A Troubling Question About Jesus' Teaching: Should we love our enemies even during a time of war?

Recently, some Christians in Ukraine came under fire for putting up billboards in their city with verses from the Bible, one of which quoted the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount where He called us to love our enemies (see Matthew 5:43-48). As a result, these Christians have been branded separatists and traitors, with some calling for their church to be investigated.

But was Jesus referring to situations like this when He called us to love our enemies? Are we to love those who ruthlessly bomb our families? Are we to love those who rape our women and murder our children? Are we to love those who tie the hands of civilians behind their backs before executing them? Is this really what Jesus meant?

To be sure, these Ukrainian Christians (some of whom I know) were not calling for pacifism. They believe in defending their country, and they believe in the use of force to resist and repel the attack on their nation. In fact, I could easily see them praying for God to be with them as they fought against the Russian army, the result of which would be Russian casualties.

But can you love an enemy soldier while at the same time trying to kill him before he kills you?

Let’s first consider whom Jesus was talking to in the Sermon on the Mount, namely, first-century Jews under the occupation of Rome. They had personal enemies, religious enemies, and national enemies. And there were some Jewish groups who taught that it was absolutely right to hate their enemies.

That means that, in times of war, you would rather see your enemy surrender than kill him, and if he did surrender, you would not treat him harshly.

It means that you would recognize his humanity, remembering that he has a loving wife and children (or parents) waiting for him at home.

That you would understand that, in all likelihood, he is simply following orders and has been fed lots of misinformation about you.

That you would want to see him rehabilitated after the war, truly repenting for his actions, truly coming to know God, and living a redemptive life. (In the case of someone who committed war crimes and would be sentenced to prison or death, even then, you would want him to repent and get right with God before he died.)

That you would even have pity on the enemy who has seemingly lost all human feeling to the point of acting like a rabid animal. Surely this was not who God created him to be. Even if he must die, we should pity his poor, lost soul.

That is how you can love your enemies even during a time of war, all while fighting with all your might to defeat that very enemy.

Some might quip in facetious response, “So, it looks like this? Before the sniper shoots the enemy in the head, he mutters under his breath, ‘Jesus loves you, and so do I. Here’s a token of my love. Bang!’”

But he might pray regularly for God to have mercy on those he has to take out. Or for God to help the widows and orphans left behind. Or for God to give them a change of heart and mind, resulting in a change of actions, so the sniper does not need to take them out.

On the other hand, if the sniper enjoys the kill itself, if he revels in the bloodshed and longs to have the opportunity to take more enemy lives, I would question how much of the love of God is in his heart.

The fact is that we are products of our environment more than we care to realize, and the ones we brand as terrorists are often hailed as freedom fighters by their people. (Ask yourself this: how would British historians writing in the early 1800s describe the Revolutionary War? Our American heroes and freedom fighters were anything but that in their eyes.)

And are all Russians guilty of the barbaric Ukraine invasion? Should all Russians be blamed and hated? Obviously not.

Of course, I’m not saying there is no such thing as objective morality. Quite the contrary. For example, there was nothing good or noble about the Nazi cause. It was downright evil, to the core. And the Nazis absolutely deserved what they got. I wish they had been stopped in their tracks and destroyed years earlier.

Yet, as New Testament scholar Craig Keener notes in his shorter Matthew commentary, Jesus “also makes a demand that can require more than merely human resources for forgiveness. Corrie ten Boom, who had lost most of her family in a Nazi concentration camp, often lectured on grace. But one day a man who came to shake her hand after such a talk turned out to be a former prison guard. Only by asking God to love through her did she find the grace to take his hand and offer him Christian forgiveness.”

So, by all legal means, let the Ukrainians fight against the Russian invaders, and may their triumph over the Russian army put a stop to this senseless shedding of blood. And may the Ukrainian Christians continue to love their enemies through it all. (For those of us feeling smugly self-righteous right now, how about us loving our enemies, right where we live?)

Let us separate a national need and act from an individual need and act.

Just as it is clearly correct and needful to protect innocents from unlawful violence and crime, it is often needful for a nation to defend itself and even be offensive against an aggressor nation.

As a combat veteran I can tell you that the act of combat is much different than that of murder. While the individual warriors are required to act in concert and collectively or individually to accomplish a national requirement, the individual act is held accountable under our laws of both war and crime. Perhaps not so with others, but as a nation we do not easily tolerate the murderous on the battlefield, but certainly expect valor and fierceness against the enemy in combat.

As a husband and father, I will kill, if need be, to protect my family, I will not employ force outside that simple and concise equation of just war- unlawful force is to be met with defensive force, countervailing up to lethal force if required, and then ceased and sheathed.

As Solomon records in Ecclesiastes, the whole duty of man is to love God, keep his commandments, love your neighbor and the rest is circumstance. Paraphrasing of course.

Often, we hear of the need to love our enemies and do good to those that spitefully abuse- and I practice that as often as the occasion arises. However, the limit is clear- unlawful force is to be resisted as both a man and as a Believer. Either that force will relent, or escalate, and they are responsible for the outcome, not the innocent. Just as our laws across the several states (with exceptions, like CA/MA/NY etc) the unlawful aggressor is subject to lawful force, both by the state and by its citizens.

I’ll turn my cheek to a brother who ceremoniously backhands me, as a man subject to grace, but I will not, ever, submit to unlawful force of any kind.

Now, if we look at persecution for Christs sake alone, then that may be the place and situation to not resist and submit to such abuse, but I will have to see that a long way off before I lay down my arms and allow unlawful force to be applied to me or mine. I will not.

While not a scripture, the principle stands “evil flourishes when good men do nothing”.

We obviously are seeing that at many levels of state and federal govt. They bear the responsibility for their nonfeasance. Why do we see millions of new gun owners annually in the US? Reasonable people are seeing the writing on the wall so to speak- if govt abdicates its public duty to not allow nor tolerate unlawful force and violence, then it is incumbent on the people personally to so do.

C.S> Lewis wrote about that:

I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Because in Christian morals ‘thy neighbour’ includes ‘thy enemy’, and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies.

…

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently ‘Love your neighbour’ does not mean ‘feel fond of him’ or ‘find him attractive’. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap?
Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it is the other way round: my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are.
Go a step further.
In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner….

Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him?
No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment— even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace.
…
When soldiers came to St John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major— what they called a centurion.
The idea of the knight— the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause—is one of the great Christian ideas.
War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it.
It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage— a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.
...
I imagine somebody will say, ‘Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy’s acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?’
All the difference in the world.
Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central , inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it any more. That is not how things happen . I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible. Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves— to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good.
That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.

I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sum ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us.
Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco…
C.S. Lewis

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