Love your enemy, but don't expect a profit.

The most radical injunction in Christianity is that we must love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, pray for those who persecute us. We are caught in a world in which this does not really look like sensible advice, because there is no future in it, no immediate indication that this will get us anything but grief.

At the same time, the hatred of enemies, the cherishing of ancient grievances, also leads to grief, as the headlines show us every day. Hatred satisfies something in us, however, that is not satisfied by loving the persecutor. To seek satisfaction in the role of the victim, the one who does good to those who hate, is rightly seen as a disgusting thing: I will enjoy the role of the innocent victim, cherish the image of myself as the suffering servant. Better a healthy hatred than what seems to be a form of pious masochism: "Hit me again, it's good for me, and I get to forgive you." There is nothing biblical about simply stepping into the victim's role and leaving it at that, as if this were the end of the story: "Jesus was crucified, and that was wrong, proof of a terrible world in which the innocent suffer." That isn't the end of the point of the Christian story.

In the Old Testament the fact that the test of one's real standing before the Lord was kindness to widows and orphans and strangers was not based on the virtue of those who were most helpless--they are likely to be as evil as we are--rather on the fact that they are able to do nothing for us. Lazarus the poor man, in Luke's Gospel, did not find himself in Abraham's bosom after death because he was good but because he was poor, and because of that he should have been helped by the rich man, who--because of his inattention--is in torment. The point here is the relationship itself, not the private virtues practiced (or not practiced) by either party. If I do something nice for a prominent politician or a wealthy man or an influential judge, I can almost certainly count on having the favor repaid. I can count on not having it repaid if I do it for someone poor and helpless.

The injunction to love the enemy is very much in keeping with Jesus' extension of the meaning of the law. Not only are we not to commit adultery; we are not to lust. Not only are we to refrain from killing; we are to refrain from anger. We are not only meant to be generous to the widow and orphan and stranger; we must love our enemies, partly because they can and will do nothing for us, like the widow and orphan and stranger.

This makes no sense, from the point of view of our advantage. We are told to act this way--to be generous to those who can't possibly help us, to love people who seek to harm us--because we are called to "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect"; that is, we are meant to become to one another and to God what God is to us. We do not love the enemy because if we do so the enemy may be changed or converted, although he or she may be (or may not); we are called to love the enemy because we are made in God's image, meant to be like God, and by loving the enemy we stand in relation to the enemy the way God stands in relation to us. God will love us, does love us, or we would not exist. This is true despite everything we may have done to contradict or deny the relationship. Nothing we can do will change it. To love the enemy brings us into the relationship God has with us, because it refuses to say that anything other than love will be the basis of our relationship.

It looks good on paper. How do you do it? And isn't there a danger that "love" here can become a kind of sentimental and at the same time bloodless indifference, a willingness to suffer any outrage to oneself or (worse) to others, in the name of something which only appears to be more noble than a passionate, and maybe violent, refusal of injustice?

There is this danger, of course; any real attempt to love involves danger, and putting something at risk. But this love is not passive, not mere acceptance. It means trying to understand the enemy as one beloved. This is not to excuse the enemy, any more than we should excuse a child of ours who has made a disastrous choice. But it does mean an effort at active, genuine love. And this has practical consequences which show us how far we fall short. It means that we may not regard the bigots and murderers and warlords and bloody-handed politicians with the scorn and range that, at one level they seem to so richly deserve. They exist, as we do, only because of the love God has for them.

When Jesus calls upon us to "be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect," he calls upon us to be realistic. This is the shock: we can see the enemy clearly only when we see the enemy with love; then we "know, as now we are known." It is an appalling thought to consider this: I love truly only insofar as I love the person who annoys or infuriates me most. Any other form of love falls short of the love God calls us to. The other forms of love are the unrealistic and sentimental ones. And if the struggle to love as God loves involves great ascetic effort, prayer, and repentance, it simply shows how far we are, in our ordinary waking consciousness, from genuine clarity.