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Loving your Enemies (In the Church)

7th Sunday : 23 February 2014  : Matthew 5: 38-48

Do I have the right as a Christian to use force to resist an intruder who breaks into my house at night? If so how much force am I entitled to use? Yes, said Thomas Aquinas you do have the right to resist an intruder in your house, for you must discharge your responsibilities to protect the members of your family. The degree of force you use should be proportionate to the threat, and be sufficient to deter, or drive off the intruder, but no more.

Does New Zealand have the right to use armed force against an armed aggressor, or to join in a war in support of other nations in pursuit of foreign policy objectives that it thinks guarantee the best interests of its citizens? Yes, wrote Thomas Aquinas, providing that its going to war, and its employment of its armed forces fulfils certain moral criteria, criteria which have now come to be called the just war theory.

Listening in to this kind of debate we can realise how the greatest Christian ethicists have felt obliged to compromise with some of the strongest teaching of Christ, and surely it doesn’t get any stronger than the command this morning to love your enemies, and to pray for those who persecute you. Part of the complication and the need for compromise is that the state reserves to itself the right to use coercive force, and tries hard to make sure that its citizens don’t go around taking matters into their own hands. The most essential task of the state is to ensure the rule of law, and to maintain law and order. The reason why Libya and Somalia are such dangerous countries to live in is that the government is weak or non-existent, and so armed militias, or gangs of criminals fill the vacuum, and as a result prey on the lives of the people. So we are spared many ethical dilemmas by the fact that the police and the justice department restrain the evil and the violent on our behalf, and strongly discourage us from any vigilante solutions.

In any case it is highly unlikely that we will ever be called upon to make a judgement call about our nation going to war, or about what weapon of choice to reach for to deal with burglar bill. We will I guess dial 111 and hope for the best.

But there are a couple of areas of our lives where today’s bracing teaching will give us pause for thought, and hopefully will spur us on to behave better than we might have thought ourselves capable of. Oddly enough our hobby groups, or our family, or our Church can be the arenas where we meet our enemies on a regular basis, and are put to the test in the matter of Christian charity.

Our church you say – how can that be – since it is a peaceable kingdom, trying to live by high standards of conduct, under starters orders from Jesus himself about treating others well, indeed we are supposed to behave towards them as if they were brothers and sisters in God’s family. But the problem is that whenever human beings come together to try and be like angels they can end up going to the opposite end of the behaviour scale in the chain of being. For in a community with high ideals it is possible to disagree violently about how to achieve them, and about which of them is the most important. And each one of us brings into our life in the church bits of the unredeemed world, hurting bits of us, and parts of us that have yet to fully grow up and mature, and these vulnerabilities and shortcomings rub up against others character defects with interesting and painful results. And of course different members of the church are putting in different levels of effort – as our Bishop put it recently, in most churches 20% of the people do 80% of the work.

There is also the matter of difference. One of the glories of the church is the way it brings people together who might otherwise never meet, or be in regular association. Most voluntary associations bring people together around a particular interest, and often there is a certain degree of homogeneity in the kind of people who meet together for this purpose. But the church has a different kind of agenda, and it tends to bring people together from a wide a variety of backgrounds and expectations. Difference stimulates and enriches, but it also can feel uncomfortable, and at times downright threatening. And this too leads to disagreements and passionate conversations.

So in the church we are in regular contact with people with another perspective on what is essential in the faith we share, with varying levels of commitment, who may be very different to us in background, and of course we all have our blind spots and personal shortcomings. So in the words of Jesus, "causes of stumbling are bound to arise."

Which is why it is so helpful, indeed essential, to make allowances for one another, to cut each other some slack, to give each other the benefit of the doubt, and to treat one another with decency, courtesy and respect. There are bound to be people in our church who we don’t like, we may even cordially detest them, but we are bound together by something bigger than our feelings, namely the love of Jesus for us, and our love for him, the one who died for us in order to bring us together into his family.

And it is why in our dealings with our fellow Christians we should avoid being quick to take offence, being highly sensitive to perceived slights to our honour, and nursing grudges to the point where they later lead to relationship ruptures. Always we will want to be quick to talk through misunderstandings and difficult incidents.

One biblical critic considering today’s passage talks about "an intelligent love of enemies." He means that considered, thought through, and calm way of relating to people we don’t get on with, and may even have reason to fear and mistrust. Rather than reacting to them from the gut we relate to them with the fairness, evenhandedness and common decency that we hope they might extend to us. In this way too we keep the moral high ground in our exchanges with them. Which means of course that if things do become difficult and unpleasant we are seen to be the ones who behaved reasonably and maturely.

No doubt we are not yet in a space to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect, as Jesus put it this morning, but we can do our best, and do all we can to be on the road towards that magnanimity, compassion, forgiving nature, and generous treatment which is God’s way of being in himself, and in his relating to all the human creatures he has made, even the bad and selfish ones. Dealing well with challenging incidents as they arise with people who are not top of our hit parade takes all the maturity we can muster, and takes a lot out of us, but the church is a school of love that hopefully trains us towards that level of outstanding behaviour.