Enemies.

Who is the hardest person in your life to love?

Kellie and I were in Wilmington for two weeks last month, primarily to savor the gorgeous wedding of our son Thorpe with our new daughter Cailyn, and secondarily to enjoy time with extended family, many of whom we hadn’t seen in a couple years. It was awesome! Getting to be the wedding officiant was an added bonus.

In a quiet moment alone one day, looking out over the tidal creek and enjoying the presence of God, I began to think about a guy who’s on the periphery of my life—a guy I find hard to love. (And if you’re reading this, I can assure you that it’s not you! ) Oh, he’s pleasant enough, but his lack of character has hurt people that I care about…and I noticed that I was carrying strong feelings of resentment.

“O God,” I breathed, “Help me see this guy the way you see him. I know he carries the fingerprints of God on his soul; help me see that and feel compassion instead of judgment. Show me how to love him whole-heartedly.” For the next few days I was keenly aware of how easy it is to justify feelings of lovelessness toward those I experience as obnoxious or self-involved or shallow or whatever. (Sure am glad no one ever experiences me that way, right?!)

In his kindness, God kept my heart really tender over those days, and I found myself longing deeply for more capacity to love…and more humility to ground my heart against pride and reactivity. The prayer for a soft heart would rise unbidden and earnest at various moments—jogging in the humidity, watching my grandson on the playground, kayaking the Intracoastal.

There’s no question that love is the “prime directive” for Jesus and the crux of the Kingdom he invites us into. The entire Old Testament, he told the Pharisees, is encapsulated in this one act (Mt. 22:34-40). Paul picks up the refrain that love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom. 13:10) and the greatest of all character qualities (1 Cor. 13).

So how are we doing with actually loving people? Especially the ones that are harder to enjoy?

When I am inconvenienced, dismissed, or challenged, I have to admit that love is not my instinctive response. “Fight or flight” is more my impulse…but humans have been fighting and fleeing for millennia, and that has not helped usher in the Kingdom of God. No, only love—extravagant and uncontained—can heal our fractured world and bind up the wounds of fear and violence that ravage us.

Jesus only raises the bar: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’” he declares in the Sermon on the Mount. “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Mt. 5:43-45). Loving enemies, hmm. Sometimes I convince myself that I have no enemies, that I’m so easy-going and welcoming that everyone loves me, and I love everyone. A nice fantasy. All it usually takes is a Floridian driving 15 mph on our mountain road—or a local taking blind curves across the yellow line—to pop that bubble!

My reflection on loving enemies took me to the Great Commandment: “The most important [commandment],” answered Jesus, “is this…. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mk 12:29-31). Okay, gotcha. Love is the gig. The epicenter of the gospel. Both the means and the end.

But what if Jesus is saying even more? What if he’s not telling us to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, which is how we generally read it…but he’s actually telling us to love our neighbors as ourselves? Catch the difference? What if he’s saying that we are all so connected in the fabric of humanity, so bound together by the act of creation, so interpenetrated as the “body of Christ” that to love my neighbor is actually to love myself? (Now my head is exploding.)

And maybe this is even why God connects our receiving forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer with our extending it (Mt 6:12)—because the very forgiveness we offer to one of our brothers or sisters is the same forgiveness we wind up receiving! We really are that joined together.

This is what Jung called the collective unconscious and the mystics often call unitive consciousness—the awareness of how connected we already are…on spiritual, physical, and metaphysical planes (which, quantum physics now tells us, are not actually different). I have often written about Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer, his final declaration of intent as he prepared to leave the earth: Oneness was his overarching theme (Jn. 17). He prayed for a radical unity among disciples (and those who would later believe)—unity with one another and with him, just as he was one with the Father.

We rarely see such unity expressed at the visible level, but love seems to operate on a Kingdom wavelength often unseen, both validating the connections that already exist and extending those connections in ways that abrogate fear (1 Jn 4:18) and redeem humanity (Rom 8:38-39).

Let me try to bring these heady ideas back to earth. The guy I find hard to love—he and I are already connected. We share the DNA of the cosmos, both brought into being by the divinely spoken word. My dis-love, even if never articulated, generates dissonance, running contrary to our divine design, distancing us, not just from one another, but from ourselves. Love, on the other hand, even if never articulated, affirms our innate bond as “heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17) and brings us into spiritual harmony.

When I love him, I am loving myself. And I cannot love myself well without loving him. And somehow, on a subconscious level at least, we experience the healing effects of unspoken love as well as the dis-ease of unspoken dis-love. So, we have our work cut out for us. And grace is the power that drives it all.

Contemplate

I asked you at the beginning: Who is the hardest person in your life to love? Love doesn’t mean denying what’s broken; it simply means to embrace a belovedness beyond brokenness. To see the holy embedded in the fragility of our humanity, to honor that divine core, and to reach for it. How can you do that today for this person you have named? How can you hope, pray, and believe for that one? How can you advocate for him or her, both in the seen and the unseen? What will you do to love your enemy?

Takeaway

It’s more important to be loving than be right.