Heart Transformation for Love, Part Nine – Love Your Competitor:  Mt.5:43 – 48

 

^5:43 You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. ⁴⁶ For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷ If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸ Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

 

         This is what one Harvard student anonymously wrote in the school newspaper about considering suicide:1

 

One day, I decided to talk to someone. Not as in talking to a professional, I had tried that already. I mean, I had an actual conversation with another student at work. Instead of joking about lack of sleep and 20-page papers, I opened up. For the first time, I discussed what was really going wrong in my life. I told her about what had happened, the constant physical pressure that I felt on every inch of my body, the apathy with which I now looked at every aspect of my life. I told her I wanted to die.

In turn, she opened up to me.

Here was someone with whom I sat in an office every single week yet knew very little about. Who else might be feeling what I was feeling? Who else might feel like they are the only one? I started talking to more people.  I started to ask questions and I stopped accepting “psetclubactivitypaperNOSLEEP” as a response. The things I learned both allowed me to share what I was going through and helped me to realize that what I was experiencing did not warrant feelings of shame. By the time finals period came, my nights didn’t seem so daunting.

 

Do we have ‘enemies’ today?  Some of us would say, ‘No.’ But we do have ‘competitors.’  Yet I wonder if ‘the competitor’ for 21^st century Westerners is almost as serious as ‘the enemy’ was for 1^st century Jews.  We compete in class, which are often graded on a curve, so someone has to fail in order for someone else to do well.  We compete for spots on the team, on the best group project, or other resume-building honors:  a leadership spot, a summer internship, the highest award.  We compete for scholarships, like thirsty animals drinking from a small pond.  We also compete in other subtle ways:  for the attention of that guy or that girl, for a spot among friends in that dorm living group, for ego space to protect our self-image when we’re around other people, and so on.  In the adult world, the focus narrows as the stakes just get higher, because money and power are on the line.

So we wind up praying that God would give us scarce commodities like good grades, internships, jobs, and a person to date.  But God wants to give us something that is unlimited in supply:  opportunities to love other people as friends.  That is, after all, what the Great Commandment says:  Love the Lord your God and then love others as yourself (Mt.22:35 – 40).  But our desire to compete draws our focus away from God’s heart.  For we cultivate contempt for our competitors just as easily as people once did for their enemies.  And, practically speaking, we spend so much time competing for scarce things that we spend little time, by comparison, actually loving people.  As someone once told me, the biggest enemy of kindness is busyness. 

In light of this, Jesus’ commands can still only be taken as radical.  He establishes a radical paradigm for relationships.  The concrete verbs are in this passage are:  to love (v.43, 44, 46), pray for (v.44), and greet (v.47) them.  He calls us to love, pray for, and greet those who threaten your well being:  our competitors, detractors, and adversaries.  He calls us to welcome them into our lives, to make space for them, to initiate with them.

Love your competitor as yourself, says Jesus.  Don’t cultivate contempt and apathy for others.  How do you sense Jesus’ Spirit leading you to love someone who competes for your time and energy?