Loving Your Enemies

(Credit to Isaac Villegas from Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship for inspiring some of this post, with a piece of his sermon “A Material Spirit”, which you can and should read here.)

Trigger-happy American Christians tend to think the best way to deal with our enemies, at least on a large scale if not on a personal level, is to annihilate them. “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out,” we hear from the mouths of NRA-card-carrying fundamentalists. Never mind that drivel about loving and blessing and praying for your enemies, Jesus only meant that in an interpersonal context. Maybe. But as far as those Muslim Al-Qaeda Iraqi towelheads go, let’s bomb them all and turn the Middle East into a sea of glass. After all, they are a threat to Christianity.

When the days were approaching for His ascension, He was determined to go to Jerusalem; and He sent messengers on ahead of Him, and they went and entered a village of the Samaritans to make arrangements for Him. But they did not receive Him, because He was traveling toward Jerusalem. When His disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But He turned and rebuked them, and said, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.” And they went on to another village. — Luke 9:51-56

Christ was on a mission, headed decidedly toward Jerusalem. In His way stood Samaria, already disparaged by the Jews, and they lived down to their reputation here by resisting Jesus’s presence. They were, in the moment, a threat to His ministry. The disciples came up with a bright idea that ought to look pretty familiar to modern readers – they suggested that they annihilate the offending citizens with fire from heaven. Jesus looks at them like they each have two heads. Really? Have I taught you nothing? Keep in mind, this is after Jesus’s famous exhortation to love enemies (see Luke 6:27-36). This had to be fresh in the disciples’ minds, as faithful followers of the Messiah. But alas, mercy is not at the forefront of their agenda…yet. So they respond instinctively with an appeal to violence – divine violence, even, implying that God would send the fire to incinerate these wicked foreigners. They know God is on their side, so they think His judgment can be brought in to solve their problems. They have yet to understand the ways of the Prince of Peace.

Jesus rebukes the disciples, and instead of razing Samaria to a heap of ashes, they all simply go around a different way. They don’t try to convert the Samaritans, either; they remain, for now, “enemies” to the Jews.

(There is another, perhaps better-known, record of Jesus’s dealings with Samaria in John 4. Jesus chats it up with a local woman – doubly subversive – while the disciples go into town to buy food, and presumably not to burn down the grocery afterward. Jesus has quite an impact on this Samaritan village, and many people there do receive His message as He stays among them for two whole days. We don’t know what the disciples thought of this or whether it occurred before or after the hostile encounter in Luke, but we can be pretty confident these were two different places in Samaria. The whole of the country was still not keen on Jesus’s teachings, and the disciples were not keen on the Samaritans.)

Time passes. Jesus dies, is resurrected, charges His disciples with spreading His gospel, empowers them with the Holy Spirit, and makes His way home to heaven. The disciples scatter, taking the good news of the Kingdom of God all over the place. In the famous eighth verse of Acts 1, Jesus tells His disciples where to take the good news – including Judea and Samaria specifically. Philip is evidently the first one of them with the guts to go that way; in Acts 8, he goes to the big city in Samaria and proclaims Christ to them. What do you know…they listened! Philip converted men and women and even the town sorcerer by preaching the word and performing miraculous signs. But for some reason, Philip’s work isn’t quite complete. God has a loose end to tie up here.

Now when the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit. For He had not yet fallen upon any of them; they had simply been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they began laying their hands on them, and they were receiving the Holy Spirit. — Acts 8:14-17

Why Peter and John were capable of finishing the work Philip began isn’t fully clear, but that’s what happens. But look closely…John is one of the disciples sent to Samaria to complete God’s work. Maybe John was too embarrassed to record the story that Luke did, quoted earlier. John was, indeed, one of the prior proponents of the total destruction of Samaria. Jesus denies him the opportunity, and then years later compels him to return to the same scene to give those same Samaritans a different sort of Fire from Heaven. The hands which John wanted to lift to call down calamity, he now lays on those people to instill them with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit finally comes upon them through this act of grace, making complete God’s work both in Samaria and in John’s heart.