Confronting the Powers that Be: The Gift of the Enemy (Session 11)

I submit that the ultimate religious question today should no longer be the sixteenth-century Reformation's query, "How can I find a gracious God?" but rather, "How can we find God in our enemies?" (TPTB 161)

What has often been a purely private affair--justification by faith through grace---has now, in our age, grown to embrace the world. ...There is, in fact, no other way to God for our time but through the enemy, for loving the enemy has become the key both to human survival in the nuclear age and to personal transformation. (ETP 263)

We have to love our enemies just because God does. To take this commandmentof Jesus seriously is to challenge much of what is called Christian or religious.

We often say, "If you repent, you will be forgiven." In Jesus, on the otherhand,

Everything is reversed: You are forgiven; now you can repent! God loves you; now you can lift your eyes to God! The enmity is over. You were enemies and yet God accepts you! There is nothing you must do to earn this. You need only accept it. (TPTB 163-4)

Matthew ends his paragraph on loving enemies with a command to be perfect as God is perfect. This has driven many Christians to near dispair; and it does not seem fair at all. Does God love only the perfect or those striving for perfection? The Greek word is "teleos" (as in telescope) and speaks of striving to be complete rather than perfect. The parallel passage in Luke 6 makes clear the kind of perfection Jesus was talking about. There we are called upon to be merciful as God is merciful, all-inclusive in the circle of our love and forgiveness. It is not possible to be perfect in this life, but we can train ourselves to practice all-inclusive mercy--though nobody ever said it is easy.

The enemy must be known as "gift," Wink says. It is only as we become able to see through the enemy's eyes and walk in his/her shoes that we become able to see what in ourselves needs redemption.

The enemy is thus not merely a hurdle to be leaped over on the way to God. The enemy can be the way to God. We cannot come to terms with our shadow except through our enemy, for we have no better access to those unacceptable parts of ourselves that need redeeming than through the mirror that our enemies hold up to us. (TPTB 171 )

Nonviolence presents a chance for all parties to rise above their present condition and become more of what God created them to be. (TPTB  172)

We must pray for our enemies, because God is already at work in their depths stirring up the desire to be just. (TPTB 179)

2. Wink describes how the refusal to return violence for violence has enabled reconciliation in South Africa and in southern states in the US during and following the civil rights movment? Where else might we actively "love our enemies" and simultaneously attack injustice and effect reconciliation?

2. Discuss:

The dream of abolishing war, like child sacrifice and exposure, gladitorial combat, slavery, cannibalism, colonialism, and dueling, seems to be finally approaching the first stages of realization. (ETP 265)