How Can You Pray for Your Enemy? (pt. 1)

Trusting in God's justice and anger

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Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.

Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”

Luke 6:20-26

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I have a friend, Ross. He is a great friend and one of the sweetest guys I know. Unfortunately, he roots for evil sports teams.

And I do mean evil. He cheered for Tom Brady’s Patriots and Buccaneers, Nick Saban’s Alabama football teams, probably the Yankees and Lakers, and most offensively to me and my North Carolina background, Coach K and the Duke Blue Devils. When he told me this in the early days of our friendship, all I could ask was, “How can you root for them?” He replied, “I like to cheer for greatness.” (Can you believe that? Disgusting.)

This is, of course, silly in the grand scheme of things, but it surely is something many of us have thought about our enemies and people who seem to like them: “How can you possibly root for them?”

Christians are in an even harder spot, because we’re also commanded to pray for our enemies. They might be personal enemies, family members, neighbors, very likely some politicians, and probably other people out there in the world, maybe whole groups. How are we supposed to pray for them?

This week and next week, I want to focus on that question. It’s one of Christ’s hardest commands, but I believe one of the most utterly important and heart-transforming. I also don't want to pretend it isn’t hard for me too. I know best that we don’t start praying for our enemies from a place where we’re already perfectly loving people. We can’t wait until we are feeling as magnanimous as Buddha hosting a dinner party overflowing with universal wisdom pouring out into the souls of our enemies and thus make them see the light. We’d wait forever. I’m also not suggesting that anybody forgive someone they’re not ready to forgive, or disavow your sense of clarity about what is right and wrong, good and evil—the contrary. But as the facts stand, we’re given this inconvenient commandment to pray for our enemies regardless of how we feel about them. How? Today, I don’t want to focus on the practical part of that “how,” but more on how we even bring ourselves to the point where we are able to pray for them at all.

To that end, I believe we start where our lectionary texts for today start (Jeremiah 17, Psalm 1, and Luke’s telling of the Beatitudes above). All of them are reminding us of the reign of God’s justice. If we want to have a prayer at praying for our enemies, I believe we have to be fully grounded and trusting in his justice. If we are having a hard time praying for our enemies, I think it’s because we’ve doubted or forgotten two things about God’s justice: one, God’s justice will prevail no matter what, and two, God can hold our anger with us better than we possibly can alone.

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First, we may have a hard time praying for our enemies if we neither trust that God’s justice will take care of the afflicted nor that those who do unrepentant harm are truly in soul danger. Maybe, on some level, we doubt or have forgotten this. The idea of praying for an enemy, then, may feel like you’re praying for someone to get away with evil, or that it means you have to brow-beat the wounded into forgiveness (a too-common ugly dynamic that compounds abuse in spiritual groups with abusive leaders).

But Scripture gives us example after example of the two broad aspects of God’s justice. These are not platitudes, but statements of promise from Scripture, even though these promises are often purely spiritual and invisible. Here’s just a few from our readings this week:

“Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream.”

Jeremiah 17:5-8

“Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers, but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper. The wicked are not so but are like chaff that the wind drives away.”

Psalm 1

And in Luke’s reading at the top, we hear about God’s “upside down” kingdom, where in the end, things are going to more than even out and be more than human fairness. God will bless those who are poor, hungry, weeping, hated, defamed on his account, while people who put their trust in riches, in popularity, in taking care only of themselves while others go hungry, theirs is woe; a literally “real as hell” woe. If these are our enemies, they are not to be feared, but pitied. Their mockery, their dominance, their shameless pursuit of the great glory of the mirror, it’s not just something to be endured, it is signs of a diseased soul that will meet its maker and will be told, “I never knew you.”¹ Their grand pseudo-wisdom is utter foolishness to the God who “chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are.”²

So how does really believing this help us pray for our enemies?

For one I think the more we can really trust that evil does not win in the end—the more we can trust that on the cross and through the cross, it’s all been taken care of and will be taken care of—the less we feel like taking care of that evil is all on our shoulders. Because it’s not. There are plenty of ways we might feel called to respond to evil, and quite often intervene in it, but we can do so even better when we remember that it’s not all counting on us, nor does God want it all to ride on us: “Do not take revenge, dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath.”³ With a deep enough trust in God’s justice, we might even see how our enemies need our prayer, because if they are knee-deep in mucking through evil, they are in far more trouble than we are.

This is the crazy, radical lens that was so unusual for its time back then and remains so unusual and counter to our human nature, instincts, and desires: Jesus tells us the wicked deserve our pity. There were a million religious ideas in his time, and nearly all of them said that the powerful had divine favor; if you were prosperous now, the gods loved you, and if you weren’t, you did something to offend the gods. The world still says this in many ways. But Jesus says this has it completely wrong. “The first shall be last. The last shall be first.”

How can you pray for your enemies? When you know they really are in last.

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This brings me to the second important part of this. I’m sure you’ve heard a variant on the phrase, “Control your anger, or it will control you.” In Christ, we actually go one step further—when we pray for our enemies, we don’t have to deny or control our anger, but hand it over to God’s control, for we know he will carry it much better than we can alone.

