Getting Closer to Forgiveness - Part 2

So how do we stitch together love and forgiveness? First, you have to get over your feelings.

Enemies can be defined in all sorts of ways. A reading of Luke 6:27-28 makes it pretty clear that enemies are (at least) those who hate you, curse you, and abuse you. So, how are we supposed to feel loving feelings for people who do this? How are we supposed to open our hearts to those who abuse us and love them?

We aren’t. When Jesus commands his disciples to love their enemies he doesn’t have in mind our modern and post-modern concern for an inner emotional state.  Our cultural preoccupation with the psychological state that we call “love” wasn’t very interesting to Jesus’ average Palestinian audience member. In fact, it’s anachronistic to read the idea of “psychological states” into Jesus’ commandment. Or as some men like to say, “feelings are stupid.”

It’s not that Jesus audience was primitive or stupid. They were just different from us. They understood their relationships not as a stew pot of psychological experience. Their relationships were set in a collectivist world-view. Individuals were known as they were in social relationship with those closest to them: the kin group, the village group, the neighborhood, and their various social groups. People’s awareness was formed by their relationships. The only way that a first century peasant living in Galilee was self-aware was as others knew them.

Love was not so much a psychological state for Jesus’ audience as it was something that you did in relation to another. You knew you were in love if you did something for another person. You might not have any affection for the other person, and still love the person. Love was manifest in what you did, not what you felt; in how you were attached to someone, not feeling all cuddly.

Jesus’ command of love broke down social barriers. When he commanded his followers to “love your neighbor as yourself,” he meant being attached to the people in your neighborhood, the same way you would to your primary social unity: your family. Which would have been just plain socially aberrant. “Family First” was the rule of the first century way more than it is for any 21^st century moralizing demagogue. To put neighbor before family was breaking up with normal.

So the bombshell “love your enemies,” was a hot moral mess. It meant, “Behave toward those who abuse you as if they were members of your primary social group, as if their benefit was your own, as if their identity was your own.” Jesus is seriously messing with family-normative culture. And he's getting us closer to why/how to forgive others.

More to come...