invited to look at. When the church gathers across the lines that nations draw, the world sees something the nations cannot manufacture.

So today's discipline is concrete. Take a current war you have an opinion about. Choose one specific person on the side you find hardest to love — a soldier, a leader, a citizen. Pray for them by name (or by description if you do not know their name). Ask God for their salvation, their family's safety, their nation's wellbeing. Pray for the soldier on the other side as you would pray for your own son.

Then sit at the Lord's Table this week with the awareness that your fellow communicants include believers in that country.

This is not a strategy. It will not end any war. But it is, the New Testament says, the form of love Jesus commanded. The form is prayer. The fruit is in God's hands. Tomorrow we look at where this all ends — at the Lamb who, having absorbed every war, reigns.

Going Deeper

Pray Psalm 137 aloud, slowly. Do not skip the hardest verses. Then pray Matthew 5:44 — for one specific enemy, by name. Notice the gap between the two prayers. That gap is where Christian discipleship lives in wartime. The lament gives the rage to God. The intercession asks God for the enemy's good. Both are biblical. Both are necessary. Neither alone is enough.