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Readings
- Jeremiah 15:10–21
- Psalm 25 (MT 26)
- Romans 12:9–21
- Matthew 16:21–28
Homily Transcript
Καιρὸς τοῦ φιλῆσαι καὶ καιρὸς τοῦ μισῆσαι· καιρὸς πολέμου καὶ καιρὸς εἰρήνης.
You will usually see this rendered into English as ‘There is a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.’, which is not inaccurate, but it is misleading for the reader who does not know the difference between English “time” and Greek “καιρός” (a term we have actually just imported directly into English). Greek certainly has a word that is truly the equivalent of our time, but it is not καιρός; it is χρόνος, from which we get such words as chronological and chronometer. Καιρός is something more than mere time. And so, permit me to provide a better English translation: ‘There exists a due season for (or to) love and a due season for (or to) hate; a due season for war and a due season for peace.’ I trust we are all familiar enough with English to recognize that “due season” is a set term that may mean anything from a moment up to an era, or even eternity; “due season” is simply our notion of καιρός, and it is, in fact, used to translate καιρός in some translations of Scripture:
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. — Galatians 6:9
(that is, indeed, καιρός there rendered “due season”).
Love and hatred are centrally important concepts in Scripture, and few things are more abused by modern pastors and ‘exegetes’. In the false conception of Christianity that so many advance or defend these days, we have no enemies and we are to love everyone and hate no one. What would these moderns say to Jesus Who called Peter “Satan” in today’s Gospel reading, or to Paul who instructs us in today’s Epistle reading to “abhor what is evil”? You cannot have love without hate (at least not in this world). If you do not hate that which threatens that which and those whom you love, then you do not truly love. The Lord God hates the devil, sin, and sinners. Would these ‘moderns’ accuse God Himself of error? And it is abject nonsense to contend that something that is sin when men do it is not sin simply because God is doing it instead; moral relativism corrupts the soul and the mind.
The truth is far different from what these men would like to get you to believe. In truth, you do have enemies and you are commanded to hate. One of the tricks employed most frequently by the enemy is conflation. If his minions can convince you that two unlike or distinct things are identical or that a term with multiple senses is univocal, then he wins a great victory without having to alter a single letter of the text; equivocation and eisegesis are powerful weapons indeed. Conflation is exactly what we have here with “enemy”. English, for better or worse, does not distinguish (at least not by using a different word) between different kinds of enemies. Latin has inimicus and hostis: I am to forgive inimici mei — my personal enemies. Greek has ἐχθρός and πολέμιος: I am to forgive ἐχθροί μου — my personal enemies. I cannot forgive the hostis, the πολέμιος — the public enemy —, for he is not my enemy in the personal sense. We are commanded to forgive our personal enemies, not public enemies. It takes only one example to both make this obvious and destroy all opposition to such clear truth: ‘Have you forgiven Satan?’ If the opponent says no, then he has agreed that some enemies must not be forgiven (and thereby cedes the entire argument); if your opponent says yes, then you ask him if he believes himself more merciful and loving than God (Who has most certainly not forgiven Satan). Our enemies’ positions are so very easily defeated, and yet many fall for their lies and their tricks.
Ultimately, these enemies are antinomians or even nomoclasts — haters, despisers, and destroyers of God’s perfect Law. If God commands you to hate, then who are you to tell Him that He is wrong? Do you know better than God? Are you more just than He? You may gain the approval of the world if you deny that Christians must hate, but perhaps our Gospel reading has something to say about the man who gains the world by compromising the things of God and a related thing about what that will surely cost him. When the Christ returns in His glory with the angels He will recompense all for their deeds in this life. What do you suppose He will do to those who lied about His Nature and attempted to lead His sheep astray? There exists an outer darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Our Epistle reading for today could not be more clear about this matter:
Let love be genuine: Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. — Romans 12:9
The Greek, of course, has no punctuation, but, in English, there should surely be a colon after the command “Let love be genuine”, for the balance of the verse is how we are to do this: We must not only “hold fast to what is good”, but we must also “abhor what is evil”. The Greek word there that is translated “abhor” does, much the same as the English, mean hate. This verse does not merely command you to hate; it also tells you that you cannot love if you do not hate. Our English translations rightly employ a semicolon here: These are two parts of, or even two ways to express, the same thought. I personally find it extremely unlikely that Paul was not thinking of Ecclesiastes when he wrote this part of his letter. Our ESV editors added a number of footnotes:
Seek out what is fine and honorable, and not what is base, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God who rules all, shall be with you, even in the manner you yourselves have declared: “We have hated the base things and loved the good.” Restore judgment in the gates, that the Lord, the God who rules all, may show pity to those who remain of Joseph. — Amos 5:15–16
<br>
I did not set before my eyes a thing beside the law;
those who do transgressions I hated.<br>
A crooked heart did not cling to me;
as the evil one was turning aside from me, I did not know him. — Psalm 100:3 [LXX]
<br>
You who love the Lord, hate evil.<br>
The Lord guards the souls of His pious ones;
He will draw them out from the hand of sinners. — Psalm 96:10 [LXX]
and these are good, but they should have also included Ecclesiastes 3:8:
There is a due season to love and a due season to hate;
there is a due season for war and a due season for peace.
If the Ecclesiast can say, in the Spirit, that there is a time for war and hatred, then Christians surely cannot assert in good conscience that we are to love, forgive, and be at peace with all men. What does Paul say in our Epistle reading?
If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. — Romans 12:18
If we were intended to live at peace with all men, then Paul would not have included a caveat; if it is necessary to include “if possible”, then there exists at least the possibility that it will prove impossible to live at peace with some men.
