Hilton Head Island, SC – February 10, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 13:1-13; Matthew 5:43-48
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But I say to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” – Matthew 5:44 (RSV)
Jesus did not speak Greek. Or if he did, no one is able to verify it. But the Gospels, and indeed the entire New Testament, was first written in Greek. Therefore in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus talked about love, he was presumably talking about a certain kind of love which is described by a certain Greek word, even though he would have been speaking Aramaic.
In Greek there are three different words which are translated as “love.” The first is philia. This is the love we have for family members: parents, brothers, sisters, and so on. You can remember that word by thinking about Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. The second word is eros. This is erotic love, the love of a man for a woman, or, as we are finally recognizing in these days, a man for a man, or a woman for a woman.
When Jesus referred to love, however, he wasn’t talking about either of those kinds of love. He was talking about agape. Agape is the love Jesus said we are meant to have for everyone, for all of humanity.
But how can we love everybody? We don’t know everybody. We will never know everybody. And of course that is true. But surely Jesus meant that we are to love everybody we encounter, everyone who enters our lives in any way. We are to love our friends, which is easy to do, and everyone who is kind to us, which is also easy. But in addition we are to love the policeman who gives us a speeding ticket and the dentist who seems to use a jackhammer to fix our teeth and the repairman who told us we need a new heat pump but he took twelve days to get there to replace it and then charged us twice what he said it would cost because he didn’t have the reasonably-priced one in stock that he first told us about.
G.K. Chesterton, the English journalist, once wrote, “The reason Christ told us to love our neighbors and to love our enemies was undoubtedly because they’re often the same people.” Some of the people we have had to work with in our occupations are among the most difficult human beings ever to draw breath. They can drive us round the bend. But of course there was nothing we ever did that could possibly have offended them. They are simply cantankerous codgers, and we are simply splendid specimens of humanity. Regardless, Jesus tells us we must love them anyway.
Have you ever known someone whose personality was such that he or she constantly got under your skin? That person is like fingernails passing over a blackboard (back in the days when they had blackboards, which most of you remember), like the taste of spoiled food, like the smell of a raccoon which died in your attic in early June and you didn’t know it until one day in late August. God wants us to love such people, despite their many deficiencies, Jesus says.
That is impossible, we tell ourselves. It can’t be done, we say. But when we say that, we make a major mistake about the nature of agape love. To love everyone does not mean that we must like everyone. Who could like Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein? Who could like Osama bin Laden or the man who shot the school bus driver in Georgia and then took the young boy into his underground bunker? Who could like the rogue policeman killing other policemen in Los Angeles? And who could like that woman back there in the office who drove everyone half crazy or the person who constantly cheats everyone he can or the lascivious lothario who makes a move on every female who ever had the misfortune to cross his path? There are some people whom nobody, maybe not even their sainted mothers, like. We want to expectorate into the visage of such folks, which is to say, to spit in their face.
Neither Jesus nor God expect us to like such people. But they do command us to love such people. Obviously, therefore, loving everyone is something very different from liking everyone. Liking is a matter of feelings and emotions; agape loving is a matter totally of will. If we will to love everyone, we will love them.
But what does that mean? It means we will respect everyone, even if they are not respectful toward us or respectable in themselves. We are not required to respect everything they do, but we are required to respect them. They are fellow children of God, as warped or broken as they may be. It means we are to seek good on their behalf, as hard as that is. It means we are to treat them as we would treat those for whom love comes the easiest to us. It is easy to love the lovely, but it is hard to love the unlovely. Nonetheless, Jesus tells us, we are to love the unlovely (i.e., our enemies) with as much consideration and compassion as we love those who for whom love comes very naturally. There is a song which says, “You are so easy to love.” It’s terrific when that happens, for any kind of love. But when it doesn’t, and it doesn’t much of the time, we are to love with as much willpower and kindness as when love happens by the unfathomable mystery of human chemistry. We get along with some people magically, but with others our will is the only means by which we can succeed in loving them.
One of the greatest love matches in the history of American government and politics was that of John and Abigail Adams. The most crucial leader of the Continental Congress which finally passed the Declaration of Independence and his wife of many decades were a match surely made in heaven. John Adams was away from Abigail and their family in Braintree, Massachusetts for many months and even years at a time, and so they wrote literally hundreds of letters to one another. Theirs was one of the most glorious collection of love letters of all time. For several years John Adams was abroad on behalf of our government in France and England. In October of 1818, nearly twenty years after he left the presidency and came home to their farm to be permanently with the love of his life, Abigail died. By then John Adams was 83 years old. He wrote of her death, “It is easier for me now than when I went to France, because I know I will see her again soon.” It wasn’t too soon, however, because the tough old New Englander lived on for another eight years, until July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He thought that his old friend-turned-adversary-turned-once-again-friend, Thomas Jefferson, had outlived him. Adams’ last words were, “Jefferson lives.” But it wasn’t true. Thomas Jefferson had preceded John Adams in death by a few hours, on the morning of July 4, 1826. Adams died that afternoon. But both died on the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration: it is one of the happiest of historical happenstances in the history of the entire world.
