Perhaps only those who have enemies can interpret Matthew 5:44. Much talk about this teaching is romanticized; "The way to deal with your enemy is to make him your friend" often smacks of the same middle-class pacifism of good, but naive intentions thatReinhold Niehbur rightly devastated in the 1930s. We cannot brush aside conflict, including class conflict, so easily.

Jesus had enemies, and assumed his followers would also. Otherwise he would not have challenged them to treat their own enemies in a way that radically breaks with all ideologies' assumptions about how to struggle for justice. It may only be as we identify with the poor deeply enough to think of their enemies as our own, that we can begin to reread Matthew 5.⁶ It may only be as we approach a setting similar to that of the original words, that we can begin to follow. Far from precluding the taking of sides, "love of enemy" may only be possible once we have taken sides!

Now, however, we confront a new danger. Loving enemies is a difficult, uncomfortable business, and we all welcome easy ways out of the challenge. But Jesus would leave no one complacent. To suggest that the poor are the enemies we have been learning to love may leave us altogether too self-satisfied. Whether overseas church workers or North Americans "in solidarity," we who have become emotionally involved with the cause of the poor may be doing little better than loving those we find lovely, ideologically. One could do worse, of course. But to say we only now have the right to reread Matthew 5 is far from enough. We must actually begin to do the rereading. Are we striving to love the oppressors -- the landowners, the death squad hit men, the generals in dark glasses, the politicians using their offices for self-gain, the informers, the upwardly-mobile among the lower and middle classes who disdain their roots and buttress the status quo? Do we?

There is a hasty, low-cost way of answering yes to the question, with glib theological talk of working for reconciliation. Such a response probably suggests we may not really be opting for the poor, nor feeling the weight of injustice. Yet what will distinguish a historic peace church approach to revolutionary struggle is the insistence that finally, reconciliation, not victory, is still the goal -- and in fact one of the means.

While we will insist on taking seriously the harsh reality of conflict, we will continue the search for nonviolent processes of resolving conflict, or even nonviolent ways of -- may we use the word? -- fighting. What will distinguish our posture toward revolutionary movements is not that we avoid taking sides, but that we will insist on striving for Christlike ways of relating to those whose side we do not take, whom in fact we oppose.

That, however, is very much a two-edged blade.

During the last three centuries our tradition, for all its apparent attention to "love of enemies," has had only sporadic experiences of oppression and persecution. We have been able to favor nonresistance over nonviolent confrontation in part because we have had the resources to flee. That is not always the case with the oppressed whom we are now learning to know. Unless administrators, constituents and board members allow field workers the freedom to "take sides," we will not be able to actualize ourtradition's -- and our Lord's -- teaching to love enemies.

But the other edge is this: unless field workers are ready to work as hard at resisting their new enemies lovingly as they have worked at identifying with their old enemies, the poor, they will do no better than those whose motivation is ideology, rather than discipleship. Loving the oppressor is downright distasteful. But if we have come far enough to feel both desire and distress for trying, we may at least find strength in knowing we are probably beginning to identify with the poor in a way such as Jesus identified.

And now, situated anew, we may find as we reread the Bible that it offers unexpected help not only in the task of identification, but even for the provisional tasks of taking sides.

A) Reading the Old Testament prophets we may hone the prophet's sense of God acting in history, raising up one regime and toppling another. In judging the nations, suggests Isaiah, God sometimes chooses violent instruments, yet promises to judge these too. This prophetic sense simultaneously suggests that we may not rule out the possible legitimacy of insurrectional movements, yet dare not stifle our criticism of their new injustices either.

B) Reading the Jonah narrative we come upon the prospect of valid societal repentance outside the framework of either Israel or the church. Such secular change may be relative, temporal and temporary, but God would warn us, as God tried to warn Jonah, not to underestimate God's active concern for the innocent ones who "do not yet know their right hand from their left." God's providential action in history, then, is not merely negative; it is constructive as well as judgmental.

C) The Bible warns us both against failing to read the signs of the times and against all forms of idolatry, all misplaced allegiance. We sense a challenge to celebrate signs of the Kingdom breaking into history, while avoiding idolatry toward those systems, institutions or policies that mediate the kingdom within human history.

D) Rereading Romans 13 carefully, we discover it is more of a help than a hindrance. At first it seems to rule out all resistance, even nonviolent resistance, to constituted authority. Or then it would seem to approve of a new government for the wrong reason -- that through brute force it is now the government, fait accompli, quite apart from its moral legitimacy. Under closer scrutiny, however, guidelines for weighing the legitimacy of a given government or movement begin to emerge: Who is really acting on behalf of the common good? Is one side delegitimizing itself by consistently punishing those who do good, while protecting a clique of wrongdoers?

Notes

⁶Liberation theology, by the way, would predict as much. The process we have followed matches Juan Luis Segundo's "hermeneutical circle": We have insisted on beginning with the reality of personal experience with "the people." We have applied ideological suspicion first to ideology itself, and then to theology. That has then led to exegetical suspicion that we may need to reread the biblical text from a new vantage point. See chapter one of Segundo, The Liberation of Theology. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1976). Also LaVerne Rutschman, "Latin American Liberation Theology and Radical Anabaptism," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19 (Winter 1982): 38-56.