Texts: Genesis 33:1-11; “Jacob and Esau: The Embrace, by Cheryl Denise; Matthew 5:43-48
Speaker: Joel Miller
If one were to read the New Testament, starting with Matthew, it wouldn’t take long to reach one of – if not the – most challenging, transcendent, maddening, beautiful, hauntingly impossible, teachings in the entire Bible. It’s just five chapters in. It’s part of the long teaching we know as the Sermon on the Mount. Speaking to the crowds gathered to hear this newly-popular prophet from Galilee, Jesus says these three startling words: Love. Your. Enemies.
“You have heard that it was said,” Jesus says, “’You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43:45).
Luke records a similar teaching. Jesus said: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?…But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High” (Luke 6:32-35).
Several decades ago there was a project called The Jesus Seminar. It was a group of liberal Bible scholars attempting to sort out the authentic words of the historical Jesus, from what might have been the additions of the gospel writers. Each saying got ranked according to its likelihood of authenticity. Among those receiving the highest rating was…“love your enemies.” Their logic went something like this: There’s no good reason why the early Christians – who were trying to attract more followers – would invent something that would clearly turn people away. To say it plain: You can’t make this stuff up.
Even the apostle Paul seems to have gotten the message. In his letter to the Romans, he writes: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse…Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all….No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink” (Romans 12:14,17,20).
So far in this series we’ve been speaking about early Anabaptism. That was the movement within 16th century Europe in which people broke with the state church by baptizing adults. They claimed a New Testament faith apart from the church hierarchy. As Mark described last week, many of them were martyred for their faith.
Perhaps some of you have wondered, with all this talk of Anabaptism as our spiritual lineage, why our church isn’t called CAC rather than CMC? Columbus Anabaptist Church? It’s a good question, with a pretty wild story behind it.
The story of how Anabaptists became Mennonite has everything to do with this startling statement that even the most skeptical of scholars are pretty sure Jesus actually said: Love your enemies.
So far, we’ve been emphasizing the model Anabaptists. Anna and Felix Manz. Hans Landis. Dirk Willems. The ones we admire. But Anabaptism soon became a wide, eclectic, wildly contradictory movement. And this kind of makes sense. When you reject the authority of the pope, when you separate from the meaning-making symbols and practices like the mass and sacraments and saints, you’ve got a big void of authority and meaning to fill. The Protestant-way was for the written word, the newly-widely-available Bible, to have the ultimate word. So it’s a good thing that everyone who reads the Bible arrives at the same convictions, always. And it’s a good thing no one ever claims they have heard directly from God about the one true path.
As the Anabaptist movement spread, so too did the range of its theology. Its extreme form took shape in the northern parts of Germany where it took on a heavily apocalyptic flavor. The early leader Melchior Hoffman emphasized Christ’s impending second coming. He taught that Christ would separate the righteous from the unrighteous and violently punish the wicked. It’s a fair conclusion if the book of Revelation is your main guide and you’re willing to believe that the Christ of the gospels has undergone a personality change. Hoffman became convinced that the second coming would take place in the year 1533. The city of Strasburg would serve as the New Jerusalem. This year 2025, is the 492nd anniversary of that not happening.
When you’ve got an apocalyptic mindset of Christ soon destroying the wicked, and you’ve got other parts of scripture saying we should be like Christ, it’s not too big of a leap to say that we should be the hands and feet of Christ in the work of violently ridding the world of evil. And this is the direction a few charismatic leaders took the path laid out by Hoffman. It involved new leadership, a new year, and a new New Jerusalem. The city of Munster soon went from a place of toleration to one of extremes with the Anabaptists taking over city government, seizing property to be redistributed, requiring adult baptisms, requiring polygamy – big jump there. Apostles would travel out and recruit followers to come and populate the New Jerusalem in Munster. Many flocked in. Their leader, who claimed to have a direct line to God, eventually proclaimed himself the new Davidic Messiah, setting up a throne in the market square. Opponents within the city were brutally repressed. It ended in catastrophe with the Catholic prince-bishop defeating the army of Munsterite Anabaptists, retaking the city by slaughtering its inhabitants. The executed bodies of the three main Anabaptist leaders were hung in iron cages from the church tower for all to see. The cages, long empty, are still there to this day.
