Jesus Christ says: “Love your enemies” (Mt 5:44, Luke 6:27, Lk 6:35).
It’s winter. There’s a blizzard outside. You hear a knock at the door. You peek through the curtains and—of all people—your enemy is standing outside.
You open the door just a crack. ”What do you want?” He tells you that he is homeless and unemployed. He and his wife are shivering. “Can we stay with you?”
Would you welcome your enemy and his wife into your home and let them spend the night?
But what if this same man had essentially turned your country into an open-air prison and had ordered the border guards to shoot anyone trying to escape?
And what if he had once personally denied your daughter access to secondary education because you’re a Christian?
And what if he were the nemesis of your entire community, and taking him in would rile up all your neighbors, indeed the whole town, against you?
Last month Pr. Peter Weber, the pastor of the SELK congregations in Jabel and Schwerin (both located in what used to be East Germany) invited me to preach and teach at their fall weekend retreat.
During a coffee break, he asked me whether I recalled the story of the Protestant pastor who had taken in Erich Honecker, who had been the former leader of the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until 1989, after Honecker had found himself “unemployed” and even homeless, only weeks after the Berlin Wall came down.
I was living in Germany during that period and did, in fact, remember that remarkable event.
“Well, see that lady over there?”, he asked. “She’s a member of our congregation. And the pastor back then, Pr. Uwe Holmer…that was her Dad.”
Wow… she must have been a teenager at the time, I thought. She was the girl whom the Communist strongman had once denied secondary education because they were Christians. And for ten weeks she had to live with that ogre under one roof?
What a tough but also very Christian decision her father made.
How would you act in a pickle like this?
Would you listen to the mob, or would you love your enemy and take them in, as Jesus commanded us to do—not once but even three times?
[Image: Pastor Holmer with Erich Honecker, the man wearing the hat].
