One reason we’re to love our enemies is so we can see straight.
Animus blinds us to the truth about reality, giving us a distorted vision of the world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the grip of war, when one people’s hatred or disdain of another people leads to unconscionable attitudes and actions.
But we see this also in political battles. Partisanship can become a drug, especially when your political identity is shaped less by your party’s philosophy and more by the outright disdain and contempt you feel for the other side. Whether we call this “negative polarization” or “partisan brain,” or we see it through a theological lens like “hate” or “contempt,” we cannot miss how animus distorts our field of vision. We lose touch with reality. Consistency and coherence fall by the wayside. Out goes reasonableness. Our minds become malformed by our hatred for the other side.
Love Enemies and See Rightly
The connections between seeing straight and loving our enemies are in the Sermon on the Mount. In the Beatitudes, Jesus declares the pure in heart will see God (Matt. 5:8). He warns of the eye that objectifies another human being for selfish purposes (vv. 28–29). Later, he emphasizes the importance of a good eye, the person whose life is marked by a shining generosity (6:22–23). The Sermon overturns our expectations so we can see rightly.
The pinnacle of Christ’s counterintuitive commands comes at the end of Matthew 5: “You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”
Jesus tells us to love our enemies so we’ll mirror the goodness and perfection of God. If our righteousness is to exceed that of the Pharisees and scribes, and if we’re to surpass the ordinary virtue of unbelievers who treat their friends well, we mustn’t settle for loving those who love us. We must pursue a life that reflects the God who loved his enemies all the way to the cross. Only from this mountaintop will the fog dissipate. Only from these heights will we see rightly. Hatred obscures our vision. Love pierces the clouds.
We Love to Hate
It’s easy to say we should love our enemies. Much harder is orienting our lives toward this goal. In a recent article in The Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs writes of the pleasures of hate that pull at Americans:
Many Americans, as far as I can tell, don’t want to shape their views in accordance with the data; many Americans, again as far as I can tell, don’t want to create an environment in which a broad range of perspectives are freely articulated and peacefully debated. They don’t want to be hopeful about the possibilities of America. Nor do they want academic freedom in our universities. What many people want, what they earnestly and passionately desire, is to hate their enemies. A few years ago J.D. Vance uttered The Creed of Our Age: “I think our people hate the right people.”
Jacobs worries we’re moving toward “an ever-blooming festival of contempt and blame” that will result in self-loathing. It won’t be enough to chide people, he says, telling them not to hate because it’s bad for their hearts or because it keeps them from seeing straight. Instead, we’ll have to concern ourselves with “the education of the passions.” The critical question for our times is this: What pleasure, what gratification, can we offer to people that exceeds the pleasure of hating?
The historic Christian response to this question is a churchy word we don’t use often: godliness. The pleasure and gratification that exceed the pleasure of hating can be found ultimately in a life of growth toward God, as we come to resemble him more and more. There’s no Christian response to hatred that doesn’t involve a call to holiness.
Hate Hurts You
One of the early church’s commentators on Matthew 5 connects love for enemies to holiness and warns of the self-damage hatred causes:
Hate is a spirit of darkness, and wherever it settles in, it besmirches the beauty of holiness. . . . [If you hate your enemy] you have harmed yourself in your soul more than you have harmed him in his body. And perhaps you do not harm him at all by hating him, but you wound yourself without a doubt.
Martin Luther King Jr. drew on this tradition when laying a foundational plank in the civil rights movement. In his famous sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1957, he pointed out the way hatred distorts the hater and alters his or her vision:
You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. . . . For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost.
King’s namesake, Martin Luther, also teased out the implications of Jesus’s command to love our enemies:
To love means, to have a good heart and cherish the best wishes, with cordial sympathy, and be especially amiable towards everyone one, and not mock at his misery or misfortune.
Luther went on to explain how this love must be shown in both words and actions. It’s no surprise that Jesus tells us specifically to pray for those who persecute us. This tangible response to opposition and disdain is one of the most striking ways we kill our contempt, adopting a posture or action that may or may not align with our attitude at the moment.
Enemy Love Is Divine
If we want to see straight, to make sure our vision isn’t distorted by disdain, we must ascend the mountain of enemy love. The beauty of the gospel is that this ascent is only possible because of the descent of God to us—his love for us while we were still sinners, his enemies. He has come down to us so that he can sweep us up into his divine love.
John Chrysostom pointed to Jesus as the key to enemy love. We’ve seen God become man, Chrysostom preached, descending so far and suffering so much for our sake. How could we not forgive others when they injure us? The Jesus who intercedes for us is the same Jesus who cried out “Father, forgive them!” from the cross.
Chrysostom’s sermon ends with a vision of the believer right now on earth, filled with enemy love, enjoying a taste of heaven, “walking as angels among men,” “abiding apart from all lust, from all turmoil” because enemy love has transformed us into the likeness of the God whose love is eternal. Surely that’s a greater pleasure than hatred and contempt. Surely that will enable us to see better, to get beyond the slogans and slurs of disdain so we can see the neighbor we’re called to love.
If you want to see straight, love your enemies.
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