The psalm behind this reflection, read through: Who Are the Enemies of God? — Reading Psalm 68.
When I came to Risdon Vale to pastor the church, I set about visiting people in their homes. It was a good way to learn a congregation. You find out more in an hour at someone’s kitchen table than in a year of shaking hands at the door.
One afternoon I sat with an elderly couple who each had a story worth hearing. But the woman of the house had her mother living with her, and it was the mother I came away thinking about. She was ninety-nine.
Before the war she and her family had been Dutch missionaries in Indonesia. When the Japanese came through they rounded up the foreigners and the missionaries and put them in a detention camp.
The conditions were not good. But the commandant allowed them one privilege. They could hold a service each Sunday, on one condition: the script of the message had to be brought to his office beforehand and read.
One Sunday the missionary who was to preach was called in to the commandant’s office. He was abused and told there would be no service that week.
The commandant was by all accounts a strict man. He stood behind his desk holding the script in one hand and pointing at it with the other.
“You don’t believe this.”
He threw the script down on the desk and sat, looking at the man across from him.
After a moment the missionary said, sheepishly, “Yes we do.”
“You don’t love us, your enemies. No service this week.”
And he showed him out.
There is a psalm the commandant would have liked.
Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered; let those who hate him flee before him. As smoke is driven away, so you shall drive them away; as wax melts before fire, so the wicked shall perish before God.
Psalm 68 opens there and does not soften. Further down, God strikes the heads of his enemies. Further down again there is a line about feet in blood that most of us read quickly and do not read aloud.
It is not a psalm that pretends the category is a mistake. Some people are against God, and the psalm says so, and asks him to act.
The commandant was pointing at a sentence from the same book. Love your enemies. Jesus does not say you have none. He does not say they are friends who have been misunderstood. He leaves the word standing and tells you what to do with the person it describes.
He went back and told them there would be no service.
So they prayed. Not for the commandant to change his mind, and not for the service to be restored. They prayed to be forgiven, because they had searched their own hearts and found that he was telling the truth.
That is what the psalm will not let you do. Read it through and every act of violence in it belongs to God. He arises. He scatters. He strikes. The man singing does not lift a hand from beginning to end — he asks, and then he waits, and the whole psalm is that ask. It is a prayer, not a permission.
They had a real grievance and a man to aim it at, and they turned it around and aimed it at themselves.
Something happened after that.
The guard at the wire stopped being the enemy and became somebody’s son. He had a mother in Japan who loved him. He had almost certainly not chosen the steaming jungle of Indonesia. The missionaries were there by choice; he had been put there. He was a long way from home and he was not going anywhere either. A prisoner of circumstance rather than of wire, but a prisoner.
They did not decide to think better of him and then find it easier to love him. They repented, and then they could see him.
And slowly they began to love their enemies.
Her name was Alika, and some years later I asked her to tell the church what she had told me.
She was a hundred and two by then. She stood up at the front with her walking stick in her hand and told it.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
It is hard to hear someone like Alika tell her story, because it becomes personal. That is what it did to me. Both times. Same message, same impact. Do I love my enemies?
Each time I heard it, and even now, writing this, I do not think I can come to the place of saying yes. I cannot tick it off as something I have achieved. It is a daily challenge to me, as it was to the man carrying a Roman soldier’s pack. It is not easy.
But I think this psalm helps. It gives me permission to have enemies. It does not give me permission to deal with them. And it challenges me as to how I should respond. That is not easy — but as Alika discovered, it is possible.
I have never been able to read love your enemies the same way since.
It is not a command to stop having any. It was given to people under occupation — the man who could make you carry his pack for a mile was a soldier of the empire, and Jesus said carry it two. The category was real and he left it standing.
What Alika’s people found out in that office is that you do not get to the second mile by deciding the soldier is not a soldier. You get there by finding out what you are.
I sit with men in prison. If there is a poster for the enemy of society, it is them.
Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered.