Re-humanizing Our Enemies

We need to re-humanize our enemies if we are going to serve them.

Consider Jonah’s stated reason for fleeing away from Nineveh. God had called Jonah to preach to the people of that city: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me” (Jonah 1:2). Yet Jonah refused because he knew that God was “a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in loving-kindness, one who relents from doing harm" (Jonah 4:2). He sensed from the beginning that the Lord’s intent in sending him was to bring the people of Nineveh to repentance and God’s mercy was not at all what Jonah wanted for the Ninevites. He wished for their destruction, not their preservation. Why would Jonah possess such a hard heart toward the Ninevites? Because they had harried and provoked Jonah’s people and were their sworn enemies. His hatred of the Ninevites allowed him to dehumanize them, which, in turn, caused him to not balk at the thought of their demise.

How do we know that he had dehumanized them? In the closing verses of the book, Jonah exhibits more compassion for a plant than he does for the inhabitants of Nineveh. God calls him on this and in so doing re-humanizes the Ninevites: “ . . . the Lord said, ‘You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?’” (Jonah 4:10,11). With this provocative question, the Lord indicates that even these who did not recognize Yahweh as the one, true, living God, and were the agents of much harm and destruction in the life of God’s people, were deserving of more respect and compassion than Jonah had a mind to give.

This rebuke of God runs very close to the heart attitude that Jesus demands of us as regards our enemies: “. . . I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:44,45). We need to remember that Jesus embodied his prayer when he "made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:7,8). Jesus looked upon his enemies with compassion and served them, even to the point of death, in order that his enemies might receive of the grace, mercy, and abundant loving-kindness of God. In this taking on of our existence we could say that Jesus re-humanized us, we who had fallen so far from the humanness that was ours in Eden.

The truth is, we all have Ninevites upon whom we would love to see the righteous wrath of God poured out. If we are going to be faithful to the Lord’s call, however, we must learn the lesson that the he sought to teach Jonah: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” If we will pray for our enemies in this manner we will better resist our tendency to dehumanize them making it more difficult for us to feel justified in our hatred them.