The Right Enemy

Ephesians 6:10-20

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power
• our struggle is not with flesh and blood
• pray at every opportunity in the Spirit

Applying the Word to My Life:
John of Capistrano knew something about conflict long before anyone handed him a cross and sent him toward a battlefield. His father and brothers were killed in the violent fighting that plagued the Italian city-states, and John later admitted that he carried a fierce desire for revenge when he was young. Instead of becoming a soldier, though, he became a lawyer. He was good at it—good enough that before he was thirty he had become a judge and then governor of Perugia, with a reputation for being tough, honest, and unwilling to tolerate corruption.

Then the fighting found him anyway.

John was sent to negotiate peace during a dispute with a neighboring power. Rather than accepting him as a diplomat, the other side captured him and threw him into prison. The successful young lawyer and governor suddenly had no courtroom, no office, and very little control over what happened next. Somewhere inside that prison, John began taking a harder look at the life he had built. He eventually walked away from his career and entered the Franciscans.

That didn't make him less intense. If anything, John seems to have brought all of that intensity with him. He became a tireless preacher and reformer who could draw enormous crowds, survived on only a few hours of sleep, and had very little patience for opposition. Even Franciscan historians describe him as a man whose zeal sometimes came dangerously close to fanaticism.

That makes today's reading particularly interesting.

Paul tells us to put on the armor of God because we really are in a battle. But then he immediately makes an important distinction: “our struggle is not with flesh and blood.” The people standing in front of us aren't the ultimate enemy.

John spent his life learning that lesson in circumstances where it would have been easy to forget. Near the end of his life, after Constantinople had fallen and Ottoman forces threatened Hungary, this elderly, worn-out Franciscan was sent to preach throughout Europe. Eventually he joined John Hunyadi at Belgrade, where the preacher who had begun life as a lawyer found himself in the middle of an actual siege. He went into battle wearing his habit, carrying a crucifix and a banner with the Holy Name of Jesus. The city survived, but John died within months after becoming sick in the aftermath.

It would be easy to read his story and make the lesson simply, “Fight hard for what is right.” But Paul gives us something harder.

The person in front of us may be part of the struggle, but that doesn't make them the enemy.

That matters because most of our battles will never involve armies. They happen across dinner tables, in offices, on social media, in churches, and inside families. Someone opposes us, wounds us, attacks something we believe, or stands in the way of something we want, and before long we stop fighting the problem and start fighting the person.

Paul tells us to stand firm, speak truth, defend what is good—and then to pray. The armor of God isn't permission to despise the people on the other side. It is what allows us to remain faithful without becoming what we are fighting against.

Sometimes the first victory is simply remembering who the enemy is not.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll resist the temptation to turn someone I oppose into my enemy.

ABOUT ST. JOHN OF CAPISTRANO
Name: St. John of Capistrano (John Capistran)
Lived: June 24, 1386, Capestrano, Italy – October 23, 1456, Ilok, Croatia
Feast Day: October 23
Patron of: Judges; military chaplains
Title: Franciscan priest, preacher, and reformer
Read more: Franciscan Media · New Advent: St. John Capistran