The Bible is of at least two minds about anger. On the one hand, it tells us in various ways not to hold onto it and avoid it when we can. On the other hand, there are many expressions of righteous anger all over Scripture, from Jesus to the apostles to the epistles to the Psalms and prophets and many other places in the Old Testament. We need neither pathologize anger nor idolize it. Anger for the right reasons can be a true gift from God, a dose of moral clarity in a world full of moral confusion, and an energizing force of good. But we all know how it can be utterly destructive to ourselves and those around us. It is a dangerous thing for us to wield by ourselves.

When we pray for our enemies, we are not shaming our anger at all. We are telling God, “I have this anger, Lord, and I want you to control it. Not me.” And how can we trust him enough to do that? Because we know he is utterly with us when we come up against evil.

Have you ever had somebody be angry with you on your behalf when you really needed it? It is one of the most special and important healing bonds we can have. For many of us, maybe we remember one time when a parent at least once stood up for us when we couldn’t, telling a school administrator or a bully what’s what. In that moment, you knew they had your back. If earthly parents will do this, how much more will your heavenly Father spiritually stand up for you?

I have not always been a good friend many times in my life. But when I look back and think on the moments I got friendship right, it was often being angry with and for a friend who needed it when the rest of the world didn’t care. And I know some of the best friendship people have ever offered for me was sharing that anger when I needed it too. It is so healing to know, feel, and trust that someone else sees the same evil that you see for what it is and is willing to name it for what it is.

How much more wonderful is a relationship with God who loves us, who perfectly sees evil for what it is, and also isn’t pretending that we are perfect either?

Ah, that’s another problem for us and our enemies: we sometimes have to imagine ourselves as be perfect to feel self-righteous in contrast to how bad they are. But we aren’t. We can’t trust that feeling, and sometimes we can’t fully trust our imperfect sense of justice. Sometimes our sense of justice is misplaced. But when we put it back in God’s hands, we can rest knowing the justice of God is perfect, and we can trust God to see where our anger at our enemy is right and where it misses the mark without having to bear the load of having our anger actually be perfectly right for God to love us and support us. Where our anger is truly righteous, we know God will be angry for us too. If our anger is more about pride, or ego, or something else, in time, God will show us in prayer, and he will never abandon us.

So how do we pray for our enemies? Not from a fake nice place, and not because we have to deny our anger. But because we know the Lord God is saying, “I’m with you. I see it too. Oh, I’m angry too. Oh, they’re laughing now…they’re really feeling themselves aren’t they? But that’s temporary. I know you’re hurting. That’s temporary, too.” (And he might also say, gently, “You have something to work on too.”)

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In next week’s Scripture readings, Jesus will tell us more about how and why to pray for our enemies and to even love them (a terribly inconvenient teaching for most of us). But if you’re looking for something practical today, sometimes literally all I can tell God is, “Lord, I want to pray for my enemies. Sorry, I can’t elaborate right now. But I know you want me to pray for them, and so here I am, praying for them.”

Yes, I believe that’s a perfectly good place to start.

Don’t limit yourself to your enemy prayer options. Sometimes, a prayer might be a prayer for a rebuke; if the Psalms can pray for that, we can pray for that. Sometimes, we might pray that his justice arrives sooner than we think; we can pray for that, too. We also don’t have to stop praying for the people our enemies might be hurting; it's not “pray for your enemies and don't do anything to intervene in their harm.” Jesus did both.

But just start praying for your enemies regularly and see what happens. You might be surprised how compassion and space slowly creep in where it didn’t seem possible. Not because you are getting soft on evil, but because you are letting God handle what we can’t alone. Not because you are losing sight of what’s important, but because you are gaining sight of what else is also important. Enemy prayer is not giving us compassion that ignores pursuing justice, but rather is fully trusting in God’s justice.

I believe the more we pray for our enemies, the more and more we can trust the fruits of our actions will be decreasingly the fruits of our imperfect sin-baked anger and will increasingly be nurtured by the Holy Spirit. The more we pray for our enemies, the less anger controls us and the less we try to have direct, angry control over our enemies. The more we pray for our enemies, the more we let Christ be our perfect Mediator (an old favorite Reformed word from my Presbyterian ancestors). Our Mediator between us and God and us and our neighbor is the man who taught us who was really blessed and who was really cursed, who died so that all of us might be saved from our favorite curses we can’t see so that we can accept his upside-down blessing. In fact, it’s impossible to pray for your enemies without Christ being your great Mediator; remember, you’re not praying to your enemies, you’re praying to God for them, meaning he is literally between you, mediating your relationship.

“How can you pray for them?” Because God’s taking care of all the scales. Evil gets its own putrid rewards, Jesus tells us, while through him, we receive better mercies than evil can ever dream of. “How can you pray for them?” Because God sees us in the pain of our anger, and he can hold it so much better than we can alone.

If Jesus Christ prayed for his enemies on his cross, we can pray for our enemies when we are too scared to take up our cross. As he was praying for his enemies, he was also spiritually intervening on our behalf. Jesus Christ took care of evil on the cross. He’s been with you the whole time. Trust him enough to do what he says and pray even for those you hate. You both need it. We all need it.

1. Matthew 7:23

2. 1 Corinthians 1:27-28

3. Romans 12:9