Love Your Enemies

A sermon on Luke 6:27-38 for Epiphany 7, 2025, Preached at St Paul's, Ashgrove

Luke 6:27-38

I saw a meme the other day that showed one of the world’s wealthiest men disparaging the people he called he called the ‘parasitic class’.

I was confused.

He was, of course, saying that people living with illness, disability or unemployment are parasites. Not human. Feeding on the body politic rather than participating in it. This was familiar rhetoric from him. Vile but expected.

What confused me was that, in my mind, the term ‘parasitic class’, refers to the class this man belongs to – people who have grown obscenely wealthy by exploiting vast numbers of people; people with enough personal wealth to rid the world of preventable illnesses but who instead remain voracious in the accumulation of more and more for themselves. So, when I saw that meme, my first thought was ‘why is he disparaging himself?’

It took half a second for me to adjust my perception and see what he was actually saying, but that half second was important. It was a half-second of clarity. It was a half second in which I caught myself thinking of a human being a parasite – caught myself dehumanising a person who is made in the image of God just as I am.

His use of the term, ‘parasitic class’ was utterly vile and reprehensible. Life is hard enough for people living with disability and disadvantage without having a billionaire stomp on them as though they are insects.

But does that make it OK for me to think he is a parasite? Isn’t he also made in the image of God?

Of course he is completely indifferent to what I think of him, but Jesus isn’t. Jesus calls us to love our enemies.

That’s hard to do, isn’t it? At this point in history, with everyone taking sides and calling each other names, it is hard to be the one who walks a different path. Hard to keep remembering that the people we see as enemies of humanity – whoever it is we think they are - are nevertheless human beings, made in God’s image like us.

No matter what culture we live in, this is the most counter-cultural thing Christians are called to do. And maybe it is the most important instruction Jesus ever gave. Love your enemies.

Brene Brown has written about this recently:

We must never tolerate dehumanization—the primary instrument of violence that has been used in every genocide recorded throughout history.

When we engage in dehumanizing rhetoric or promote dehumanizing images, we diminish our own humanity in the process. Brene Brown[1]

When we look back at some of the most violent episodes in history, where one group of people has tried to wipe out another, we always find that in the years leading up to the violence there has been a ramping up of dehumanising rhetoric. You see a subsection of society being called parasites or vermin or viruses. Once that language takes hold, genocide doesn’t have to be called genocide. It can be called extermination, eradication, inoculation.

Jesus calls us to love our enemies. This is not fluffy sentimentality. This is the hardest thing you will ever do.

Some say this is the only truly new ethical teaching Jesus delivered, and I think they could be onto something. Most of what Jesus taught was distilled from his tradition – the Scriptures and teachings of his day. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’: you can find that in the book of Leviticus. The Beatitudes that we looked at last week lare pretty much a summary of the book of Psalms.

Love your enemies, though. It is hard to find that clearly and explicitly taught before anywhere Jesus.[2] So it is basically the most Jesussy ethical teaching in Scripture. That doesn’t mean we like it, though.

For a start, we don’t like to think that we have enemies, do we?

Having enemies makes life feel a bit scary. If someone hates me there’s no predicting how they might act out their hatred. Life can feel more under control if I tell myself I don’t have enemies.

But Jesus told us to love our enemies, so he must have been assuming that we’d have some.

Anglicans like to think that we are too nice to have enemies. Surely, enemies only appear when fail to live well, fail to be a good community member. Nice people don’t have enemies. Do we?

This way of thinking is a trap that clergy are particularly vulnerable to. There is this voice in my head that says if I was a good parish priest then everyone would love me. But that voice is a lie. All parish priests have enemies close by. And on our better days we thank God for them, because loving them helps us develop the spiritual muscles we need to love all our enemies.

Last week we read:

Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you … for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

The prophets had enemies. Jesus had enemies. The apostles had enemies. The fact that you have enemies says nothing about how nice you are or how good you are or how smart you are.

Nice people do have enemies.

Good people do get hurt.

Smart people do carry scars from encounters with their enemies.

So we need to change the way we think about enemies. Don’t let them make you think there is something wrong with you. In fact, according to Jesus, the reverse is true. ‘Woe to you’, he said ‘when everyone speaks well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.’

Jesus had enemies. He was a great leader and a perfect human being, but that didn’t stop people from hating him enough to kill him. If Jusus had enemies, then having enemies can’t be a sign of failure. It isn’t a sign of success, either, by the way! It’s mostly just a sign that we are human beings in an inhumane world.

Maybe you are like me and you have a tendency to blame yourself for everything that goes wrong. We often talk about people being their own worst enemy. Jesus’ command is still clear in that case: we are to love the enemy that is ourselves.

Perhaps you can’t think of anyone who is personally trying to harm you, but what about the people who are currently undermining peace in the world. Are they not the enemies of each one of us? What does it mean to love them?

The people Jesus spoke these words to knew had an enemy like that: the Roman Empire. They were paying exorbitant taxes; their land was being taken away. They couldn’t rule their own nation.

Of course, some of them might have also had a next-door neighbour who was really annoying, but mostly, when they used the word enemy they were not thinking individualistically. They were thinking nationally. They were thinking of Rome. Not an annoying neighbour but a powerful oppressor.

In Australia over the last six months, both the Jewish and Muslim communities have been victims of increasing violence from various enemies. Federal Police, I understand, are trying to work out whether these acts are coordinated and funded by foreign entities or are random, coming from an increase in religion-based hatred among Australians. Both possibilities are disturbing.

Of course, we are not going to tell Jews and Muslims that they must love their enemies, since that’s a Jesus thing. But we can imagine ourselves in their shoes and wonder: if it was happening to us, what it might look like to love our enemies in a situation like that?

Could we do it?

Is it even possible to love enemies like that?

If our definition of love is soft, squishy and sentimental then there can be no love in this situation.

If love means letting violent people off the hook, then there can be no love.

If love means letting the enemy keep harming us and other people, then there can be no love.

But love is none of those things.

Look at how Jesus treated his enemies:

• He got angry at them

• He challenged them. He scolded them in very strong language on occasion.

• He often hid or slipped away to keep himself and his friends safe from their enemies.

• In the end he allowed his enemies to kill him, and as he did that, he made sure his friends were safe.

For Jesus, love of enemies wasn’t about denying there was a problem. It wasn’t about letting the enemy get away with abuse. But it was about seeking the enemy’s welfare no matter what – knowing that:

The best thing for any hater is to stop hating,

The best thing for any abuser is to stop abusing

The best thing for any enemy is to stop being an enemy.

• Jesus challenged his enemies and tried to get them to change their behaviour. We must always do that where there is abuse.

• He kept himself and his friends safe. We must also do whatever we can to keep people safe from abuse.

• When all else failed, Jesus absorbed their violence and died with words of forgiveness on his lips. Even at the point of death he effectively declared: ‘You may be my enemy, but I will never be yours.’

Ultimately, love of enemy comes back to the place where we started: With refusing to allow ourselves to undermine the enemy’s humanity – refusing to call the enemy a parasite or vermin or virus - even when that is what they are calling us or those we love.

What do you reckon Jesus would say to the billionaire I started with? How might Jesus show love to that particular enemy?

There’s a story in Luke’s Gospel about a very rich man who approaches Jesus. The story even says Jesus looked at him and loved him. Jesus told that man to go sell everything he had and give the money to the poor, then come back to Jesus and become his follower.

So, with this Billionaire who has made himself the enemy of all who are vulnerable - and therefore the enemy of Jesus, since Jesus identifies with everyone who’s small, hungry and thirsty – how would Jesus love him?

Jesus would remind him that even after all he has done there is still hope – he is still a human being, made in God’s image. He can still turn around and find that shrivelled part of himself that is his humanity. He can give back his wealth to those he has exploited and degraded. He can begin to follow Jesus on the path of love rather than that of greed and hatred.

There is hope for this and all enemies. So, we mustn’t write them off. We must love them for the humanity we share with them and for the hope in Christ that we also share with them.

However inhuman then may appear to us, and however inhuman we may appear to them, Jesus calls us to love them, to love ourselves, to love each other, come what may. Amen.

With Love from Rev Margaret

[1] https://brenebrown.com/articles/2018/05/17/dehumanizing-always-starts-with-language

[2] This is disputed among Jewish scholars. Some see it as consistent with Jewish teaching. Some don’t.