Jesus Calls Us to Perfect, All-Inclusive Love

I often go on walks around our organization’s property that sits up against the US-Mexico border fence. I’ll stop and sit for a while, or place a few more stones outlining the path of an emerging labyrinth, reflecting on the layers of history held by this land: indigenous pathways, Spanish colonization, Apache resistance, Mexican independence, U.S. expansion, enslaved African Americans, Buffalo soldiers, Chinese laborers who laid railroad tracks nearby and were then excluded. 

So many stories. So many stories. Many marked by pain and injustice. It can feel overwhelming to imagine how much pain, and how much potential for hatred, has been carried in one place. I find myself asking, and we as a community find ourselves asking: What could this place become? What does it actually mean, here, to love our neighbors? To love our enemies? How do we go about seeking to develop a Borderland Center for Peace and Transformation on this sacred site?

Jesus’ words take on a different weight in this context. God “makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good, and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous.” In a place where we all live in close proximity, where our lives, histories, and futures are intertwined, this kind of love points toward something deeper than mere coexistence. It points toward the common good. It challenges me to consider whether I’m willing to seek flourishing not just for those I naturally align with, but for everyone, even those I struggle to understand or agree with.

We’ve been thinking a lot about what collective flourishing looks like in our context. And we know that it doesn’t mean avoiding what’s painful, but it means looking it squarely in the eye. Naming the harm, the injustice, the fear. Acknowledging it. Crying out in lament for all that is wrong. But instead of responding with hatred or vengeance, it invites us to offer something different. Loving an enemy, in this sense, isn’t weak or naive, it’s a courageous interruption of the cycle of fear, pain, violence and trauma that has had a grip on humanity. It opens up the possibility of a new path, one that could lead toward healing for us, for our “enemy,” and for the community we share.

We know that we are not living this out as consistently as we would like. But these are some of the questions we carry, both personally and alongside others. In a world shaped by fear and polarization, what does it look like to pursue a different way? A way that Jesus names, and that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. embodied, a way of love that refuses to mirror hate. It seems to me that it usually starts small: one step, one prayer, one choice at a time, trusting that even a small act of love might open possibilities for something far bigger than we can see.