Praying For Your Enemies

One of Jesus’s most recognizable teachings is about loving your enemies and “praying for those who persecute you.”

While this is a wonderful sentiment, it is difficult to put into practice, and I daresay most Christians - myself included - rarely engage in loving their enemies and praying for people who mistreat them.

I am reading a Christian spirituality book right now called Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller. Like most Oregonians, he is rather unique, and he seems to have an unusual combination of liberal, progressive ideas about the Christian lifestyle, backdropped against what seems to be a basically evangelical concept of God, Satan, and the ultimate forces of good and evil.

In a chapter I read last night, he was discussing how he went from being a Christian who basically couldn’t stand church - because of its hypocrisy and tendency toward self-righteous conservative politics - to someone who absolutely loved church because his church had gotten rid of the politics and the self-righteousness, and instead focused purely on community, love, and helping people - not for the purpose of evangelism, but simply for the purpose of helping to end poverty, hate, crime, loneliness, etc, and spread love and acceptance. From his description, it truly sounded like a church attempting to emulate the teachings and lifestyles of Jesus of Nazareth, difficult as that may be in our post-modern, self-absorbed culture.

Anyway, the chapter got me to thinking about compassion, charity, love for all people, even my enemies, etc - which is something I have been convicted about for quite some time now.

This morning in the shower, for whatever reason, I was dwelling on my job at Tempur-Pedic, which ended a year and a half ago, and how miserable I had been there, and all the people (two, specifically) who had mistreated me. I started to feel angry and upset, and then I suddenly began thinking about the “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” teaching.

I decided to pray for those two individuals that I was thinking about.

Not a prayer to ask God to forgive them for treating me bad, or to ask God to help them to realize what jerks they are, but rather for their well-being, their happiness, their personal and spiritual peace, their families, etc.

It wasn’t easy. In some ways, it didn’t even feel genuine.

But what was genuine was my desire to follow this difficult teaching from Jesus.

And I discovered, sort of to my astonishment, as I prayed, and particularly when I was finished, that I felt better. In some ways it was very freeing. In the past I’ve attempted to consciously “forgive” those people for what they did, but it never really helped me to get past those experiences. Praying for them like this, on the other hand, felt very freeing. I found myself thinking that I would continue to pray for them in the future.

I don’t want to misrepresent it and say that I’m now completely free of the hard feelings, but I can see how this practice of praying for my enemies may help me to eventually move toward that.

This is the kind of life I want to lead. This is the kind of Jesus that I want to follow. It’s not about an Eternal Life Insurance Policy. It’s about enriching my life, and the lives of those around me, now, in the present. It’s about touching that otherness, that transcendence, that ground of being that I conceive of as God. This, I believe, is the ultimate path of spiritual happiness and peace.

Prayerful Misconceptions

Growing up, I remember being under the impression that in order for a prayer to "count" or to be "heard by God," one had to say "Amen" at the end of the prayer. I had no idea what this word meant, but I knew that it was necessary to close out your prayer. Indeed, no one in church, even to this day, prays without saying "Amen" at the end. I always understood the necessity of Amen having been commanded by Jesus in the Lord's Prayer.

This prayer is found in Matthew 6 and Luke 11. In these chapters, Jesus is teaching his disciples about how to pray. He commands them first not to pray in public, or with flowery speech like the hypocrites do, but to pray in secret. He then goes on to say:

"When you pray, pray like this: Our father, who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

In Luke's version, that's where the prayer ends. But in Matthew's version, we find an additional statement at the end of the prayer..."For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever, Amen."

Curiously enough, I recently discovered, by the footnote in the biblical text, that this phrase is not found in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew. Like so many other things in the Gospels, it was a later addition to the text. So that, coupled with the fact that the phrase doesn't appear at all in Luke's account, is a strong implication that it wasn't part of Jesus's original teaching. Thus, Jesus never taught his followers to give the now customary laudatory homily at the end of their prayers, nor to say "Amen."

This may not seem terribly important, and indeed it's probably not. But for someone who grew up with the concept that prayers literally weren't valid unless they had "Amen" at the end (a belief born entirely from Jesus's commandment on how to pray in the Lord's Prayer), this discovery really had an impact on me.

So much of what we take at face value regarding the bible isn't even historically reliable. We assume the bible is the inspired, unedited, infallible Word of God. We make this assumption because it serves our emotional needs. But what we want to be true is not always the same as what is true. The fact is, the bible has been edited, re-edited, transcribed, and re-transcribed a thousand times. Things have been added, taken away, and altered. Anyone who abides by a Christian philosophy that does not take these facts into account, is guilty of shallow faith at best, and willful idolatry at worst.