How to Love your Enemy -- And your Brother                    2/20/49

 

Scripture:  Matthew 5: 38-48

 

Text:  Matthew 5: 44;  ... “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use and persecute you.”

 

We are a nation that experiences a succession of “special” days and weeks.  A variety of motives and interests calls for our pointed attention for a concentrated period of time.  There are the holy seasons of the church - Lent, Easter, Christmas,  Pentecost and so on - each contributing variety and reminder to our life through the year.  There are the dignified and moving observances of our nation - Thanksgiving day, Independence day, Armistice day, the birthdays of some of our great men - Washington and Lincoln in the month of February.  There are the local festivals which emphasize, with a commercially experienced eye, the products and possibilities of various sections of the country.  These multiply until some of them approach the ridiculous.  One wonders when he may hear of “National Apple Core Week” of some other such trivia.  The idea behind these special emphases is good if the matter emphasized is good.  National Boy Scout week, for instance, gives an additional boost to an organized activity that unquestionably helps to train boys for finer manhood.  There is similar merit in Girl Scout Week.

 

The proclamation of National Brotherhood Week serves a good purpose in our communities, as does also the observance of Race Relations Sunday in many churches.  For some time, the week during which the birthday of George Washington falls has been commended to local communities all over the country as Brotherhood Week.  Then, at least, our attention is focused again on the need of understanding, respect, and appreciation among people whose religious preferences may differ, but who are, and ought to be, united in the attitudes and actions of community life.  The hope of a better world for people of every race and nation and creed mounts, or recedes, with the degree of constructive tolerance and cooperative appreciation we learn toward each other.

 

Hatred is an ugly sin.  It can produce a poison within the body which does untold harm to physical well-being.  It can warp and dwarf some of the mental processes until one hardly has the capacity to think straight.  If your own brand of cunning seeks to unseat an opponent mentally, spiritually or physically, get him to hate you.  Hatred produces marked results in a very short time.

 

When the Nazis sought the means to rise to great power, they found an effective slogan: “Death to the Jews.”  They played on that one string until they had organized themselves into unbelievable political strength.  And it cost the lives of at least six million Jews.  What did it do the non-Jewish Germans?  The self-appointed leaders became brutal and shocking in their treatment of an alleged enemy until they themselves -- hosts of them -- fell to a new low in human bestiality.  Nazis seized on a prejudice, organized it into a mass-produced hatred, created an artificial enemy and proceeded to rise on the dead bodies and crushed lives of their victims.  In the end, that which had been their slogan became a terrifying menace to the health and happiness of the whole world.

 

In the scriptural text of this morning, Jesus was speaking primarily of the individual.  He had just been speaking of the condition of people in the incomparable Beatitudes.  In them he assembles the virtues of man.  Then as if to climax his sayings, and impress the comprehensive truth of them, he said: “If ye love them that love you, what reward have you? -- Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”  

 

This is the basis on which we may become proper children of God.  Yet it imposes upon us one of life’s most difficult tasks.  See what it entails.  Suppose for the moment you feel yourself to have an enemy whom you believe seeks to harm you by his own hatred or fear or mistrust or cruel neglect of you.  One of the first reactions will probably be to strike back in some way.  We encounter this mood in ourselves and in others from childhood on.  How often do you parents have to deal with the vehemently-expressed childish assertion, “Well, if he hits me, I’ve got a right to hit him!”  Do you find it easy to convince your young hopeful that there are better and more permanent ways of reacting to injuries than by retaliation in kind?  Probably you need all of the aid you can get from your religious teaching, from current sportsmanship, from the ideals of the child’s Scout or other group activity, plus your own ingenuity, to get over the good lesson of our Master for all of us: “Bless them that curse you.”  But that ability to bless both your enemy, and the brother with whom you have fallen out, determines much of you own inner peace, as well as his.

 

Now come to another difficult part of Jesus’ moral injunction: “Do good to them that hate you.”  It seems almost incredible that this should be required by the Master.  That we should be expected to go out of our way to do good to those who go out of their way to do us harm, who are vindictive, who laugh at our discomfiture; who seem never so happy as when they have done an evil thing against us - this seems more than reason or patience can bear.  But there it is in the teaching of Jesus, backed up by other of his sayings and by his own acts.  If a soldier forces you to carry his baggage a mile (a commonly enforced practice of that time), go two miles with him, said Jesus.  If you are struck on one cheek, turn the other.  If one kicks you around, be prepared for the chance to help him when he is in a tight pinch.