Tell me: Has it proven possible to live at peace with all men? Was peace possible with the Jews that persecuted the Early Church? Was peace possible with Sodom and Gomorrah? Was peace possible with the Mohammedans that invaded Europe and plagued the Medieval Church? Was peace possible for Abraham when barbarians kidnapped Lot? Is peace possible today with the wicked Jews, Muslims, and Hindus? God commanded His people to exterminate His enemies in Canaan. They failed and ceased to be His people. God does not change. Incidentally, when the Ancient Israelites failed to obey God and destroy the peoples He commanded them to destroy, He let their lands be overrun by foreigners, including those they had failed to destroy. Again: God does not change.
And so let us return to Ecclesiastes: There is a time for love and peace, and there is a time for hatred and war. You must ask yourself if you believe you are in the former or in the latter. When you look around, does it seem like we are in a time of love, unity, and peace or does it seem like we are in a time of hate, division, and war? Do you think that if we were to throw down our weapons, our enemies would choose to live with us in peace? Where peace is not possible, you must prepare for war.
To the Greek reader, καιρός did not simply mean ‘a good time’ to do something; rather, it implied something much greater: A kairotic moment was not merely the right time to act; it was a moment that demanded action, and to fail to act was seen as foolish, disastrous, or even wicked. A wise man is one who understands the times, one who neither forces an action out of season nor fails to seize the kairotic moment when it arrives. Speeches, campaigns, battles, and much else are governed by kairotic moments that are seized or missed. In the words of the Psalmist:
Every pious man will offer prayer to You [for this] in a season that is fitting; / yet in a flood of many waters they will not come near him. — Psalm 32:6
The prayers of the pious man shield him from disaster. In the words of Paul (and Isaiah):
“In a kairotic moment, I listened to you,
and in a day of salvation I have helped you.” Behold, today is the kairotic moment; behold, now is the day of salvation. — Isaiah 49:8; 2 Corinthians 6:2
God offers to men the free gift of salvation — behold, the kairotic moment! — and He does so according to His good time and plan — behold, the day of salvation! —, and some men seize this lifeline and are drawn into the Ark that is the Church and some men reject Christ’s outstretched hand and are swept away by the floodwaters. Death waits for no man, and men who ‘plan’ to confess on their deathbeds often find God has scheduled their departure earlier than they expected:
Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? — Luke 12:20
The Lord God is patient, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, but opportunities for mortals to repent are not infinite. Tempt not the Lord; miss not καιρός.
Christianity is a religion of peace: By, through, and for the sake of Christ, we have peace with God and adoption as sons; via the certainty of our Election, confirmed and sealed in the waters of Baptism, we are at peace with our own mortality and the inevitability of death; due to the promises of God, we are at peace in this life, even when matters seem bleak or hopeless. Christianity is a religion of war: From the Garden onward, God and His camp have been at war with Satan and his; every single day, every single Christian wages a personal war against the temptations of the flesh, the world, and the devil; and the children of God here in time, the Church Militant, wage war against the enemies of God. Our forefathers in the faith understood their duties to God and man when they drove the Saracen hordes from Europe and pursued the vile heathens back to their lands across the sea — lands that were once, and will be again, Christian; we find ourselves today in a worse position than they — these are not times for peace. Jehu understood his duties to God and man when he looked upon the wicked practices of Ahab and set about to purge the worship of Baal, Asherah, and other demons from his lands; we find ourselves in a worse position than he, for abortion surely outranks child sacrifice and fornication and pornography surely outrank temple prostitution — it is not a time for peace. Our ancestors from the Roman Empire onward, were surely acting in accord with their duties to both God and man when they suppressed, oppressed, persecuted, expelled, and certainly did not tolerate the wicked Jews; we find ourselves in a worse position today, for, while the Jews continue their wicked opposition to the Christ and their genocidal campaign against all mankind, our institutions (to include our government) are even more thoroughly captured and more deeply corrupt than those of nearly any past era — it is not a time for peace. If the words of the Lord God in Ecclesiastes are true, then there exists a time for hatred and war; if the words of the Lord God spoken by Paul in today’s Epistle reading are true, then we are commanded to hate that which is evil. It is my contention and my firm belief that it requires only the most minimal — even remedial — sort of spiritual discernment, or even merely natural human wisdom according to reason, to recognize that we now live in a time of war.
To live in a time of war and call it a time of peace is to betray both God and man, to participate in the wicked shout of ‘peace, peace’ where there is no peace. To find yourself in a kairotic moment that demands war and to not only fail to seize upon and pursue it but to go so far as to run in the opposite direction and seek after an impossible peace is to commit a sin worse than Jonah’s, to be a fool, a coward, and a traitor.
I want to make absolutely certain that I have been completely clear about the necessary exegesis of the passage from Ecclesiastes: God does not say there ‘may’ be a time for hatred and war; He says in no uncertain terms that there will be times for hatred and war; in fact, this is so certain that He employs the simple present to state it as bare fact: There is a time for hatred and there is a time for war. And of our passage from Romans: You cannot have a genuine love without both holding fast to what is good and hating what is evil. If the Christian life is one that involves love (and it most certainly is), then so, too, must it necessarily involve hatred.
It may help you, in dealing with these matters, to think of yourself as a soldier in God’s army, and so you are, for you are a member of the Church Militant; as a soldier, you are not at liberty to throw down your weapons and declare the enemy forgiven — it is not your place to do so. Your rightful Lord and Commander gets to declare who is a friend and who is a foe. Your duty is to follow orders and hold the line. Whatever calls you have been given and whatever tasks have been set before you, it is your duty to love your own as dearly as God loves us, to forgive your personal enemies because God has forgiven us, to oppose the enemies of God and His children with all you can muster, and to remain loyal with all that you are.
Amen.