Love and Hate

I read a passage from Bonhoeffer's Discipleship and I was struck by the timeliness of his words. He was commenting on Matthew 5:43-48 from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus told His disciples to love their enemies.

Instead of trying to summarize his thoughts, I thought it would be best to simply quote the passage at length.

The prayers of neighborly love and of non-revenge will be especially important in the struggle fought by God toward which we are moving and in which to some extent we have already been engaged for years. On one side, hatred is fighting, and on the other, love. Every Christian soul must seriously prepare for this. The time is coming in which everyone who confesses the living God will become, for the sake of that confession, not only an object of hatred and fury. Indeed, already we are nearly that far along now. The time is coming when Christians, for the sake of their confession, will be excluded from 'human society,' as it is called, hounded from place to place, subjected to physical attack, abused, and under some circumstances killed. The time of widespread persecution of Christians is coming, and that is actually the real meaning of all the movements and struggles of our time. Those opponents intent upon destroying the Christian church and Christian faith cannot live together with us, because they see in all our words and all of our actions that their own words and deeds are condemned, even if ours are not directed against them. And they are not wrong in seeing this and feeling that we are indifferent to their condemnation of us. They have to admit that their condemnation is completely powerless and negligible. They sense that we do not relate to them at all, as would be quite all right with them, on the basis of mutual blaming and quarreling. And how are we supposed to fight this fight? The time is approaching when we - no longer as isolated individuals, but together as congregations, as the church - shall lift our hands in prayer. The time is coming when we - as crowds of people, even if they are relatively small crowds among the many thousands-times-thousands of people who have fallen away - will loudly confess and praise the crucified and resurrected Lord, and his coming again. And what prayer, what confession, what song of praise is this? It is a prayer of most intimate love for those who are lost, who stand around us and glare at us with eyes rolling with hatred, some of whom have already even conspired to kill us. It is a prayer for peace for these distraught and shaken, disturbed and destroyed souls, a prayer for the same love and peace that we ourselves enjoy. It is a prayer which will penetrate deeply into their souls and will tug at their hearts with a much stronger grip than they can manage to tug at our hearts, despite their strongest efforts to hate. Yes, the church which is truly waiting for its Lord, which really grasps the signs of the time of final separation, such a church must fling itself into this prayer of love, using all the powers of its soul and the total powers of its holy life.

Bonhoeffer wrote of the situation of the church in Germany under the Nazis. He could have just as well been describing the situation of the church in 21st century America. These words are timely and need to be heard. Persecution is coming, but our response to hate must be love, because love is our greatest weapon.