Editorial August 1, 1959 Issue

THE END OF ENMITY

Helen Wood Bauman

Christ Jesus was designating the power of Christliness over evil when he said to the triumphant seventy who had returned from a healing mission on which he had sent them (Luke 10:19), "Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." The Master proved this power in his own life when he overcame death and the grave which the enemy of good would have inflicted upon him.

His intimate knowledge of God as Love made it possible for Jesus to prove that "the enemy" is simply enmity, the opposite of Love. And he dealt with enmity impersonally, that is, as a false sense, in which there is no truth. Teaching this great lesson of the impersonality of enmity on the night before his crucifixion, the Master said to his disciples (John 15:18), "If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you." Note that he said that it was "the world" that hated, and he referred his followers to the ancient prophecy, "They hated me without a cause."

Enmity hates because it is enmity, not because it has a reason for hating; it is the opposite of good and would aim its shafts of iniquity wherever good is active. But the action of Love, God, expressed in tender ways of mercy and justice and goodness, overcomes the supposed action of evil. The Christ is active good, the evidence of divine Love; it is Love's sinless expression. And enmity is everything that denies the Christ.

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