By Johnny Zokovitch
I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel. Part of the reason that this part of Scripture has been foremost in my mind is that US political and religious leaders who so like to flaunt their “Christianity” seem to be utterly unaware of it. Jesus’ most important sermon seems wholly ignored by those Christians who are looking for biblical justification for their wars, their treatment of immigrants, their white nationalism, and their abandonment of the most vulnerable.
In Matthew’s version of the sermon, Jesus sets up a dichotomy, a juxtaposition that will run throughout his preaching and teaching: “You have heard that it was said … But I say to you…”
“You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.
You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…”
In other places in scripture, Jesus phrases it as the difference between thinking the way that human beings think and thinking the way that God thinks, most notably after he makes the first prediction of his passion and death and Peter pulls him aside to rebuke him for the “crazy talk.” Jesus’s response is “Get behind me you Satan! You are thinking like a human being and not like God!”
So what do we do when we come upon these difficult teachings of Jesus, the ones that fly in the face of conventional wisdom? What do we do with “love your enemies” when we live in a culture that teaches us that you hate your enemies? That you bomb your enemies? That you ignore your enemies, or belittle them, or dismiss them, or dehumanize them?
Bishop Pierre Theas was one of the few Catholic bishops in France to speak out against the German occupation of his country, the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis, and the imprisonment and extermination of the Jews. During the war, he pleaded with French Catholics to see their Jewish neighbors as their brothers and sisters, to protect them, to hide them, and he publicly criticized those in power who executed the policies that led to the concentration camps. For these reasons, he was eventually imprisoned.
In prison, he took it upon himself to try and lift the morale of his fellow prisoners. He saw to their spiritual needs, comforted them, and celebrated the Mass for them. At one of these Masses, he read those words of Jesus about loving your enemies in the Sermon on the Mount and he was captured by them. He asked aloud how this command could be put into practice and was met with extreme resistance from his co-prisoners: It is impossible they said! They have killed our families and imprisoned us! But Theas stuck to his conviction that Jesus intended no exceptions to this command, that the command was valid no matter what the situation. When he tried to lead his fellow prisoners in the praying of the Our Father, they refused to say the line “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.”
Eventually the war was over, and Theas was released. But this struggle with how to love one’s enemies stayed with him.
Bishop Theas would go on to co-found Pax Christi as a reconciliation movement between French and German Catholics who, as enemies, in a span of about 30 years over two wars, had killed each other by the millions. The movement was rooted in Jesus’s command to love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you.
So often when we hear a passage like this, Jesus telling us to “love our enemies,” the easiest thing to do is to skip over it. “Jesus said a lot of things, let’s not get too hung up on this one.” Or we try to spiritualize it. “Well, when Jesus calls us to love our enemies, part of that love is saving them from the error of their ways, so it’s okay to use corrective measures even if it comes at my enemies’ expense.” Or we compartmentalize it. “Jesus meant this in our personal relationships but not for political reality. We’re to love our sister who is a pain in the butt but if our country is threatened by terrorists, well, love your enemies doesn’t apply at that level.”
But the point is – the point lost on Trump, Hegseth, and the religious leaders who give biblical backing to their actions – is that passages like the call to love our enemies are meant to needle us, prick us, make us feel uncomfortable. They’re meant to stretch us, to shape us into a form that more closely resembles the Jesus we say we’re following. Such passages are designed to clash with all the ways we have allowed conventional wisdom about the way the world works to settle in and take root; our failure to take such passages seriously mocks Jesus and dismisses any Christianity that seemingly misses the entirety of who Jesus is and for what he lived and died and rose again.
A Christianity that ignores the part that says “love your enemies” in order to find justification for bombing and killing them is, in fact, no Christianity at all.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.
This mini-history of Pax Christi by Johnny Zokovitch could not appear at a better time. The moment we now find ourselves in is not only dangerous from a global perspective but really forces us to accept or reject the moral challenge of Bishop Theas. Reading this essay brings to mind the words of the late and great Jewish American historian Howard Zinn who flew bombing raids over occupied France and who later, in spite of ostracism by the Jewish American community, maintained that in retrospect our military involvement in the Second World War was an unspeakable and immoral mistake that could have been resolved through diplomacy and certain painful concessions that could have saved millions from the murder of war.
David-Ross Gerling, PhD
Thanks for reminding us once again of the centrality of forgiveness and love of enemy to the Gospel and authentic Christian discipleship. I still have a long way to go.
Johnny, thank you for this post. I didn’t know the history of the founding of Pax Christi, and I’m glad to learn there is a connection with “loving our neighbors” in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.