From enemies to neighbors

In a favorite book of mine, “Jayber Crow” by Wendell Berry, Jayber is shooting the breeze about the issues of the day with the customers in his barbershop in mid-century rural Kentucky. One of the men, Troy Chatham (a character that is somehow both despicable and pitiable), pipes up that they should just round up all the Communists and shoot the lot of them.

Jayber stops, looks at Troy, and says, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you."

Troy retorts, "Where did you get that crap?"

Jayber says, "Jesus Christ," and Troy can only respond with a subdued, "Oh."

And this next line is my favorite part.

Jayber, reflecting on the conversation, admits: “It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy."

Oh, it can seem so hopeless sometimes, can’t it? Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:43-48)—“love your enemies”—feel unattainable in our real lives, where we make enemies of anyone who stands in the way of our fulfillment, doubts our intentions, mocks our closely held convictions as foolishness, dismisses our feelings, or views the world in a way that we believe is dangerous. All the while, I wonder if we aren’t blind to a much more insidious danger—both to our own hearts and those around us—of the ways we have systematically bisected every facet of our world into those that are part of the “problem” and those that are part of the “solution.”

This bisecting line runs all the way back to the Garden, where Eve drew a line between herself and God when she wondered if he really had her wholeness in mind. Making quick judgments on who is friend or foe is a survival tactic embedded in the human heart, and we do not have power in ourselves to heal this way of engaging the people around us. We utterly cannot love our enemies. We do not have it in us.

Yet “loving our enemies” is not a mere lens through which to see the world, or a worthy goal, but a mandate Jesus actually means us to follow. Jesus shows us the depth of his meaning as he embodies his own words on the Cross, saying of those those who falsely accused, mocked, tortured, and murdered him: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” 

In this crucial moment in his crucifixion, he offers forgiveness to the blatantly unrepentant. He shows compassion to those convinced they are in the right. He offers dignity to those who crucified him, even as he suffers grave injustice at their hands. He offers safety of his love to those who deemed him too dangerous to live.

Pledging our allegiance to this King means following him into this kind of love. God help us, he actually intends us to do this, right here in the midst of the hopeless tangle of cultural and literal battle lines that is 2022! 

But through the precious blood of Christ, every dividing line has been crossed, every wall of hostility has been broken, every curtain torn. The One who has taken those who were “hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” and “alienated and far off” has brought them near, transforming them into those who by his grace “share in the inheritance of the saints in light” (Col. 1, Eph. 2).  Will he not also transform those who are united to him that they might call “neighbor” those they once called “enemy?”  He has shown us the way by his Cross and his life. Let’s follow, imitating his every move, in humility.