Jesus, the Friend of My Enemy

     A few days ago I received this lovely tribute to a Lutheran pastor, Richard Wurmbrand, who worked for twenty years in Communist Romania, and spent fourteen of them in prison for his faith. Pastor Wurmbrand was no despiser of the Orthodox; he met many saintly priests and laymen in prison, and confessed to them, and learned from them the arts of patience and holy love.

     I have been pondering the story of the priest, effectively murdered by his torturer, dying of wounds he had received, meeting the torturer himself in the barracks, after the Communists had turned against him and beaten the life nearly out of him. The priest was dying, and the man confessing, who was his murderer, was dying; yet the priest asked the help of a couple of men to carry him over to the bed of the murderer, so that he could console him, and give him love, and hear him groan out a life of sin, and assure him that God had not abandoned him.

     It is enough to take the breath away. And I ask myself, "What single thing have I done today -- or this whole year -- or in all my life, to go out of my way to show love to someone who hates me?" So simple it is to understand the command of Jesus, and yet how many are the excuses we make to keep from fulfilling it! How easily I forget that the enemy is loved by Jesus with a love that I cannot imagine. And it is that transcendent worth that makes it not only right for me to love my enemy, but possible in the first place. For without it, he is my enemy, my rival for the compassing of certain goods whereof there is a finite supply. He is my political opponent, perhaps, and I must rise by his fall. But under the canopy of that Good which makes all earthly goods fade into relative insignificance -- even as it confirms their goodness, in their right place -- I can and indeed must love my enemy, because Jesus loves his enemies, among whom we all at some time have stood, or are standing even now.

     Here, in the loving of the enemy, there is nothing to lose but our pride, and everything to gain. What would the world be like, if once in a week, as a kind of observance of Sabbath rest from the weary bustle of pride and envy and wrath, we were to direct a single act of love, even gruff love, towards someone who has hurt us, or who hates us, or who mocks us, or who (and this is the terrible secret of bullies, for example) is afraid of us? Would we make conversions to Christ? Indeed we would. First among them would be ourselves.

     And, as if to confirm my thoughts and abash me at once, one of the finest students I have ever taught came to visit at my office the other day. His senior year had been made miserable by a professor who is what I call a "destroyer," that is, someone who cannot bear that anyone else should uphold a standard of goodness and beauty that she (in this case it was a woman; most of the really determined destroyers at my school are men) had rejected. We talked about it for a little bit, after which I said, as if I were the possessor of great wisdom, "You should pray for her."

     "I do," he said.

Comments

[Beth from TN]

What conviction. Many are the days when I don't go out of my way to do something loving for my *friends*. This is one of those things I kind of know, in the intellectual sense, yet it's so easy to let it slip away with all the petty excuses my worldly mind can conjure up . . . You always have a way of bringing truth home so that it can't be read over and ignored . . . Thank you yet again.

[Bananas Gorilla]

And I should say an excellent posting Dr. Esolen. It reminds me of Corrie Ten Boom telling of when she was confronted by a guard, asking forgiveness, from the concentration camp Ravensbruck, where she had been held.

[MCModerator]

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