Loving – and Forgiving – our Enemies

Sunday, February 23, 2025 – Genesis 45:3-11, 15, Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40, 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50, Luke 6:27-38

Jesus tells us that we should love our enemies and do good to those who hurt us. Has there ever been any more difficult teaching than this?

I’ve seen an image going around in certain circles that shows a muscular Jesus carrying automatic rifles and looking like he’s ready to gun down the world. Of course, that image is completely antithetical to who Jesus actually was and to the life he lived.

Jesus is not out for blood. He’s not interested in vengeance. He’s interested in loving our enemies and forgiveness not in gunning them down.

Years ago, when I lived in Atlanta, I was in a singles group that met in a large church in the Buckhead neighborhood. I had a friend there named Allen who was as sweet and kind as they come. Every so often, Allen and I would go to the arcade at Dave & Busters, a local bar and restaurant. We’d make a beeline to the site of our favorite secret vice, sit in the two seats behind the video screen, throw in our tokens, and proceed to blow away all the bad guys that moved across the screen with our plastic rifles.

The point was to avoid killing the innocent bystanders while racking up as many points as you could in bad-guy deaths. Except it was harder than you might think to tell the bad guys from the good guys.

In a way, I think our secret vice was kind of like Halloween, where we face the monsters we’re so afraid of to build up our courage to face the real struggles of life. And real life isn’t so clean cut as we’d like to think. Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to people we don’t like.

And sometimes the enemy is someone in our own family.

That was true for Joseph. What’s so amazing about his story is how God brought so much good out of so much evil. And Joseph – who had every reason to hate his enemy brothers – instead loves them, feeds them, and forgives them.

We first meet Joseph in the book of Genesis when he’s 17 years old, and one arrogant young man who irritates his older brothers so much that they grow to hate him. He’s Jacob’s favorite son and spoiled rotten. He’s a snitch that gives bad reports about his brothers to his father. And to add insult to injury, he brags about his dreams of being worshipped.

No wonder they toss him into the cistern.

They intended to kill him but instead, Joseph ends up as a slave in Egypt serving the Pharoah’s household manager and making a great impression. But due to a false accusation, Joseph ends up in jail. There, he correctly interprets the dreams of two fellow prisoners. Two years later, one of those prisoners remembers Joseph when the Pharoah himself has two dreams that he can’t figure out. Pharoah springs Joseph from the clink and tells him his dreams.

In the first, seven healthy cows are swallowed up by seven lean cows, and in another, seven healthy heads of grain are devoured by seven dying heads of grain. Joseph hears the Pharoah’s dreams and correctly predicts that Egypt will experience a seven-year famine after having had seven abundant years.

He advises the Pharoah to store up as much grain as possible in the good years so they can survive the lean years. The Pharoah is so impressed that he puts Joseph in charge of the whole effort with great success.

Later, during the years of famine, Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt looking for food, completely clueless that he’s alive in Egypt. They don’t even recognize him. How does Joseph respond to his murderous brothers? Does he send them away? Does he erupt in rage? Does he beat them? Does he kill them with his plastic rifle?

No. He feeds them. And he forgives them.

How was he able to do that? To forgive these family members who had tried to kill him? Forgiveness can be a tough business, especially within families. It’s often hardest to forgive the people closest to us because they have the greater capacity to hurt us. (another piece of proverbial wisdom: Why does our family push all of our buttons? Because they installed them.)

I think the greatest nugget of wisdom I’ve heard on the subject of forgiveness is that when we forgive someone who hurt us, we stop being the object of their story and become the subject of our own story.

In a sense, forgiveness helps us as much or more than the person we’re forgiving.

I’ve also heard it said that holding on to a grudge is like drinking poison. It damages our own heart, soul, and body while the person who wounded us goes merrily about their own way, unaffected by the poison.

People also mistakenly think that if they forgive someone, they’ll have to let them back in their life. But that’s not necessarily true. I’ve heard Oprah say that forgiving somebody doesn’t mean you have to invite them over for potato salad. You can forgive and release them from your life if they’re too toxic for your own wellbeing.

In a way, forgiveness can act like a lubricant that gets the gears of our lives moving again. That flowing quality comes when we allow our emotions to flow and our hearts to open.

We see that in Joseph when he weeps with his brothers and when he chooses to see the hand of God in every step of his journey, drawing good out of evil. He sees everything that happens as working together for his and his people’s flourishing.

Joseph aligned himself with the life of God by opening his heart. This is the same open heart that Jesus asks us to have when he wants us to love our enemies.

Like Paul, Jesus asks us to live not just according to the flesh. Not just according to what our violent culture expects or what our biology and instincts would have us do. No, Jesus asks us to live as he lives, as someone who brings together in his own life the perishable and the imperishable, matter and spirit.

In this way of life, Jesus is the model for all of humanity. When we open our hearts to Jesus’ way of love and forgiveness, we’re living within a flow of compassion and generosity that we couldn’t generate on our own.

Again, this is the point of the Body of Christ. When we understand ourselves as part of this greater community of the living Christ, then within that whole, we have access to resources of faith, love, and forgiveness that we just don’t have the power to generate alone.

This is why we need each other in community so very much.