Excerpt from Lancelot Schaubert’s, Least of these Least, published 2023. Used by permission.
The gospel would be easier if it existed just for my buddies, but I’m not that kind of Christian. In fact, I don’t think that idea equates with Christianity at all. I don’t fit in with most Christians because I believe in enemy love in my heart of hearts. I really and truly believe it and that’s why I’m a Christian. That’s why I consistently try to reach the people who are some of the hardest to reach in the world. By numeric metrics, Tara and I produce little fruit. By forgiveness metrics, however, I couldn’t be prouder of the folks we have had the privilege of serving. But also: I’m the worst kind of hypocrite and therefore practice enemy love less than many who disbelieve in it. I do not do what I want to do. What I feel convicted to do.
To do what God did for us.
A friend recently bragged about how he was actively cutting virtually everyone out of his life who wasn’t a close friend or someone he was reaching out to outside the church. He’s a pastor. Bragged about it. A Christian pastor. I know for him, he’s thinking about boundaries and his “true” friends and likely comparing it to his idea of me where he thinks I want to be liked by everyone. I did at one point, but violent personal attacks manifested in public one star book reviews (or email threats riddled with f-words) can cure that desire just as quickly as your home church’s refusal to put your face on their wall of ministers. Both of which I’ve experienced. The truth is deeper: I don’t see Jesus cutting people out of his life. Just the opposite. I see him saying I will drag all men to the Father, some of them kicking and screaming I suppose until the day they finally yield and bow with every other knee and turn and see what they truly protested all these years. I see him in the text in John’s Gospel — who said in this way, not the cross, Jesus showed the fullest extent of his love — he washes the feet not only of all the friends he knew would soon abandon him. He washed the feet of the man Judas whom he knew would sell him out to the man, to the state, to the religious powerful mob for about a month and a half of unemployment checks.
Jesus didn’t cut him out. Rather he washed the feet of the least of these twelve disciples. Washed Judas’s feet to show the full extent of his love.
I understand boundaries have to be instated sometimes, I’m certainly getting better at it, but boundaries imply a border and a border implies the place where lands meet. Boundaries require presence and consequences for two people to meet. Solitary confinement or self-exile seldom imply boundaries. Rather, they imply a refusal to set boundaries. If the boundary is that I avoid you or cast you out of my presence for all time, it’s not really a boundary, is it? It’s just cowardice. There’s a difference between the difference of persons — such as the intimacy of the Trinity where they defer, in unity, to one another: I will drag all men to the Father, the Spirit conceives Jesus, the Father sends his son — and the idea of the sea. Revelation says the day will come where there is no more sea: peoples and people will no longer be divided by anything other than the white stone with the unique, true name of their personhood. You will be united to everyone, you might as well start reconciling now and separating the wheat from the chaff in your own soul. Even that person you hate right now? Their true self will emerge one day and the chaff of their person will burn away, says 1 Corinthians 3. If Jesus says love your enemy and the person you hate the most is yourself, get to work.
Jordan Peterson and almost every cultural voice like him, liberal and conservative, does not help here. They say “love your enemies” means learn from them, take their tips, beat them in the long run. Use their strategy to defeat them on social media. That’s literally the opposite of what Jesus says and means: when he says love, he means love. He means forgiveness. And you can see it by the way Jesus treats his enemy: you. While you were Jesus’ foe, he died for you. It’s cowardice to avoid or merely learn from our opponents.
What’s harder is the long, slow slog of reconciliation. That takes patience. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t cut someone out of your life for a year or two and then revisit. I did with my father and we reconciled before he died: he became a good man. Not only because of me, but because of several. It’s never permanent because 1 Corinthians 3 among other places teaches us that we will have to deal with the healing, purging, and reconciliation of our relationships anyways when Jesus returns. We’re stuck with each other — all of each other — forever. You’ve never met a mere mortal. Never once. You have to figure it out eventually. You can’t hide your bitterness and stinginess and withholding of honor and cynicism forever.
We might as well get busy on the hard work of forgiving our enemies now. Sooner begun is sooner done, as Kvothe’s father said. And that’s a kid that could use some reconciliation.
Along those lines, Tara’s granny passed during COVID and I wrote a threnody for her that The Author’s Journal of Imaginative Literature bought. There’s a stanza that goes:
Now she knows the Hence and Hither
From Whom all has gone;
Sparrows fall, lilies wither,
Yonder known by Yon;
All the Want behind her wants,
Longing known above;
Knows if love be want to wander
wandering to Love.
Be want to wander to love, friend.
Keep wandering down the path of love and reconciliation.
