What Kind of Hate Is This?

A couple years back, a reporter for a small newspaper where I live went with little or no proper preparation to cover the rioting and war and violence and hate in Somalia. She was captured and taken hostage. Her camera man and sound crew barely escaped. Held, repeatedly tortured and raped and mistreated in a multitude of ways for almost two years, this woman was eventually released after her parents and a wealthy friend of the family paid a huge ransom. Just recently she gave an interview in which she forgives her captors and has set up a scholarship fund that will pay for university education for 100 Somali women.

Sounds like a good ending to a horrific story - yes?

Well, for 85-90% of the people commenting on the story, this is anything but a good ending. The names that she is called is bewildering. The put-downs, the snark and vitriol - mostly because she is seen as a “fundamentalist evangelical do-gooder.” The people who hate Christians have turned on her like a pack of starving wolves devouring a wounded deer.

Her willingness to forgive her torturers was especially confusing to those who were hating on her. “Who the hell forgives someone who has raped you?” asked one commenter. “Just trying to win the favour of her God,” remarked another.

An atheist recently asked if I as a Christian, minded being laughed at. I said something like, “It’s slightly better than being hated.” The thing is, the kind of people that Jesus turns us into makes us perfect targets for mockery, ridicule and hatred. “If they hate you," said Jesus, "remember, they hated Me first.”

Frederick Buechner wrote:
“The love for equals is a human thing - of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.

The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing - the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.

The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing - to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love the of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.

And then there is the love for the enemy - love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts emotional or even physical pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer.

This is God’s love. It conquers the world.”
“The Magnificent Defeat”