Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Jesus taught them, “But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” —Matthew 5:44
Richard Rohr describes how loving our enemies is a practice of “integrating the negative,” accepting what we find unacceptable within ourselves:
Our enemies always carry our own shadow side, the things we don’t like about ourselves. We will never face our own shadow until we embrace those who threaten us (as Francis of Assisi embraced the leper in his conversion experience). The people who turn us off usually do so because they carry our own faults in some form.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says in essence, “If you love those who love you, what’s so great about that?” (Matthew 5:46). It’s simply magnified self-love. Instead, we are called to love the stranger at the gate, the one outside of our comfort zone. Until we can enter into love with them, Jesus is saying we really have not loved at all.
And what’s Jesus’ motivation for doing this? Some translations say, it’s to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). In my opinion, a more useful and accurate understanding of the word translated as “perfect” is “whole.” Jesus and Francis met a God who is One, whole, and all inclusive. Be all inclusive as our God is all inclusive and all merciful. This is the heart of the gospel. Jesus’ and Francis’ goal was imitation of a loving, forgiving God. [1]
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) modeled how to “integrate the negative” by facing the realities of racism, poverty, and war, while insisting that we follow Jesus’ command to love our enemies.
Let us be practical and ask the question, How do we love our enemies?
First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive…. Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship….
Second, we must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that they are. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy….
There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of their acts are not quite representative of all that they are. We see them in a new light. We recognize that their hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God’s image is ineffably etched in their being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 1992, 2010), Audible audio ed.
[2] Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in Strength to Love (Fortress Press, 2010), 44, 45–46. Note: minor edits made to incorporate inclusive language.
Image credit and inspiration: Nadya Spetnitskaya, Untitled (detail), 2018, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Making bread requires the integration of dry and liquid ingredients that must be kneaded and combined. They move from messiness to a cohesive form, just like any kind of integration process.
Story from Our Community:
This past year has been one of recovery and change for me. Physical recovery from surgery on both hips, stepping away from a long-served post on a church board and the church itself, and retiring from full-time work. All have involved challenges, dark days and brilliant periods of relief. Physical recovery has required a daily practice of exercise and rest. I’m finding that spiritual recovery from decades in the evangelical church also requires daily attention to my soul. CAC’s writing about “Experiencing Transformational Nights” really resonated with me and offered a way forward to help restore my soul and place in the reign of God on this earth. Thank you.
—Michael K.
