Jesus, who loved his enemies was targeted by them as an enemy and executed by soldiers. His friends are shocked and depressed by his murder. They are not angry, plotting revenge against enemies. Their friend Jesus then returns in the Resurrection. They enjoy 40 more days of friendship until Jesus departs in his Ascension, today’s feast day. Again, nothing shows Jesus’ friends acting as soldiers, targeting people as enemies to hurt them. They live on in the witness of their friend, to be a friend to others.
Living as a friend, including toward those who treat us as an enemy, is a counter-cultural disposition in this world controlled by soldiers. Soldiers are members of the cult of Militarism and trained into enemy consciousness. Sun Tzu famously asserts of soldiers, “To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.” Thus, in the process of defeating their enemy, soldiers take on the enemy’s thinking, tactics, values – the worst of them. Soldiers are not free to live as friends and love their enemies. People who did live in the witness of loving enemies were the Christian Trappist monks of Tibherine, Algeria. We remember them in these final days of May. A violent civil war was destroying Algeria (1991 to 2002). National soldiers were fighting rebel soldiers each treating the other as the enemy. In the midst of the enemy making lived common people trying to live together as friends. Among them were the Trappist monks who tended a great garden. They fed themselves and their neighbors physically and spiritually. They practiced and trained persons in the surrounding community in helpful agriculture practices and joined them in ever enduring friendship practices. The monks never joined either one of the soldier’s camps to fight enemies. They remained in solidarity with their friends; Muslim brothers and sisters doing their best to live and love as friends. Then, on a spring night in 1996, rebel soldiers entered the monastery and kidnapped seven of the monks. After 2 months in captivity the monks were killed. It was first thought they had been executed by their rebel captors after their severed heads were found May 31. It was later learned that in a military raid on the rebel soldiers’ camp government soldiers had killed the monks. Then, in true Sun Tzu fashion, the government soldiers beheaded them to make it look as though their enemies, the rebel soldiers, had executed them. Under Militarism, soldiers know their enemy and become their enemy and thus murder loving people who befriend their enemy. Our call as lovers of enemies is to befriend soldiers.
“If it should happen one day—and it could be today—that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass all… I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God… I ask them to be able to associate such a death with the many other deaths that were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity. My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value… I should like, when the time comes… to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down. I could not desire such a death… My death, clearly, will appear to justify those who hastily judged me naive or idealistic… For this life given up, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God… In this “thank you,” which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you my friends of this place… And you also, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you were doing. Yes, for you also I wish this “thank you”—and this adieu—to commend you to the God whose face I see in yours.” (Last Testament: A Letter From The Monks Of The Tibhirine – Christian de Chergé)
Prayer: Spirit, keep us living as friends to all we meet.
Question: Who do I regard as an enemy and need to hold dear as a friend?
May 24, 2020 Gospel Matthew 28:16-20 Seventh Sunday of Easter / Ascension