Terry Anderson, the longest-held American hostage in the Middle East, refused to hate his captors. "I have no room for hatred, no time for it," he said. "My hating them is not going to hurt them an ounce. It's only going to hurt me, and I'm not going to do that."
Do we pastors ever hate our enemies? Who are our enemies, anyway? Enemies are those who wish to do us harm. They are the ones we really pay attention to, whose moves we watch. We do not have to be on a continual alert with our friends and acquaintances. We can afford to ignore them from time to time. But we cannot afford to take our eyes off our enemies. The pastor who invades our territory and recruits our members or baptizes our converts; the parishioners who threaten to report us to the president if we do not acquiesce to their demands---these can become our obsession.
Hatred's three dimensions
What is our emotional response to our enemies? Anger? Resentment? Hatred? How do we know if it is hatred? Hatred has a way of enduring in time and organizing life around itself. Hatred manifests itself in one of three ways: retrospective, as in anger; prospective, as in suspicion; and present, as in resentment. When we are angry we look back to the deeds that our enemies have already committed. We find ourselves reviewing those acts again and again. The very thought of past injustice causes the blood to boil. We will not rest until we have done "justice" to past deeds by finding some mode of revenge.
Hatred's forward glance is suspicion. The enemy not only outrages our sense of power because of something in the past but also threatens our power because of something that may be done in the future. Thus, the enemy puts us on our guard. We become watchful and alert to the enemy's every move. Suspicion fastens on hints and clues as to what the enemy is likely to do in the time ahead and maintains itself in a kind of religious state of watchfulness.
Hatred directed to the present is resentment. Our hatred of enemies may focus not only on what they have done or may do, but on what they are. Their very existence quite apart from any specific harm they may do to us in the future provokes resentment. While the enemy lives, we cannot be ourselves.
How to combat hatred
How do we as pastors combat hatred in any form---anger, suspicion, and resentment? Only through "tolerance"? By simply believing that in this unideal world there are people much like ourselves, who share a common humanity and represent certain distinctive values that we should not ignore? Do we think that once we discover them in their common humanity and their distinctive virtues, we will be better disposed to tolerate them?
The advocates of tolerance would offer yet another spiritual strategy---coexistence! The idea is to let go of the religious obsessions we aim at our enemies. We are to leave our enemies alone. Move them from the center to the periphery of our attention.
The only difficulty with this strategy is that the enemy is precisely the person we cannot remove from the center of our consciousness. In hatred the enemy occupies the foreground of our life.
The Christian dynamic
Here's where the Christian dynamic stands out in bold relief. The Christian response to the enemy is basically different. Instead of relaxing one's attention by being tolerant, the Christian faith requires a focus upon the enemy. Jesus said, in effect: Does your enemy the administrator who exercises arbitrary authority; the col league you don't like, the parishioner who irritates you occupy a great deal of your attention? Do not try to solve your problem by driving them to the edge of your consciousness. Let them stand where they are. Love them. Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use and persecute you. Let your enemies stand before you. Let them be the object of your concrete love, blessing, and intercessory prayer.
Clearly this dynamic stands in contrast to the idea of tolerance; yet it must not be supposed that ordinary and possessive human love is the pattern and substance of Christian love as opposed to tolerance. There is, after all, a certain releasing and letting go in Christian love, of which tolerance is a better analog than human love.
Consider the adulterous woman (John 8:1-11), who is the center of a vengeful crowd, but whom the Lord releases with the words "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her" (verse 7, RSV). It is the Lord who forgives, not the crowd. His judgment and forgiveness are such as to prompt the crowd simply to let the woman go. "But when they heard it, they went away, one by one" (verse 9, RSV). The crowd can only break up and go away as they surrender the woman into the hands of the Lord. They became "tolerant."
Christian love, however, differs from tolerance. Tolerance is negative; love is positive. Christian love does not merely negate the obsessions of hatred with a vague benevolence. It calls for positive deeds of mercy and compassion directed toward the enemy. Christian love not only seeks to overcome anger and hatred, but to transcend it.
