There’s a meme going around that goes like this:

Jesus: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.”
Onlooker: “But Lord, what if they’re Muslim?”
Jesus: “…Ok, let me start again from the beginning.”

I’ve found myself having a love/hate relationship with this meme and its variations!

Loving your enemies is revolutionary. “If I have not love” and all that. It is so important. However that’s not what I see as the big issue for some of today’s Christians.  I don’t see the “Muslim” bit as the issue, either.

What I do see as the big issue is the disconnect some Christians have with love. It’s easy when your love is a love from afar, when it is not challenged, when you’re not in a warzone. When the term “Muslim” is occasionally heard on the news, we quickly rationalise that not all Muslims are like those extreme examples. Now we’ve mentally created a subgroup of Muslims that are easy to love and thus satisfy ourselves. Please note I’m not attacking Muslims, I’m highlighting our thought process.

For me, the meme would be far more powerful if the question was “But Jesus, what about if they’re causing problems at my church?” because this might start to convict us that this love thing is far harder to do on a personal level than a remote, generalised level.

There’s a danger in thinking we’re following Jesus’ teaching by creating a comfortable but distant entity that we can feel good about because our ‘love’ for them is demonstrated as not judging them, when we should realise there are people in our immediate social circles who, whilst much harder to love, are our front line when it comes to acting out Jesus’ directive.