love your enemies? really?

Christ’s coming was not at all like d-day. d-day was when a huge army went to “defeat” the evil regime headed up by adolf hitler. as much as we love to see that day as a time when evil was conquered. the truth is that God calls us to defeat evil in an entirely different way.

if you are a christian i can infer that your model for living is the life of Jesus Christ. a tough task, and it is a much tougher task than we often think about it as being. we seem to be like, “ok, being nice to people is hard, not lying is hard, not gossiping is hard”. yes, all of those things are hard, but there is so much more to loving people than those kinds of commandments. if christians are modeling Jesus, they should go so far beyond that because Jesus loved in a radical way.

back to the idea of d-day. how would Jesus have handled the situation? how we did? probably not. how did Jesus conquer evil when He was on earth? well, ultimately He died on the cross to defeat evil for good, but lets think about His everyday life. His teachings were pretty clear, “You have heard that it was said, ‘And eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on the right cheek turn the other to him also…”(Matthew 5:38). Ecclesiastes tells us that there is, “A time to love, And a time to hate; A time of war, And a time of peace”. i think that what He says in the sermon on the mount is Jesus’ way of saying that there was a time for war, but now is not that time. it’s kind of hard to get around these teachings, yet, we insist that there is more to the story; i think that's our sinful nature. the fact is, Jesus didn’t say “turn the other cheek except when (fill in lame excuse for violence here)”.

in the book of Isaiah, isaiah prophesies about the coming Suffering Servant (Jesus) by saying, “…He had done no violence, Nor was any deceit in His mouth” (Isaiah 53:9). this prophecy is true. Jesus was not a hurter, He was a healer. even to those who were defending good, Jesus insisted on loving rather than acts of violence to solve the problem. the prime example is in Matthew 26 when a huge group of people with swords and clubs came to arrest Jesus. one of Jesus’ friends who was with Him decided to defend Jesus by pulling out his sword and cutting off the ear of the high priest. Jesus doesn’t like this at all. he says, “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Or do you think that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels?”. good point Jesus. why wouldn’t we just trust God in this situation? why can’t we let go of all of our earthly thoughts that tell us that we need to take care of a situation our own way instead of the way God told us to? what is interesting about this passage is that after Jesus says this the disciples and everyone else who was with Jesus peaced out (Matthew 26:56). seriously, they ran away from Jesus, who was God! obviously the thought of not being able to defend yourself is scary. the thing is...it’s what God calls us to do. flat out. our command from Jesus is to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. as hard as that is to live out, i think i’m gonna give it a try.

Jesus was ridiculously counter-cultural, especially when it came to loving people. don’t get me wrong, we need courageous people to go to places like iraq, but not with guns. christians should go to those places with the intention of loving the enemy like Jesus commanded. i think it takes a lot more courage to go armed with love than with guns. we need to trust in God’s method to take care of things, not our own. our job is to obey His commandments. so love your enemy.

in fact, beyond just not shooting people, let's ACTIVELY love people. let's find CREATIVE ways that we can GO OUT OF OUR WAY to love people. i mean, that's how Jesus did it after all. He went way out of His way to love us.