Can I Pray Against My Enemies?
What do you pray when you see bad (and good) people doing bad things.
Can you pray against your enemies? It depends.
It depends on what you mean by “enemy,” what you pray against them, and what you’re willing to risk if you pray such prayers.
If we ask how the Prayer Book of Jesus defines the enemies of God, the answer is pretty clear.
As the Psalter sees it, the duplicitous are enemies. The brutish are enemies. Those who take the name of the Lord in vain are enemies. Enemies are those who despoil God’s good earth and who take advantage of the vulnerable. The bloodthirsty, the remorseless, the merciless, the rapacious—these too are enemies.
But it’s important that we be clear about the purpose of such enemy prayers.
Praying against one’s enemies is most emphatically not a license to do violence to others. Nor is it about indulging our revenge fantasies, nor a matter of performative venting.
Praying against one’s enemies is chiefly a way to get us to talk to God, which is often the last thing we want to do when we’re angry at the world’s injustices and the arrogant and unrepentant behavior of human beings, some of whom may belong to your own ecclesial tribe.
Praying against one’s enemies is about healing, not self-gratification.
Praying against one’s enemies is a matter of honestly naming before God our rage and our feelings of helplessness in order to entrust it all to God.
Can I pray against my enemies? Yes, if you pray this way:
“Act now, O Lord!”
“Defend the weak!”
“Rescue the needy!”
“Vindicate the innocent!”
You might also pray:
“Fight against the lawyers who twist the evidence, the politicians who manipulate the weak, the bullies who hide behind their cowardice, the abusive, and all who pervert your good purposes. Frustrate their efforts and stifle their purposes.”
Can I pray against my enemies? Yes, but only if you’re also willing to become an instrument of God’s justice and to do the hard, sweaty, often-thankless work of being an agent of his peaceable kingdom.
Can I pray against my enemies? Yes, but only if you’re also willing to pray these words:
“Search me and see if there be any enemy-like ways in me.”
Station XIII: “The Body of Jesus is Taken Down from the Cross,” Tim High, painter
When we look at the public ministry of Jesus, as I explain in my book, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life, we see that Jesus never denies the reality of enemies. Enemies are real and they come in all forms: human, societal, natural, demonic. Nor does Jesus tell his disciples to avoid using enemy talk. For Jesus, enemy talk rightly describes the world as it is.
In the first three Gospels he quotes Psalm 110:1 without feeling any need to correct the psalmist: “The Lord says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” Enemies indeed.
How does this relate to our prayer life? At the very least it means that we cannot pray for enemies in the abstract. For the psalmist, there are only concrete enemies—those that do enemy-like things.
For Jesus, likewise, there is no generic enemy. There are only particular enemies that behave in God-denying, image-of-God-abusing ways. At times they are religious leaders, at other time they are Roman rulers, or even his closest friends. Always this includes Satan.
As the Psalter sees it, we pray the psalms of enmity to name the corrosive nature of life-destroying activities. The psalms refuse to minimize or ignore such things. They refuse to let evil have the last word in history, and that refusal requires honest expression: “Make it right, oh Lord!” “Don’t let them trample on me!” “Be my refuge!”
We pray against our enemies, in the end, with the single goal that we relinquish all our desires into the sovereign hands of God.
To pray the psalms of enemies, then, is to pray prayers of relinquishment, not because we’ve been excused from playing an active role but because vengeance is ultimately the Lord’s alone. In the words of Romans 12:19 (NLT): “Dear friends, never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say, “I will take revenge; I will pay them back,” says the Lord."
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
“O Lord, you who see the hearts of all with perfect clarity, I confess this day my irritation with those who bully their way with words, who think that none see what they do in the shadows and who traffic in violence. Strengthen my weary body, I pray, minister to my angry spirit, and comfort my fearful heart, so that I might not lose hope in doing the right thing in the name of justice. I pray this in the name of the God who is Holy and Just. Amen.” — Prayers for the Pilgrimage
