Can you love your enemy?  In October of 1950, the Communist government of China, fresh from its leader Mao Zedong’s successful takeover of the Chinese mainland, invaded the nation of Tibet.  Brutal and efficient, the Chinese army spared no one who stood in their way.  Thousands of people lost their lives, thousands of monasteries were destroyed:  an entire way of life vanished forever.  Among the many families affected was that of a certain Tibetan monk who was forced to watch, amidst the carnage and upheaval, Chinese soldiers torture his mother to death.
     For years afterward, this monk, despite his sacred oath and calling to love each and every one he came across, hated and despised the Chinese.  He loathed even the thought of them.  In 1971, twenty-one years after his mother died, however, he forced himself to eat at a Chinese restaurant.  As he did, he met someone whose father had died in the same way as his mother, and who had managed to put the past behind him.  It was then that he realized how wrong he had been.  No longer could he hate the Chinese.  That was over.  His former tormentors were, he now saw, just like he, people and human beings with whom he lived on planet earth.  He began to love his enemy.
     One of the most remarkable passages in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is one in which Jesus, in describing for us his vision of a community whose people have committed themselves to live life differently—radically differently—than they had before, tells us that we are to love our enemies.  Hard as it is, difficult as it sounds, he says, we are to love those who hate and despise us.
     Why?  As Jesus well knew, inhumane and vicious though he or she may be, our enemy is a creation of a loving God.  Like us, our enemy is made in the image of the creator of the universe.  Our enemy is valuable, our enemy is important, our enemy has eternal value.  Our enemy has meaning.
     Does God like what our enemy does to us?  Of course not.  But he wants us to love our enemy anyway--because he made him (or her).
     On the first Christmas Eve of World War I, a number of German and British soldiers, after some preliminary bantering, emerged from their trenches to celebrate Christmas together.  For a few wonderful hours, these soldiers, long commanded to hate the other, recognized who, beyond all else, they really were:  fellow human beings living together on a planet blessed and sustained by God.  Although their countries had declared war on each other, these soldiers, for one remarkable night, did not.  They loved their enemy.
     Hating is easy, but loving is hard.  Hating, however, is for this life only; it’s as evanescent as a candy bar.  Love, on the other hand, lasts.  Love is for eternity.
     We'll never regret love.