The love of Abigail and John Adams is not the burden of love about which this sermon is addressing, however. Rather it is the love of the two bitter and long-embittered political rivals, Adams and Jefferson. They were very different personalities. They did not think alike, they did not act alike, and they were very unlike one another as American presidents.
The election of 1800 pitted the incumbent President, John Adams, against the would-be President, Thomas Jefferson. It also was the first presidential election in which the two candidates represented political parties. In the first three elections, two for Washington and one for Adams, there were no official political parties. The election of 1800 was probably the most awful of all our awful elections, even worse than the elections of 1960, 2000, or 2012. When it was over, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson did not speak a word or write a word to one another for the next fifteen years. Finally, Adams could stand it no longer, and he wrote a letter to the Sage of Monticello. Jefferson immediately responded, perhaps hoping that Adams would break the ice.
These two men were distinctly different, and they were not likely to love one another in a New Testament sense. Adams was somewhat puritanical, undiplomatic, stubborn, and a federalist, favoring a strong national government. Jefferson was ethically somewhat suspect, the very soul of diplomacy, stubborn, and a devotee of states-rights. They strongly agreed on the necessity of becoming independent from the English king, but politically they agreed on almost nothing else. Initially they were leery if fond friends, then they were sworn enemies, then, in their old age, they became friends again. “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” John Adams did that for Jefferson; I doubt Jefferson did that for Adams, because Jefferson was not a praying man. I am much more politically and philosophically drawn to Adams than Jefferson, but I admire them both for finally burying the hatchet.
If those two could learn to love one another, you and I certainly can do it with our own enemies, whoever they may be. Almost certainly we have far less at stake than two of our greatest Founding Fathers.
George Wythe was Thomas Jefferson’s teacher of law. Wytheville, Virginia, on the West Virginia border, is named after him. Wythe had a grand-nephew named George Wythe Swinney. When the young boy became orphaned, George Wythe took him into his home and raised him as though he were his own son. He named him in his will. But the young man was an addicted gambler, and when he was just a teenager, he stole a great deal of money from his benefactor to feed his addiction. In the end, the grand-nephew poisoned his great-uncle. He escaped conviction of the murder, because it was slaves who knew he administered the poison, and slaves were forbidden to testify in Virginia courts.
It would be very hard to love such a person as that. Nevertheless, that is what Jesus tells us God wants us to do.
Edward Wallis Hoch wrote a short but ever-memorable bit of doggerel philosophy.
There is so much good in the worst of us
And so much bad in the best of us
That it hardly behooves any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
All that is certainly correct, and it is worth bearing in mind at all times. But loving everyone, especially our enemies, entails more than merely recognizing that we are all in the same boat, and that no one can claim moral or personal superiority over anyone else. As Christians, we need actively to love everyone not only despite their deficiencies, and despite their fallibilities, but precisely because of their deficiencies and fallibilities. The only way we can create the kind of human society God intended for us is to love everyone, not to like them, but to love them, to do good to them, often to put their best interests ahead of our own, to do to them what we would like them to do to us, as Jesus said in another section of the Sermon on the Mount.
To love anyone with biblical love is a difficult challenge. It may require every ounce of patience and forbearance we have. It may be Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, George Wythe and his grand-nephew, the Hatfields and the McCoys.
At the Last Supper, according to the writer of the Fourth Gospel, Jesus told the disciples, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). No doubt Jesus was thinking about what almost certainly awaited him the next morning, after he would be arrested and tried before the Roman governor. To love all people is to lay down our life for them, probably not in a literal sense as Jesus did, but in a figurative sense. There is a great burden in that kind of love, but there is also a great blessing. To love others, especially those who most vex us, is to fulfill God’s purpose for each of us. It is to be the people he wants us to be, and to establish the loving community He envisioned for Israel and for the entire human race.
For a number of years, James Forbes was the pastor of the famous Riverside Church in New York City. Every Sunday, at the conclusion of the service, he gave this benediction: “God’s love is the hope of the world.” One of the ways that love becomes most visible is through our love of one another. It is often a heavy burden, but it also is a major factor in the last, best hope the world has. Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.