Today's Lenten Meditation: Loving Your Enemies
- Christ Episcopal Church
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
“The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30 you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ 31The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” From Mark's gospel, the 12th chapter
God made my enemy my friend.
Love is hard enough. Loving our neighbors? Even harder. Especially the ones who hate us, who slander us, who disregard us. The world tells us to hate them, to shame them, to expose the error of their ways & to define ourselves by what they’re not. Just think about how much time and energy was spent this week criticizing & separating ourselves from the awful Christians who want a more "Christian" coffee cup. We love to perpetuate our divides & to expose our neighbor’s flawed perspective. God, though, invites us into a different way of relating to our neighbors - all of our neighbors.
We are to love God with our whole lives. And, then he adds a second most important command that is intricately linked to the first: Love your neighbor as yourself. We love God by loving God’s creation - all of it - including ourselves.
Loving ourselves as God loves us is natural and good and yet, it is one of the most difficult things we can do. Pause for a minute and imagine this: How different would our world be if we all loved ourselves? If we believed that we were worthy of love and belonging? If we knew That God’s desire was not to shame us, but rather to renew us? According to Jesus, loving our ourselves is connected to loving our neighbor.
The world does not need more hostility. It needs more love. Only love has the power to transform.
That is why we come together - to confess our deep need for God’s help. And, to once again look to Jesus as the source & imitator & perfector of God’s love. It was that love that refused retaliation and chose instead to die for Love's sake.
Excerpts from LOVING YOUR ENEMIES
NADIA BOLTZ-WEBER, 2025
