However, I say to you, love your enemy, bless the one who curses you, do something wonderful for the one who hates you, be and respond to the very ones who persecute you by praying for them. Matthew 5:44-45 (TPT)

Your Enemy – Neighbors Series – Part 8

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7  |  PART 8

In a recent interview, former CIA agent Amaryllis Fox, said:

“the only way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them. If you hear them out. If you’re brave enough to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not, you might have made some of the same choices if you’d lived their life instead of yours… And while it may be easier to dismiss your enemy as evil, hearing them out on policy concerns is actually an amazing thing. Because, as long as your enemy is a subhuman psychopath, that’s going to attack you no matter what you do, this never ends.”

In her book “Short Stories by Jesus” Amy Jill Levine said:

“Can we finally agree that it is better to acknowledge the humanity and the potential to do good in the enemy, rather than to choose death? Will we be able to care for our enemies, who are also our neighbors? Will we be able to bind up their wounds rather than blow up their cities? And can we imagine that they might do the same for us? Can we put into practice that inauguration promise of not leaving the wounded traveler on the road? The biblical text— and concern for humanity’s future— tell us we must.”

Jesus looked at the Lawyer who was struggling with the concepts of this provocative tale and asked, “who was more neighborly?” Out of hatred, revulsion, or maybe out of self-realisation and shame, the lawyer didn't (couldn't) respond.

“Go and do likewise.” Jesus said.

And still says.

It starts with us.

What does “go and do likewise” look like in the wake of the Orlando shootings, the refugee crises, equality issues, political campaigns and government elections, foreign policies and taxation laws, health and education issues? What does it look at home? With our geographical neighbors? Families? Friends? Communities?

The only way to figure it out is to let our guard down and start seeing each other and talking to each other like we all hold the same value. Because in fact we do. No matter what religion, sexual orientation, skin color, gender, age, able bodied or not, or any other difference possible between human beings, we ALL MATTER.

A closing thought from my favorite writer, Frederick Buchner:

“I prefer to think that the difference between the Samaritan and the other two was not just that he was more morally sensitive than they were but that he had, as they had not, the eye of a poet or a child or a saint—an eye that was able to look at the man in the ditch and see in all its extraordinary unexpectedness the truth itself, which was that at the deepest level of their being, he and that other one were not entirely separate selves at all. Not really at all.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality — not as we expect it to be but as it is — is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily: that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.”

Over to you… What does ‘go and do likewise' mean to you. Leave us your comments below.

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