The Absurdity of Hate... and Love

“You have heard that it was said, You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. He makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same?  And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete.”  (Matthew 5:43-48)

A few days ago I joined a whole host of clergy (and others) who posted these words to social media: “I condemn white supremacy.”

And one of my friends, a man whose heart I admire greatly, posted, “And those who don’t.”

Nope.  No, I do not condemn them. In the first place, condemnation of other humans is not my job. That belongs to God. (It is my job, however, to call out hate and speak the words of the prophets, to be angry about injustice.)  In the second place, though, I have those words of Jesus, those very ones that open this blog, hanging over me.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe people who actively promote white supremacy are committing great acts of evil. I believe we must do everything we can to stop them from taking harmful actions against others. But we have to do that for two sets of people: for the people the supremacists intend to harm, and for the supremacists themselves. That is what love demands of us. Because love demands that we love everyone in this situation. No exceptions.

I don’t always do so well at that though. It is so difficult to love those who are unrighteous (or who I deem are unrighteous). It is so much easier to hate them. So much easier to overstep my authority and condemn them.

It is at this point I want to remind you of a few blogs ago when I shared my family’s experience when my father was a plaintiff in a racial discrimination suit. You will recall that my father took a stand against racial discrimination of African Americans in his workplace. The cost to my family was deep. But there was a great injustice before us, and we had to stand up against it. That kind of hate, hate that restricts another beloved child of God from living fully and free, that hate had to be stopped. It had to be stood against.  I loved that my father took that chance. I admired him so much for making that stand.

But here is something else you need to know about my father. He hated redheads.

I mean, he hated redheads.  HATED them. He said they always thought they were better than other people. They were treated too special as small children and it twisted their brains into thinking they were extraordinary. He periodically described men who had red hair as having prison eyes. He never trusted redheads. He was sure they were up to evil all the time. Once he caught me talking on the phone to a redhead, and he refused to speak to me for 3 months. My great teenage rebellion was then getting my first real kiss from that redhead in the middle of the dance floor at our band Valentine’s banquet. (Of course my enneagram one self would make a first kiss into a moral stand against discrimination! But I digress).

He would tell us there was one redhead he fought in school. Later, that kid died tragically. My father, who by that point skipped school pretty much every day, made it a point to go to school the day of that kid’s funeral so everyone would know he didn’t go to honor that kid. I was shocked at how judgmental and callous my dad was in that moment.

We had redheads around. One of my closest friends in high school had red hair. My dad actually really liked her. But he never said she had red hair. He said her hair was strawberry blonde. Other redheads my dad liked sometimes had auburn hair. Two of his three grandkids flirted with having red in their hair. My brother and I just held our breath and hoped they would outgrow it, which they did.

You probably think this is crazy. You probably think I am making this up to prove a point. I assure you, I am not making it up, but I hope it is proving a point anyway. This whole thing is absurd. How ridiculous for someone to hate someone because of their hair color!?  And then to make exceptions but to explain it away by softening the color with different descriptions. But is it any more absurd than hating someone because of their skin color? No, it is not.

And it is also absurd that a man who fought so hard and sacrificed so much to improve the lives of people with different skin colors and allow them equal employment opportunities would not have hired a redhead if it came with a million dollar bonus for him.

Hate is absurd.

But so is love.

Because it doesn’t really make sense that I loved a man who hated redheads. Right? I mean, shouldn’t I have rejected him for his evil beliefs? That’s what we are supposed to do these days, aren’t we? Aren’t we supposed to love our neighbor and hate our enemies? I have heard that said…

And then Jesus speaks. Well, hell.

The thing is, we will never get better without love. And we will really never get better just loving people like us, or people who agree with us. Instead, we will all sink into our irrational hatred.

We think hate is easy, but is it? Often hate costs us the people we love. It certainly costs us the people we could love. And it also costs us because it gets us farther and farther away from the fullness of the reign of God.

My father taught me some of my most profound lessons about hate. And he consequently taught me to love more boldly from watching the good and bad example he was for me. And I learned that it is out of love that I do have to work for justice in this world, and that definitely means striking at unrighteousness. And for such moments, I try to stay focused on the model Jesus gave us when he cleared the Temple of the moneychangers. He took a whip and cleared the space, flipping tables and making a big old scene. But none of the Gospels say he struck a fellow human. He overturned the system. He didn’t hurt the people. And when that crowd later condemned him, overstepping their authority, he said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”

We don’t know what we are doing. That is so true.

I am far from perfect at loving my enemy. I have to work at it on the daily. But I have to work at it. Because until I love like my Father loves (and not like my father loved and hated), I will not be complete. None of us will, because we will not be a complete family. Beloved children of God will be missing. Beloved, misguided, unrighteous children of God who themselves will never be able to let go of their hate if they aren’t loved too. 

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash