Are we called to love the enemy?

Four years ago, on Monday, October 2, Charles Roberts walked into an Amish school house near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and took the students hostage. While Roberts allowed a number of people to leave the building, he kept ten girls at gunpoint. State troopers, who had reached the scene within minutes, asked Roberts to let the children go, throw his weapons through an open widow, and then come out with hands raised. He flatly refused and then began shooting the children. Five of them were seriously wounded and five of them died. As troopers stormed the building, they heard one last shot: the gunman had committed suicide.

What stunned many members of the press was the Amish response to this horrific event. One Amish elder, a grandfather of one of the slain girls, implored his relatives not to hate the killer, not to think evil of him. As he wept almost uncontrollably, another grief-stricken father asked his Amish sisters and brothers to remember that the murderer “had a mother and a wife and a soul.” Still another member of the community said that “we don’t want to do anything but forgive and reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.” The New York Times reported that one Amish father held Roberts’ sobbing father in his arms for over an hour, so bewildered and shocked was the gunman’s father that any member of his family would commit such an act against innocent human beings. Indeed, this Amish community set up a charitable fund for the children of the now-dead shooter and many of them attended his funeral. In a letter to her Amish neighbors, Marie Roberts – widow of the dead gunman – thanked them for the forgiveness and mercy which they had shown to her and her family, a kindness, she wrote, which “we so desperately needed” and “one which was so unexpected.”

In today’s reading from John’s gospel, the risen Christ appears among his disciples, a group of men who are huddled behind a locked door, a group of men who are fearful and anxious. After all, their leader was executed by members of the Roman imperial army, an execution approved by a small group of Jewish religious leaders who lived in Jerusalem. Would they, too, be arrested as collaborators with their slain leader? Would they, too, suffer his fate and be executed as seditious criminals? The risen Christ appears in their midst, this group of followers who failed to follow him to the place of execution; this group which simply disappeared at the most critical moment of his life. Do you remember the reading from John’s gospel on Good Friday? After the arrest of Jesus, the police ask Peter, “Are you not one of his disciples?” to which the usually zealous disciple responded with the flat denial, “I am not.” The risen Christ appears to his followers who ran away, who betrayed him, and abandoned him, the desire to preserve their own lives apparently trumping any desire to share his fate.

The risen Christ appears in their midst and says the one thing they desperately need to hear and the one thing which was so unexpected: “Peace be with you.” He shows them the wounds on his hands and his side, and again says, “Peace be with you.” While we may imagine that such a greeting of peace is simply a lovely greeting, indeed, the very greeting we offer each before the beginning of the eucharistic liturgy, it is not simply a salutation. We hear in these words what Jesus, at his last supper, offers them and all those who would follow him: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give it to you as the world gives it” (John 14:27-28). Why the double greeting of peace? Is the risen Christ simply at a loss for words in his new mode of existence? Or is it this: that peace, the making of peace, living as people of peace, is a sign of his risen presence in the lives of his followers in a world marked by violence, by torture, by execution, by the horrific deaths of five precious girls who?

You see, it is really not all that difficult to greet someone, even a stranger, with words of peace. It really is not all that difficult to sing, “Grant us your peace,” if by such words we mean only peace as the absence of conflict in life. But what about this: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor,’ but I say to you, Love your enemies.” Is it just possible that the words of the risen Christ, “Peace be with you,” may actually mean, love your enemies? After all, he stands in the presence of those who betrayed or abandoned him and, rather than condemning them – a nasty word for a cowardly act, offers them peace, the restoration of a relationship. Is it just possible that this greeting of peace, which may sound so sweet to the ears, actually holds within it a remarkable, an astonishing challenge: do not return hatred with hatred, betrayal with even more betrayal, violence with violence. While the secular press was surprised by what one reporter called the naïveté of the Amish in offering forgiveness to the one who had wounded and murdered their children, I wonder: did they, the Amish, not get it? That is, did they not discern that a life marked by peace will be a life marked by the challenge to forgive, to love one’s enemies?

At St. Paul’s this past Sunday – Easter Sunday – five precious children were baptized as kings and queens in the kingdom of God, as priests with our great high priest Jesus Christ, as brothers and sisters of the Spirit. Here is what I say about that life-changing act: the One who once was dead has risen into them, our dear children, and risen into us – risen in to them and risen into us. Dear brothers and sisters, if our neighbors and friends and co-workers are to witness the resurrection of the dead, they will behold it in us or they will not see it; they will behold it in us.

And so I ask: what will they see?

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