The passage: You have heard it said, Love your neighbour and hate your enemy; but I say, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who abuse and persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. If you love only those who love you, or greet only your brethren, what more do you do than the publicans? Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.
Is this not too much to expect? A man may come to do good to those who hate him, but when will he pray for those who abuse and persecute him? When he is a child of his Father in heaven. Then he will love his neighbour as himself even if the neighbour is his enemy; in the Leviticus passage our Lord and his apostles quote, neighbour and enemy are one: do not avenge or bear a grudge against your people, but love your neighbour as yourself, for I am the Lord.
See how gloriously Jesus interprets the earlier scripture: “I am the Lord” becomes “that you may be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
Is it reasonable to love our enemies? God does, so it is the highest reason. Is it reasonable to expect man to become capable of it? Yes, on one ground: the divine energy is at work in man to make his doing divine, as his nature is. For this our Lord prayed that all may be one, as the Father is in him and he in the Father, that they may be one in us. Nothing could be less likely to human judgment, yet he knows it will one day come.
Why should we love our enemies? The deepest reason cannot be put in words, for it lies in the absolute reality of their being, where they are of one nature with us, the divine nature; we see into it only as into a dark abyss. But we can sketch its form if we let our hearts’ thoughts move over the face of the deep.
“Are our enemies men like ourselves?” Yes, but not by virtue of their enmity, their wrongs, cruelty, heartlessness, injustice or misrepresentation. Humanum est errare is a truism with a germ of truth: errare shows that there is a way so truly human that to leave it is to wander, and the wandering is not the humanity. The words humane and humanity point to a shadow of that loving-kindness which, perfected in the divine fashion, will include even our enemies. We do not call human sacrifice, torturing captives or cannibalism humanity; not by such deeds are they men. Their humanity lies deeper, in the divine essence in them, and that pure essential humanity, deeper than the region of hate and independent of it, is what we are to love. It originates the claim of neighbourhood; neighbourhood only decides the occasion for it. Is it in every enemy? Else there would be nothing to love. Then we must love it, come between us and it what may.
But how can we love someone cruel and unjust to us, who sears with contempt or cuts off with wrong every tendril we put out; who is mean, carping, uncertain, self-righteous, self-seeking and self-admiring; who can even sneer, the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in essence than murder?
These things cannot be loved; the best man hates them most, and the worst cannot love them. But are these the man? Is there not within each a divine element of brotherhood and sisterhood, something lovely and lovable, perhaps slowly dying under the heat of vile passions or the colder fear of selfishness, but there? Shall that divine something, which once awakened will loathe these unlovely things tenfold more than we do, have no recognition from us? The very presence of this fading humanity is what makes it possible for us to hate; had an animal hurt us we should only kill. We hate the man because we are prevented from loving him; we push over the verge of creation, we damn, because we cannot embrace, and embracing is the necessity of our deepest being. Instead of telling ourselves that there is our enchained brother, our disfigured sister, captive of the devil, whom our love would sooner free, we recoil into hate that fixes them there, sacrificing their lovable reality to the outer falsehood of Satan’s incantations, murdering them to get rid of them. Yet within the most obnoxious lies that which, if it could show itself as it will one day, would compel our devotion. We are told to love not the unlovely but the brother or sister who is unlovely. Shall we leave our brother to his desolate fate? Shall we not say, “With my love at least you shall be compassed about, since you have not your own lovingness to wrap you; and when yours comes out to meet mine we shall be one in the indwelling God”?
Let no one say I speak only in a figure. I do; but many things we see most vividly are more truly expressed by a right figure than by clear logical outline. My figure means a truth.
If anyone says, “Don’t make vague distinctions. There is the person; can you deny he is unlovely? How can you love him?” I answer: with the evil cast out he will be yet more the person, his real self. What you now dislike is separable from him, is not he; it makes him less himself, working death in him until he risks ceasing to be a person at all. In his right mind he will be a person indeed, and you could not go on hating him. Begin to love him now and help him into the loveliness that is his. His personality, though clouded and defiled, lies deeper than the wrong, and is injured, perhaps destroyed, only so far as the wrong has reached it.
Those who will not acknowledge the claim of love may acknowledge the claim of justice. Some would shrink from doing injustice to people they would equally shrink from loving. But if, as I believe, justice is impossible without love, much more can it not coexist with hate. The pure eye for another’s claims goes only with a loving heart; the man who hates can hardly be delicate in doing justice to his neighbour’s love, predilections and peculiarities. It is hard enough to be just to friends; how shall our enemies fare? Justice demands that we think rightly of our neighbour as surely as that we neither steal his goods nor bear false witness. Man is made not for justice from his fellow but for love, which is greater than justice and by including it supersedes it. Mere justice is a fiction of analysis; it exists between man and man only relative to human law. Justice, to be justice, must be much more than justice. Without love, the law of our condition, we can no more render justice than a man can walk a straight line in the dark. No man even indifferent to his brother can recognize his humanity’s claims; the indifference is itself an injustice.
I have assumed the fault lies with the enemy, to build on the primary rocks. But each man must ask, “Is my neighbour really my enemy, or am I his, and so take him to be mine? Awful thought! If he is mine, am I not his? Am I not refusing to acknowledge the child of the kingdom in his bosom, and so killing it in mine?” Let us claim no more indulgence than we give him. Such honesty ends in severity at home and clemency abroad: we are accountable for the ill in ourselves and must kill it, and for the good in our neighbour and must cherish it. Only God can kill the bad in him; we cherish the good by being good to it across all the evil fog between our love and his good.
Nor should we forget that this fog is often misapprehension and mistake, giving rise to indignation, resentment and regret. Scarcely anything is just as it seems, but at the core is truth enough to dispel all falsehood and show life unspeakably divine. O brother, sister, across this weary fog, dim-lit by the faint torches of our truth-seeking, I call to the divine in you, which is mine, not to rebuke you or say “Why do you hate me?” but to say, “In God’s name I love you.” I will wait until the true self looks out of your eyes and knows the true self in me.
In the working of the Divine Love on the race, my enemy is doomed to become my friend. One flash of truth toward me would destroy my enmity; one hearty confession of wrong and our enmity passes away, and from each comes the brother who was inside the enemy all along. For this The Truth is at work. In faith, let us love the enemy now, accepting God’s work in reversion, as it were, and clasp our brother fast against the wiles of the wicked enchantment that would persuade us he is some horrible thing, hateful and hating.
But what if we are in the wrong, and hate because we have injured? Then let us cry to God as from the throat of hell, as under a spiritual incubus, as possessed by an evil spirit, as one buried alive in the sepulchre of our evil consciousness, that he would pity us, the chief of sinners, and lift us from the fearful pit and miry clay. Nothing will help but the Spirit of the Father and the Brother casting out and revealing. It will be with tearing and foaming, a terrible cry and a lying as one dead, that such a demon goes out. But what a vision will then rise in the purified soul!
“Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” “Love your enemies, and you shall be children of the Highest.” It is the divine glory to forgive.
Yet, some say, a time will come when the Unchangeable will cease to forgive; when it will no more belong to his perfection to love his enemies; when he will look calmly, and have his children look calmly, at the rising smoke of the everlasting torments of our strong brothers, our beautiful sisters! Nay, alas, the brothers are weak now, the sisters ugly now!
O brother, believe it not. “O Christ!” the redeemed would cry, “where are you, our strong Jesus? Come, our grand brother. See the suffering brothers and tormented sisters down below! Come, Lord of Life, Monarch of Suffering, redeem them. For our part, we will go down into the burning and see whether we can carry through the howling flames a drop of water to cool their tongues.”
Believe it not, my brother, lest it quench forgiveness in you and you go down with those brothers to the torment unforgiven; whence, were God not better than the phantom you call God, you should never come out, but whence you shall come out when you have paid the uttermost farthing, having learned of God in hell what you refused to learn on the gentle earth: what the sunshine and rain could not teach you, nor the seasons, nor morning and evening, nor the human face divine, nor the word near you in your heart and mouth, the story of Him who was mighty to save because he was perfect in love.
O Father, you are All-in-all, perfect beyond the longing of your children, and we are altogether yours. You will make us pure and loving and free. We shall stand fearless in your presence because perfect in your love, and your children will be of good cheer, infinite in love of each other and eternal in your love. Lord Jesus, give us the heart of a child, that we may arise from the grave of our dead selves and die no more, but see face to face the God of the Living.