J4P – Enemy Love

Blogger: Brent Underwood continues the Community Book Review of Jesus For President

Because my life is in God’s hands, I will never take my enemy’s life into my hands.

-John Howard Yoder

Logan, Jesse and Father George’s stories should give us all cause to pause. If you haven’t had a chance to read these stories yet, I highly recommend that you read these important insights into what it means when you take the teachings of enemy love by Jesus to heart!

As followers of Jesus, we are called to love our enemies and to return evil with good. This does not come natural to us, I know. Instead we have bought whole heartedly into the myth of redemptive violence. David Augsburger claims that our basic natural assumptions go like this…

The world is a dangerous place.

Human beings are innately, intrinsically violent.

The enemy is evil, more violent than we are, and beyond change.

We have only three alternatives: accommodate violence, avoid violence, or use violence ourselves – go along with it, run from it, or do it before or when they do.

The answer to violence is more violence. Evil is the bottom line, and violence its language, logic, and ultimate reality.

Violence can solve our problems decisively. Power, domination, and extermination of evildoers will stop the spiral, prevent the violence from feeding on itself, extinguish resentment, intimidate those who would seek revenge, render retaliation against us impossible, allow us to dominate benevolently.

And so we fight. We go to war. We kill without blinking an eye. We ask young men and women to pull a trigger on another human life without ever asking what it might do to the one who does the killing let alone what it does to the countless lives connected to the one whose life is lost. Does one have to become a monster to defeat the monster? Is there another way?

Nonviolence is right not because of what Jesus taught, although that guides our thinking on the nature of love for God and neighbor; nor because of the individual acts of compassion that Jesus performed, although they model the selfless life of concern for the other: It is the cross, the radical confrontation with evil, that refuses to return evil for evil.

Nonviolence is right not because it works but because it is the way of Jesus. It anticipates the triumph of the Lamb that was slain; it reveals the heart of God.

The way of the cross is not an inner spiritual surrender, or a profound sentiment of spirituality as pretension holds, or any of the many other inner conceptual, emotional, volitional, spiritual definitions of experience that identify the cross with physical, familial, or vocational hardships. The way of the cross is the willingness to die.

-David Augsburger (Dissident Discipleship)

I know this is a controversial topic. I know that there are many who follow Jesus who might disagree with me on the issue of nonviolence. I know that many struggle with the God of the Hebrew scriptures who seems to be anything but nonviolent. I know that are families are filled with those who have served in the armed forces, which can make this a very emotional issue. But is there a way that all of God’s children could make these affirmations together?

• Love for God and love of neighbor are two aspects of the same love. Jesus was wholly faithful to God and truly faithful to fellow humanity. We live out his love.
• No one for whom Christ died can be to us an enemy. If Christ already suffered the death penalty for a person who has committed a capital offense, how can I reenact it without invalidating all Christ offered and suffered? We carry out his mission.
• No one is expendable or disposable. No one is absolutely or irrevocably incapable of loving; no one is absolutely or unapproachably incapable of being loved. All persons are within the love of Christ. We join him in this work of love.
• We do not fear or avoid conflict. We refuse to believe the lie that violence is the answer to conflict. We believe in peacemaking.
• To love God, our neighbor, our enemy, and ourselves requires persistent, relentless commitment to the way of Jesus.

Amen?