Love Your Enemies

Love your Enemies

Last week I began reading the sermons of Dr Martin Luther King Jr as a way of honoring his holiday. Now I can’t stop. Not only am I struck by his eloquence, depth, and richness, but by the fact that these sermons sound so contemporary. The proclamation stands as if it could be preached today, not half a century ago.

This morning I read the sermon, “Loving your Enemies” that King delivered to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on November 17, 1957. In this sermon King takes on one of the truly “hard teachings” of Jesus. Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

King not only gives the theological and psychological background for the necessity of this command, but also gives practical instructions on the redemptive power of love:





Love Your Enemies

Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies

For King, the belief in the redemptive power of love was not merely the instruction of a pastor to a congregation. Rather, Jesus’ words became the ground of King’s ethic of nonviolence. In this same sermon, he went on to point to redemptive love as the means to change:

It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way.

Let us all recapture the hope of Dr. King and center ourselves on the teaching of Jesus who calls us to love our enemies so that we might be changed, they might be changed, and our old world might become a new world.