Christianity & Culture Recalling the Call to Love1

By Margaret P. Aymer

As the parent of a nine-year-old child, I have spent many nights before bed reading children’s literature aloud to my son. In our imaginations we have, with J.R.R. Tolkien as our guide, traveled with Bilbo to see Smaug the dragon and with Frodo to fight Sauron. Alongside Tristan Strong, we have punched King Cotton and the gods of racism, guided by the words of Kwame Mbalia. And most recently, we have conquered Lord Voldemort, the villain of J.K. Rowling’s septology about a boy named Harry. In many of our literary adventures, I have been continually struck by how flat, how one-sided, how separated from any hope of salvation or redemption most of the villains in children’s books are. Video games are, if anything, worse. The world of the screen is separated into them and us, bad and good, shooter or target.

If we are not careful, our Holy Scriptures can lead us down a similar, inflexible, and unforgiving path. As we read the Exodus narrative, it is tempting to flatten the Egyptians and their leader as wholly evil, wholly unredeemable, expendable so long as we—imagining ourselves as Israelites—attain our liberation. We ignore the impending danger to the “Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites” (Exod. 3:8), the people already living in the land to which Jacob’s children will go. After all, they are enemies, and we know the rules. It’s them or us, bad or good, shooter or target.

Likewise when we read psalms that celebrated God’s liberating actions for Jacob’s children, God’s acts of deliverance from oppression and deliverance through the sea. Here, too, we can fall prey to our childhood tendencies to reading this act of divine grace as the only needed liberation in this story, ignoring the liberation needed for those who didn’t follow Moses through the sea: for the families mourning the losses of their children back in Egypt, for the families about to lose their lands and children in Canaan. Our scriptures—often composed for and to a people in exile who needed to hear of God’s liberation—can tempt us, if we are not careful, to see God’s grace and liberation as apportioned only for a few, only for those whom God loves and chooses, as God’s arbitrary consideration for one family above all other families on earth.

Certainly, the narrative underscores that the descendants of Zilpah and Bilhah, of Rachel and Leah were truly oppressed. The Egyptian nobility, at least, acted in horrific ways toward them and presumably others whom they enslaved. For the Israelites in bondage, “enemy” was a true and honest depiction of the Egyptians’s position with regards to Miriam, Moses, and their kin. Moreover, the Canaanites also acted as enemies. They did not welcome the refugees to their lands in peace. Open war, open hostilities rained down not only from the Israelites but also from the Canaanites. But in the end, in the end we are expected to take sides, to see the enemy clearly, to identify with unerring specificity who is them and who is us.

In Luke 6: 27–36, Jesus challenges us to reconsider. The gospel does not deny that some people truly are our enemies, truly want to oppress us, to imprison us, to hurt us, perhaps even to kill us—as indeed Jesus himself experienced. We are not called to deny the true and demonstrable presence of enemies in this world awaiting redemption. Nor are we called to change our enemies. God alone can do that. But in Luke’s gospel, Jesus does call forth a change in ourselves, a change in orientation that empowers us while refusing to dehumanize those who set themselves against us as enemies.

Jesus’s commands can be separated into two sections. The first are the corporate commands. At this point in Luke, Jesus has just called the twelve apostles. Then he comes to a level place and is surrounded by a great crowd curious to hear him. Jesus teaches them about God’s favor for the poor, and the woes coming to us who are wealthy (Luke 6: 20–25). And you can almost hear the crowd dividing itself into good and evil, blessed poor and accursed rich, friend and enemy, when Jesus turns to them and says: wrestles with this teaching in Luke’s gospel. King muses that this kind of love is “a love in which the individual seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor.” This kind of love, which Dr. King called agape, does not divide people into “worthy and unworthy.” Rather, this is a love that springs from the other person’s need, need perhaps not only for the means of daily survival, but perhaps even more need to be seen as human, acknowledged as human, treated as human. “Agape,” insists Dr. King, “is love seeking to preserve and create community.” It is “a willingness to go to any length to restore community.” Agape recognizes “that all life is interrelated,” that all of us are kin and interdependent. As such, it does not, indeed, it cannot make a “distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both.”2

Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you … Do to others as you would have them do to you … love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:27–28, 31, 35, NRSVue).

In his 1958 essay, “An Experiment in Love,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrestles with this teaching in Luke’s gospel. King muses that this kind of love is “a love in which the individual seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor.” This kind of love, which Dr. King called agape, does not divide people into “worthy and unworthy.” Rather, this is a love that springs from the other person’s need, need perhaps not only for the means of daily survival, but perhaps even more need to be seen as human, acknowledged as human, treated as human. “Agape,” insists Dr. King, “is love seeking to preserve and create community.” It is “a willingness to go to any length to restore community.” Agape recognizes “that all life is interrelated,” that all of us are kin and interdependent. As such, it does not, indeed, it cannot make a “distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both.”2

But what does such love look like concretely? Jesus proposes three examples: turning the other cheek if struck; relinquishing one’s inner tunic if one is sued for the outer cloak; giving to those who beg and not demanding recompense from those who take from you.3 These examples reflect Jesus’s cultural context. In the first century, an enslaved person or a poor person could expect a master, an employer, or simply a random person of superior rank to dismiss them with a slap across the face—and that without consequence. An impoverished person deeply in debt could be brought to court and sued literally for the cloak he wore over his undergarment. Beggars were ubiquitous, and theft was not uncommon.

In turn, Jesus’s examples inspired King and his colleagues to launch a movement of nonviolent resistance against segregation in the south, and later a poor people’s campaign. These mid-20th-century movements of civil disobedience refused to obey the laws of segregated society; simultaneously, they refused to dehumanize segregationists. King led a movement that claimed these rights and full humanity of all people, African Americans and those who resisted them. He insisted that at the heart of his movement lay the principle of loving one’s enemy.

Jesus’s command to love our enemies continues for us today, we who continue to follow his teachings well into this socially, economically, racially, and now digitally polarized 21st century. We are still called to claim the fundamental human worth, the imago Dei, of all human beings, including our enemies. Love still requires us to acknowledge our interdependence with all of creation for our mutual survival and flourishing, including our enemies. Whether or not we like or even choose to acknowledge it, all of us are kin, including our enemies. God’s love, by which we are formed, still directs itself at everyone without distinction, including our enemies.

Thus, the challenge persists: what does it mean for us to love our enemy today? How can we act in loving ways toward those who treat us as an enemy? How can we honor their fundamental human worth, acknowledge our interdependence with them, name them as kin? What might it mean in our call-out culture to resist the trend and instead call our enemies in, back to themselves, back to the fullness of the human family? How can we struggle for liberation for all people so that all may be truly free?

Here is one example, drawn from the nightly literary adventures of my son and me this year, an example from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 4 For in reading this last of her septology, I found astonishing how J.K. Rowling, unlike other

Margaret Aymer is academic dean and The First Presbyterian Church, Shreveport, D. Thomason Professor of New Testament Studies at Austin Seminary. Aymer has published four books including James: Diaspora Rhetorics of a Friend of God, and she was editor of Horizons in Biblical Theology for several years. Most recently she was editor for the book of James in the latest revision of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV-ue) of the Bible.