Every Church A Peace Church

	Support ECAPC!
	ECAPC is a movement built upon the financial support of individuals like you. Click here to make a contribution.

	Publications
	Subscribe to Online Publications to support your journey!

	Register
	Individuals, small groups,and congregations are invited to join the National Registry of Peace Churches. More...

Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in God’s work to save the world.

Jesus and World Religions: How to Deal With Enemies

View Archives

JESUS, ANTHROPOLOGY AND WORLD RELIGIONS
Some Good News

by John K. Stoner

4th of 7.

4. How to Deal with Enemies

    It becomes then, in the Christian view, a matter of observing how Jesus dealt with his enemies (by loving them), and making his way our way. And all of this, not just as a pattern of interpersonal, or interindividual relationships, but as a way to run the world. And that not just because it would be nice, or would do honor to Jesus or God, but also because it is the only way that will work. Since this is the only workable way to run the world, it is right, helpful, and humanly indispensable to say that Jesus is the way and the only way. People who have found a way of human relationships that work, whatever their religion, will find that it is not materially different from what Jesus taught.

    At the same time we can, in this, invite everyone who wishes to take the scientist’s way out, to do so, and gladly welcome them to say with Albert Einstein, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that do not work.”    In my view there is no doubt, God has time for that. It may well be asked whether humanity and it’s earth-bound project has time for it, and that would be the urgency of saying “yes” to the way of Jesus sooner rather than later. But human freedom will have its say in this.

    Christians do claim that Jesus helps people to understand God better, but they/we should be clear that first he helps people to understand themselves better.

    It has been said that we are our own worst enemy. We see at least some truth in that any time we observe that the better we understand ourselves, the better life goes for us. That is, when we become less an enemy to ourselves, life goes better for us.

    The first, and in the end the most surprising thing that we learn from Jesus, is that we have the capacity to live out the primacy of the will to embrace, and that living this way is more true to our nature than anything else. That is to say, we feel more fulfilled, whole, mature and happy when we recognize that the economy of undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of just desert. This is, no doubt, different from most prevailing cultural ways of dealing with others, which tend to put the primacy of desert in first place.

    But how do people learn the primacy of embrace from Jesus?

    Let’s look at the Jesus story with that question in mind. What we see, in one event after another, and one teaching after another, is Jesus practicing the primacy of embrace, and we see people responding to that.

    We admire Jesus in large part because we feel ourselves loved by him in spite of our failures. There is nothing quite like feeling oneself accepted/embraced even though, and before, one has done something, or achieved a moral status, where one could think of oneself as worthy of acceptance. We describe the extending of this embrace by a gracious person as forgiveness.

    Forgiveness transcends both guilt and hostility. What is the shape and form of our hostility? Of our alienation from our enemy? What is the shape of our hostility toward “God?” Perhaps our anger at being created unable to achieve the potential we feel, and feeling blamed for that inability!

    The emotional power of Christian conversion in diverse cultures is the very human experience of coming to see, to believe, that one is loved, forgiven, embraced as one is: imperfect, conflicted, hostile, whatever--at the center of the universe, the bottom of everything, we are loved as we are. Every child likes that experience. When adults rediscover it, it is a big discovery! Put in terms of theology, if God thinks of us that way, we can think of ourselves that way!   And when we think of ourselves that way, something very big can change within us very suddenly, and it is indeed a “conversion.” It is first a whole new way of seeing one’s self, and it becomes a whole new way of seeing others.

    But let us put a qualification on the claim that this is a whole new way of seeing ourselves. For some people it will not be so much a whole new way of seeing themselves. Some people have little difficulty accepting and forgiving themselves. So there will be exceptions. But first, more about the usual.

    People are nothing if not diverse, including diverse in their self-image and their perceptions and assumptions both about their own nature and the nature of others. But generally, and here I generalize, people have conflicted feelings about themselves. We do not feel all one way all day, nor all days. Sometimes we feel good about ourselves, sometimes less good. My generalization includes the assertion that most people feel less good about themselves when they live with the primacy of just desert above the primacy of embrace--with concerns of justice above concerns of compassion. And a further generalization, most people, largely because of cultural conditioning, never even think of putting the primacy of embrace first--especially in relation to themselves! They live with an attitude of blame rather than an attitude of embrace toward themselves.

    When someone calling himself “the human one,” Jesus, comes into that kind of life and that kind of self-image, saying, “You should be embracing yourself, because I embrace you, and God embraces you,” it can certainly have the quality of welcome information, or good news, about it.

    Having said that, the diversity of human nature means that some other people, I believe a minority, and in any case basically determined by culture, some other people will not hear the primacy of embrace as a brand new idea nor a brand new way of thinking about themselves. That’s great. Let’s keep moving on to the people who have yet to discover this, giving them Jesus’ message of embrace, because this discovery for them is very important.

    In summary, a serious religion has got to take seriously the question of how to deal with enemies. A plan for human relations which works only under good conditions and in easy cases is no plan at all. That is why Jesus’ plan of loving your enemies, a plan dealing with the hard cases, is so essential and in the end so attractive.

Submit a Comment!

We appreciate your comments. Your e-mail address will not be displayed on our website.
Name
Email Address
Comments (you may use html tags)

View Print-Friendly Page Send This Page To A Friend