The Right To Hate

As we begin winding down 2023 and start looking forward to 2024—a Presidential election year in America—I think back.

Some years ago now, one of our girls shared a group chat she had participated in online. She had, in fact, begun the chat by expressing her feelings about the unkindness and hatred people were voicing in the wake of the projections for that year’s presidential election. One of the people in the chat shared part of her story and concluded by saying, “I have a right to hate.”

The question it stirs up in me, is do we actually have a right to hate if we are followers of Jesus as Lord? My understanding has always been that God hates sin, but He loves His creation—and especially human beings who He made in His image. It is precisely because He loves us so profoundly that He hates sin, which is eroding us from the inside out—soul, spirit, and body.

And it is because He SO loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son… And, perhaps, the most intense picture of that love is Jesus on the cross, interceding for the Father to forgive; even those who mocked, beat and helped crucify Him. He, who has every real right to hate the people who did this to Him, chooses instead to ask His Father to forgive them, realizing they don’t know what they are doing.

But Grace is still very foreign to us. It is only when we really connect on a heart and soul level with the grace we have received, and continue to receive, that Grace begins to become real enough for us to freely give what we have freely received. I think, quite often, at least in earthly matters we prefer the idea of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” It gives us some sense of justice and control, if I have the right to require/inflict the same or similar pain or loss on the person responsible for the pain or loss that was inflicted on me.

After all—somebody has to pay . . .

But Somebody already did.

-Sally Klein O'Connor

10/2/23