"Love Your Enemies" | Charissa Simmons | February 23, 2025

Many years ago, when I first started working with kids here at Trinity, I had a Sunday morning church school class that was something of a disaster. There was a small group of kids there that day—a couple of sibling groups who obviously didn't want to be there. They were disengaged, disruptive, and, at some points, actually mean to each other—mostly to their siblings. And I didn't handle it well.

By the end of class, one child was in tears, another was cleaning marker off of the ceiling, and another was reluctantly picking up all of the tiny pieces of paper they had strewn all over the floor.

So when it was time, I sent most of the kids upstairs to join their parents here for communion, but I made this small group stay with me for a few minutes because we needed to address what had happened that morning. We talked about what we did and what we said. We talked about our feelings. And on the spur of the moment, I decided to end with a prayer. That's what we do, after all. I was hoping for some sort of reconciliation, so I started the prayer and then asked each child to pray for the person next to them.

I should have seen what was coming.

The first child's prayer was, "Dear God, please help my brother not to be such a jerk."

Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you, Jesus says. I'm not sure that praying for your brother not to be a jerk is exactly what Jesus had in mind, but honestly, it's probably what a lot of our prayers for enemies are about.

Then we get the Golden Rule today—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And we're aware that we don't always treat other people the way we would have them treat us. We're very aware that others don't always do unto us as we would have them do. And sometimes, we end up calling these people our enemies. Loving them is not our first instinct.

"Dear God, please change this other person."

It's not necessarily a bad thing. When someone's heart has been hardened, God tells us it's good to pray that their heart be softened. It can be an act of love to call out someone's bad behavior and want them to change. But many times, we can't help them—either because they are out of our reach or because we just can't find our way to that kind of love. Sometimes, it might be dangerous or harmful for us.

Loving our enemies is complicated, and it's hard.

Our first reading today gives us a great example of loving our enemies, where Joseph forgives his brothers for their past wrongs against him in a most gracious display of love.

This morning, we heard just a little piece of what is an epic story. Joseph's brothers—he had a lot of them—were jealous of their father's love for Joseph, the favored child. So they sold Joseph to slave traders, and he ended up in Egypt as a slave in the house of Pharaoh. At one point, he's unjustly thrown in jail, but his ability to interpret dreams puts him in Pharaoh's good graces. Eventually, he becomes the most powerful man in Egypt, controlling the distribution of food during a prolonged famine.

When his brothers come to Egypt looking for food, they don't recognize him. Joseph doesn't immediately reconcile with them—there's a lot of drama that happens first. By the point in the story that we heard today, Joseph's brothers have been back and forth between Canaan and Egypt a number of times. Joseph—whom his brothers don't recognize—has put them through an emotional ringer. He's pretended to think that they were spies and thieves. He planted evidence to frame them. And with that accusation, Joseph has made his brothers fear for their lives and for the life of their elderly father, Jacob, back in Canaan.

Now Joseph is ready to reconcile—to tell his brothers who he is and to forgive them. He gives God credit for using this terrible situation, for turning this terrible situation, for using this terrible situation for something good. But let's be clear: he does not say God has caused this terrible situation in order for something good to happen—only that something good has come out of it in the end.

Because Joseph was able to rely on God's goodness and resist the temptation for retaliation, he still holds his brothers accountable for all the things they have done. He demands that the truth be told and the pain caused by their actions acknowledged. And then, through the gift of grace, comes his forgiveness and their reconciliation.

When we think about responding to our enemies, forgiveness and reconciliation are not usually top of mind. Retribution, revenge, destruction—these are often more appealing.

Jesus says to turn the other cheek, to give more than is asked of you, to just give it all away. We can read these words as acquiescence to those who would harm us, but that is not what Jesus was about.

Jesus’ teachings were often given with a twist. He had a way of turning things on their head, making people think in different, creative, maybe even subversive ways. He did this all the time—right?—with the parables, little stories with unexpected messages.

Now, the theologian Walter Wink has applied that kind of thinking to these verses we heard today. He maintains that rather than acquiescence or retribution, Jesus is advocating a third way—a way of resisting and changing the power structure without resorting to violence or retribution.

He suggests, through historical research, that a backhanded strike on the cheek was an act of humiliation—something done by a person of power to one with no power. Turning the other cheek, where the aggressor couldn't land another backhand strike, would have forced them to treat the victim as an equal—thus turning the tables of power.

Similarly, taking someone's coat was a common act of punishment. But if one gave away their undergarment as well, then the shame of nakedness, at that time, would be on the observer, not on the naked person themselves. So again, the suggestion is that we've inverted the power structure here—not giving in, but resisting in a way that is not violent, that takes the power away from the aggressor.

Jesus goes on to talk about how we should behave, and he sums it up with these words: Love your enemies. Do good. And lend, expecting nothing in return.

Expect nothing in return.

This is key to this passage.

We live in a transactional world: I pay for something, I get something in return. We seek to return favors, to make fair exchanges, to expect a return on investment. But that's not the way God works. That's not the way God's love works. Love doesn't rest on reciprocity. It doesn't keep tabs. It isn't concerned with fairness.

Lend without expectation of return.

This kind of giving—love freely given—is a kind of grace. As Christians, we define grace as God's love and favor to us, unearned and freely given.

This is the kind of love Jesus is calling us to live out in our own lives.

The Greek word for grace is "charis," and that is the word that has been translated as "credit" in the version we heard today:

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?

If you love those who love you, what grace is that to you?

What grace have you?

Or, what grace is there in that?

If you do good to those who do good to you, where is the grace in that?

If you lend expecting return, what grace is that to you?

Jesus contrasts this grace with reciprocity:

"Even sinners do that."

We, on the other hand, are called to live graciously—in the image of God's charis. And we are made to do it together.

Another detail that's lost in our English translation is that Jesus is speaking to his followers communally. The verbs in this passage are all plural imperatives, not singular.

He's telling us: This is communal work.

Just before this passage, we heard last week, are the blessings and the woes, right? And now, Jesus is telling us how those blessings and woes are lived out in community.

What does it mean to be a community that loves this way?

To be a community that loves enemies?

We don't do this work on our own.

We can't.

Loving our enemies is complicated, and it is hard.