(Judas) came up to Jesus and said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” and kissed him. Jesus said to him, “Friend, do what you are here to do.” Then they came and laid hands on Jesus and arrested him. Matthew 26v49-50

One day Ernest Hemingway was having lunch with friends, and they were talking about the importance of writing with brevity.

Hemingway bet everyone at the table ten dollars each that he could craft an entire story in six words.

After the pot was assembled, Hemingway took a napkin and wrote down the following six words:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Everyone paid up without saying a word.

Saint Matthew does a pretty good job of coming up with his own version of Hemmingway’s barroom story.

Then all the disciples deserted him and fled. (Matthew 26v56)

In this story of betrayal, the disciples desert Jesus. When Jesus called his disciples to follow him towards the beginning of the book of Matthew, these same men “deserted” their vocations, homes, families, and friends to apprentice with Jesus.

Once they left everything for Jesus. Now, they leave Jesus so they can hang on to everything. Everybody in this story is either an enemy, a betrayer, or a disappointment.

Everybody.

And Jesus walks straight into a sacrificial death for all of them.

When Jesus preached his most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, these same disciples were sitting on that grassy hillside on the north shores of the Sea of Galilee in Matthew 5 and heard,

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.  (Matthew 5v43-45)

You don’t defeat enemies, Jesus says, you love enemies. That’s what Kingdom people do.

That’s what Jesus said in a sermon and that’s what Jesus does in this dark garden in front of a mob of men with torches, clubs, and disappointing disciples.

In this election year, with our unprecedented polarization, it is easy for evangelical Christians to say, “That way is naïve and impossible to live in the real world. If we don’t win this November, we will lose the America I love. We have to fight. We have to win at all costs!”

Bertrand Russell who was a 20th-century atheist and philosopher said, “The Christian principle, Love your enemies is good. There is nothing to be said against it except that it is too difficult for most of us to practice sincerely.” 

He’s right.

You and I, on our own, can’t work up enough moral sweat to live this way. And that is why we have to receive what Jesus does for us into the center of our being.

When Lynette and I were in Israel in 2018, we stood in this garden and one of the things that became clear to me as I stood there facing Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is that Jesus would have been able to see and hear this mob coming for about an hour. He would have had all kinds of time to make his escape if he wanted to.

That isn’t what Jesus did. No fight or flight with Jesus. He watched the people who are coming to kill him and welcomed them.

If evangelicals are ever going to regain the moral authority that we have lost through scandals, political atrocities, and moral relativism, I believe it will happen when the one who welcomed his enemies in a dark garden occupies a deeper place in our soul than our enemies.

If not, we will end up behaving like the world and voting for people who legislate policies and values that veer away from normative and historic Christian values or a candidate who’s behavor is a violent violation of normative and historic Christian values.

Either way, our country deserves a better version of ourselves than what we’ve shown in recent years. If not our country, then the one who loved enemies, betrayers, and deserters.

It’s time to write a different story.