The shock waves from this were felt across Europe.
Including a little further North, with a Dutch priest who had become sympathetic to the Anabaptist quest for the renewal of the church. He was a respected pastor, quiet but effective in his leadership and preaching. His name was Menno Simons. Menno was appalled by the Munster ordeal. He left the Catholic priesthood and became an Anabaptist right at the time when those cages were first displayed. His first writings were a sharp rejection of “the sword.” Menno set about defining an Anabaptist Christian faith modeled on the Lordship of Jesus, the prince of peace, and the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, including, “love your enemies.” He was soon recognized for his strong leadership and became a man always on the move. This was both to avoid persecution, and to visit and teach different gatherings of the scattered and confused Anabaptists still recovering from the wake of Munster. Menno saw himself as a shepherd to the scattered sheep. He managed to stay out of harms way for 25 years before dying of natural causes at the age of 65. His influential role in building up congregations committed to the peacefulness of Jesus and loving one’s neighbor led to these groups being known as Menno-nists, or Menno-nites.
And so, my fellow Mennonites and Menno-curious folks: Not that we have always done it well, but Menno’s people are the sheep in the wild flock of Anabaptism that have attempted to love, rather than kill, their enemies. Mennonitism was born as a nonviolent response to violence committed in the name of God. Our origin story is one of wrestling with the implications that Jesus actually said and meant for us to love our enemies.
And wrestle we do.
To repeat that description from the beginning, this is one of if not the most challenging, transcendent, maddening, beautiful, hauntingly impossible, teachings in our or any tradition.
The thing about having an enemy is that the enemy sets the terms of the relationship. It is because of the harm, the abuse, the trauma, the violence they have inflicted, that they become an enemy. That’s what defines the relationship.
At a basic level, love of the enemy is a refusal to stay stuck in the conditions set by the other person, or system. This is what’s behind Jesus’s teaching to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, and hand over the additional piece of clothing. These are not passive acts. The purpose of slapping someone on the cheek, forcing them to carry your pack for a mile, or demanding they hand over their cloak – the purpose was to establish dominance, to humiliate and debilitate the other. The responses Jesus prescribes are assertions of agency and dignity, re-setting the terms of the relationship.
The best-known practitioners of nonviolence in the last century, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. spun out 1000 different forms of these active responses, which Gandhi referred to as “experiments with truth.”
In the post-Civil War US, when many in the North were seeking retribution against the South, President Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying something like: “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make them my friends.”
On an even deeper level, deeper than strategies for response or winning over enemies, who may or may not become friends, is the spiritual call of living within the reality of love. Divine Love, we believe, is what sets the terms of all relationships. It is the underlying condition that makes possible all other conditions. To be rooted in the love of God, is to see that whatever harm an enemy has inflicted is a sign of their own diminishment, their own alienation from the love of God. As fellow children of God, offspring of the same evolutionary unfolding, we are fundamentally of the same family.
This is what the story of the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau illustrates and why we chose this image for today. They are twins, at odds even while in their mother’s womb. The younger son Jacob has tricked Esau out of his birthright and fled for his life for fear of Esau’s revenge. In this story of their meeting many years later, Jacob expects the worse. His excessive gifts to his brother are an act of diplomacy rather than generosity. His arrangement of his large family such that the wife and son he loves most are at the back of the pack – Rachel and Joseph – is a desperate act of asset-protection. But Esau shocks his brother, his enemy, by embracing him. And Jacob can finally see that his brother’s face, his enemy, is, as Genesis says so beautifully, the face of God. “For truly, to see your face is like seeing the face of God” (33:10).
It’s 2025, and enemies abound. Enemies seek to set the terms of the relationship and produce an in-kind response that only further justifies their violence. It can be a maddening game. To love one’s enemies – and to pray for them – is no naïve or passive response. It is actually the only way to survive. It is a deeply spiritual project to refuse the death trap. To be daily grounded in the love of God is to reclaim the terms of all of our relationships. Menno Simons and more recent leaders have shown us one form of this. To see the face of God in the other is to see the truth, even if the other has lost the ability to see it. What this actually looks like is something we must continue to discuss as a community as we attempt our own creative experiments with truth.