"Love your enemies? The Word of God in our midst? But we were at war! The moment the war was launched, we all became realists. The Word of God might apply elsewhere (or elsewhen) or to simpler times or to one-to-one conflict or to pacifists and religious (whoever these latter might be; for the most part they were mum as the others).

"Love your enemies — a strange command, when you think of it. It is like the text of a drama, written with a mysterious ink. When the play is staged, the text disappears. It is in a sense self-canceling. You say it aloud, act it out and are struck by the tremendous, curt implication. The enemy disappears!

" 'Love' and then 'enemies.' The two cannot coexist, they are like fire and ice in the hand. The fire melts the ice, or the ice extinguishes the fire. The fire wins out (at least in the Gospel text)! The verb 'love' transforms the noun 'enemies.' The enemy is reborn by the power of love. Astonishing. Now the enemy is a former enemy, and a present friend, brother, sister, lover even. Talk about rebirth!

"Love, you, the enemy, and lo, the enemy vanishes where he stood.

"Also, it is not only the opponent who undergoes a dazzling transformation, but myself as well, who against all expectation has learned love in place of hatred, who had once been stuck in the same plight as my enemy. Together we made a frozen mirror image, awful, redundant, implacable. I was the enemy of my enemy. A sound definition of hell.

"Break the mirror! Christ commends, and confers, a mutual rebirth. Now for the hard part. If, according to Christ, there can be no just war because enemies have been transformed by love, something else follows.

"No humans, not even those armed and at war against my country, can be regarded as legitimate targets. Christians may not kill, period. Christians may not be complicit in killing, period. May not hurl napalm at children. May not bury alive in the desert, the nameless soldiers. May not launch the smart bomb against women and children in the shelter.

"Are women and children the enemy? No sane person would declare so (But we are not all sane). Are the soldiers the enemy? The just war theory says so. But Christ denies it. He has granted the soldiers, too, a kind of deferment, an exemption from killing and being killed.

"We heard stories of former wars, stories that underscore the absurdity and pathos of bloodletting. On Christmas day during World War I a cease fire was declared. The exhausted soldiers, allied and German, issued from the trenches, exchanged cigarettes, chatted, traded photos of their families. A day later they squared off once more, one imagines with half a heart — back to the bloody business as usual. . . .

"And what of ourselves, Americans, Christians? We soldiers, civilians, church members, women, children, are called to be conscientious objectors against war. Against any war. Christian presidents are called too, and Christian generals — strange, bizarre, unlikely as it may seem.

"Christians are called to be objectors against all and any war, against 'just' war, invasive war, preemptive war, defensive war, conventional war (whose horrendous effects we have seen again and again).

"The above declaration, admirably simple and to the point, would of course, put many exaulted authorities out of work. So be it; better unemployed than so employed.

"Let us remind them, and ourselves, that we are called to other tasks than killing.

"The ethic of Jesus is set down in some detail and embarrassing clarity, in the fifth chapter of Matthew's Gospel. 'Blessed are you makers of peace." And immediately, since we are to know that such a title is not cheaply conferred or claimed: 'Blessed are those persecuted for the sake of righteousness.'

"The 'good works' that follow the ethic are indicated in the twenty-fifth chapter. Summoned to love the (former, transformed) enemy — and thereby transformed, reborn, ourselves — we are to undertake the works of justice and peace.

"There is another implication of what I call the 'just command' to love our enemies — that terms such as 'combatants' and 'noncombatants' no longer wash. The terms imply that some, because they took up arms, stood outside the love invoked by Christ. As though others, for being disarmed or unarmed, were thereby, and solely thereby, judged more valuable.

"So reasoning, we remain stuck in the pernicious language of the just war, implying that the unjust soldiers, enemies, tyrants, drug lords lie beyond the pale; that such lives can be wasted with impunity. The language is outmoded, passé, morally regressive. It will not jibe with the Gospel and its vision of the human; just, peaceable, compassionate.

"More, such language condemns us to a cycle of violence and guilt, in which we are whirled about, off kilter, shamed, celebrating crimes we should weep for. The guilt of the generals haunts us, the pale implacable face of the wartime president, the mass graves filled with the living and the newly dead. The guilt of those who launched the bestial slaughter, the guilt of those who know of it, who parade and rejoice. The guilt of those who have no objections to register.

The time is short. Reject the errant history, the pseudotradition. There can be no just war. There never was one."