 

I had a glimpse of what the Master meant at this point in a high school experience.  A fellow in the grade ahead of me took an obvious dislike to me, which I cordially reciprocated.  He seemed to lose no opportunity to sneer at me, to belittle me, to humiliate me.  And upon occasion we even exchanged a kick or a cuff.  After months of that mutual dislike, we found ourselves (upper classmen) both taking a course in geometry back with the sophomores, he because he had failed to get it in the year he should have completed it, and I because I had dropped it the year before when I was ill for six weeks.  The course was easy for me and I enjoyed it.  It was hard for him and he didn’t understand it.  To my great surprise, he came to my chair one day and asked if I would explain a problem to him.  Too astonished to do otherwise, I did so, and he seemed to appreciate my help.  After that we worked on geometry several times together.  The old enmity just melted away.  We never became chummy, for we had little else in common.  But we were no longer enemies.  If either one of us had learned earlier that to do something good for the other fellow is the best way to destroy an enemy we might have saved ourselves a couple of years of constant irritation at each other.  If instead of waiting until circumstance thrust the lesson on me, I had had the Christian sense to watch for the help and good will I might have offered that fellow, I might have known him as a friend early enough to save a lot of trouble.

 

A great soldier once said: “Always take the high ground, and the enemy will flee.”  Translated from tactical maneuvers to spiritual sense, those words are still good.  Take the high ground and enmity will flee.  And you will find, in place of an enemy, a brother.

 

Jesus wasn’t content even to let the matter rest there!  “Pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.”  One cannot speak lightly of this saying of Jesus.  It is difficult until we are more nearly in his spirit than most of us are a good deal of the time.  But approach it from this angle and see what happens.  We have been talking about our enemies.  But what is to prevent us from being the enemies of others?  Perhaps this is why Jesus insisted that we pray for those we consider our enemies -- to make sure that the fires of hatred are not in us!  For when we really begin to pray for another, the fires of hatred die down within us.

 

Think what that would do in the field of labor-management relations.  Perhaps there would be less disposition for some elements of one group to label the other “fascists” and for others to brand all labor leaders as “communists” if each were to pray for the other.  Is that visionary?  Of course it is!  But “without vision the people perish” in self-concern.

 

I once heard a man who sat on the management side of the bargaining table for his company give this testimony.  He had this to say; he and the other company representatives were facing an unusually hard season.  The union had brought in a really tough leader to be their spokesman.  The demands were sure to be far beyond what the management felt could be conceded.  It was months later, and far from the home scene, that I heard this man say, “Two or three of us decided that we would pray, without telling anyone else about it, before each of those bargaining meetings.”  And they did, day after day.  They prayed for wisdom; they prayed for a Christian spirit; they prayed for alertness to see the right solutions as they might appear; they prayed for their opponents.

 

The bargaining was concluded, satisfactorily, long before either side had supposed it could be, with both parties well satisfied with the new contract.  At the conclusion of it, the tough union leader said to their company man that he had never felt better about his dealings than about this negotiation, and came as near real cordiality as he likely ever came in his rough-and-tumble career.  This company man never told the labor leader about his prayers, but late he did tell the group of Christian laymen I heard him addressing, that he had not the slightest doubt that the prayers uttered by him and his associates before going into each bargaining session had been answered in his own outlook and in the reaction of those across the table.  [I also, at another time, heard a successful labor leader speak in the same way]

 

There is nothing impractical about this; it is the most practical thing in the world.  That is the way with Jesus’ points of view.

 

There is nothing impractical about the viewpoints emphasized in brotherhood week.  They are the most practical thing in the world.  The most impractical, trouble-brewing, suicidal thing in the world is for people to keep on being enemies because of emotional intolerance on account of race, or nationality, or creed.  Science knows no basis for discrimination on account of race or other accidents of ancestry.  Anthropology has demonstrated that all of the human species belong to one family and that the physiological differences of color, bone structure and facial shape are superficial and unimportant.  Sociology reports that every racial group can and does produce both superior and inferior individuals as to ability.  The same is true in matters of creedal differences.

 

The editor of a leading American agricultural magazine used to say that all the reports he got from India typically had as their keynote:  “What low-down people the India farmers are to live the way they do.”  Mason Vaughn, American missionary agricultural engineer of many years’ experience in India says: “Where the Indian farmer is shown something that will fit into his systems and make him a profit, I think he’s as receptive to new methods as the American farmer.”

 

Our calendar today contains a note announcing the first appointment of a Negro educator and clergyman by the United Board for Christian Colleges to the University of Nanking, China.  [for the second date this sermon was given, the above sentence was replaced with the following:  (In recent years, a Catholic was chosen to be President of the United States, and that was news.  It is news when a Negro is appointed to an Ambassador’s job.  We find it newsworthy when a Jew is accorded prominence in civic or governmental affairs.)]  That is good news in a way.  It will be better news when we get to the place where the news is not that an appointed teacher or elected is a Negro or a Caucasian or an Indian, but a man or woman of superior ability, better fitted than anyone else for that position!

 

A small, but very influential portion of our population can be rational about proper relations between all peoples -- about brotherhood.  More difficult is our emotional reaction.  Here we must really let our religious faith take hold of us, steadying, disciplining, directing our hearts until we truly purpose to have fair opportunity and recognition based on merit, for all people.  The happier all people are, the harder it will be for them to hate others.

 

“Love -- bless -- do good -- pray for --.”  These are the keys which banish intolerant hatreds and unlock the doors of brotherhood.

 

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Dates and places delivered:

 

            Wisconsin Rapids, February 20, 1949.

            Wisconsin Rapids, February 20, 1966.