Love our enemies, bind up the nation’s wounds

Abraham Lincoln attended the church I served in Washington D.C. — The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. His memory is revered there, as it is by many throughout the nation. At this moment of dire political turbulence in our country that threatens to erode democracy itself, I find myself recalling Lincoln’s healing words during an earlier moment of turmoil in the nation’s history as he delivered his Second Inaugural Address: “With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.” This admonition is as powerful today as it was in the troubled era in which Lincoln spoke. Indeed, it resonates profoundly with Jesus’ own admonition to the disciples in the Sermon on the Mount: to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48). And today, there may be no doubt that our perceived enemies have become those who stand on one side or the other of the nation’s political divide — a divide represented in most of our churches, our denomination as a whole and in the communities in which we live.

The admonition to love our enemies is surely one of the hardest things Jesus ever asked us to do. But he also specified the reason we are to try, by the power of God’s Spirit at work within us: quite simply, because God is like that, and we are God’s children who are to reflect that family resemblance in this world. We are to love our enemies so that we may “be” (NRSV), even “become” (GNT) children of our heavenly parent — or as the CEB translation puts it, so that we “will be acting like” children of our heavenly parent (Matthew 5:44-45). Otherwise our witness is not distinctive — we are not salt and light in this world, but just blending (Matthew 5:13-14). In short, loving our enemies goes to the heart of Christian witness, an expression of our identity as children of God.

Theologian Miroslav Volf, who has thought long and hard about this challenge, articulates what it entails this way in his book “A Public Faith,” writing that “Christ’s followers must love their enemies no less than they love themselves. Love doesn’t mean agreement and approval; it means benevolence and beneficence, possible disagreement and disapproval notwithstanding. A combination of moral clarity that does not shy away from calling evil by its proper name and of deep compassion towards evildoers that is willing to sacrifice one’s own life on their behalf was one of the extraordinary features of early Christianity. It should also be the central characteristic of contemporary Christianity.”

Loving our enemies does not absolve us or deter us from pursuing justice as we understand it, from our calling to stand in solidarity with the marginalized among us, or from calling evil by its name. Justice and mercy go together — both are works of God. And the mercifully just God calls us to both as we endeavor to bind up the nation’s wounds and grow into our full stature as God’s children. May it be so.