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Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in God’s work to save the world.

Jesus and World Religions: How to Deal With Enemies

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JESUS, ANTHROPOLOGY AND WORLD RELIGIONS
Some Good News

by John K. Stoner

4th of 7.

4. How to Deal with Enemies

    It becomes then, in the Christian view, a matter of observing how Jesus dealt with his enemies (by loving them), and making his way our way. And all of this, not just as a pattern of interpersonal, or interindividual relationships, but as a way to run the world. And that not just because it would be nice, or would do honor to Jesus or God, but also because it is the only way that will work. Since this is the only workable way to run the world, it is right, helpful, and humanly indispensable to say that Jesus is the way and the only way. People who have found a way of human relationships that work, whatever their religion, will find that it is not materially different from what Jesus taught.

    At the same time we can, in this, invite everyone who wishes to take the scientist’s way out, to do so, and gladly welcome them to say with Albert Einstein, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that do not work.”    In my view there is no doubt, God has time for that. It may well be asked whether humanity and it’s earth-bound project has time for it, and that would be the urgency of saying “yes” to the way of Jesus sooner rather than later. But human freedom will have its say in this.

    Christians do claim that Jesus helps people to understand God better, but they/we should be clear that first he helps people to understand themselves better.

    It has been said that we are our own worst enemy. We see at least some truth in that any time we observe that the better we understand ourselves, the better life goes for us. That is, when we become less an enemy to ourselves, life goes better for us.

    The first, and in the end the most surprising thing that we learn from Jesus, is that we have the capacity to live out the primacy of the will to embrace, and that living this way is more true to our nature than anything else. That is to say, we feel more fulfilled, whole, mature and happy when we recognize that the economy of undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of just desert. This is, no doubt, different from most prevailing cultural ways of dealing with others, which tend to put the primacy of desert in first place.

    But how do people learn the primacy of embrace from Jesus?

    Let’s look at the Jesus story with that question in mind. What we see, in one event after another, and one teaching after another, is Jesus practicing the primacy of embrace, and we see people responding to that.

    We admire Jesus in large part because we feel ourselves loved by him in spite of our failures. There is nothing quite like feeling oneself accepted/embraced even though, and before, one has done something, or achieved a moral status, where one could think of oneself as worthy of acceptance. We describe the extending of this embrace by a gracious person as forgiveness.

    Forgiveness transcends both guilt and hostility. What is the shape and form of our hostility? Of our alienation from our enemy? What is the shape of our hostility toward “God?” Perhaps our anger at being created unable to achieve the potential we feel, and feeling blamed for that inability!

    The emotional power of Christian conversion in diverse cultures is the very human experience of coming to see, to believe, that one is love

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