When Cain murdered his brother Abel, the Lord warned that whoever slew Cain would be avenged sevenfold. A few generations later, Cain’s great-great-great grandson Lamech lamented that if anyone killed him for his crimes he would be avenged seventy sevenfold. It is obvious that death and violence begets more death and violence, and always at an alarmingly exponential rate. We are tempted to believe that the quickest way to peace is over the corpses of our enemies, but killing an enemy is like cutting off the head of the mythical hydra. We’ll soon find that for every enemy we’ve killed, we’ve created seven, or seventy-seven, new ones. If attacking and killing our enemies only results in a net gain in the number of our enemies, then how can we ever win? How can we destroy our enemies if every act of violence only multiplies their numbers? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once shared a story of Abraham Lincoln that shows us the only effective and lasting way to destroy our enemies - “But through the power of love Lincoln transformed an enemy into a friend. It was this same attitude that made it possible for Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War when feeling was most bitter. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could do this, Lincoln said, ‘Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’ This is the power of redemptive love.” We can’t win by taking our enemy out of the fight, but we can win by taking the fight out of our enemies, and out of ourselves. If we can sincerely and earnestly put into practice our Savior’s commandment to love our enemies, then over time that love will grow from chilly skepticism to begrudging duty to casual tolerance to burgeoning interest to warm regard to mutual respect to deep reverence and devotion. As we make fast friends of our erstwhile enemies, we will come to see the world from their perspective and adopt their own causes and struggles as our own. We will be welcomed into places and communities into which we once believed even angels feared to tread. That exponential math that turned one slain enemy into seven will work in our favor as we find that one enemy befriended will soon lead to seven others. In the constant struggle of us vs. them, the “us” side will expand with each enemy that we befriend, and the “them” side will shrink smaller and smaller.
