I recently came across an old photograph of me with Marina Nemat.

It was taken at Church of the Transfiguration in Toronto, where I was serving as priest-in-charge in 2013. That same spring, the church hosted a public evening with Marina titled “Loving Your Enemies” on May 24, 2013. The event invited people to wrestle with one of Christ’s hardest commands, not as abstraction, but through the witness of someone who had suffered more than most Christians in Canada can imagine.

Marina Nemat is not a sentimental speaker. She was born in Tehran in 1965, arrested at sixteen after the Iranian Revolution, imprisoned in Evin, tortured, and brought close to execution. She later came to Canada, published Prisoner of Tehran in 2007, and became internationally known for telling the truth about political terror, survival, and memory.

That matters, because Christians are often very good at talking about forgiveness in the abstract. We are much less impressive when forgiveness has to pass through the body of someone who has actually been brutalized.

“Love your enemies” is one of the most quoted teachings of Jesus and one of the most abused. It gets used to rush the wounded. It gets used to protect institutions from embarrassment. It gets used to demand grace on behalf of people who have not told the truth, not repented, not repaired, and not stopped doing harm. It is one of the easiest verses in the Gospel to weaponize when you want to look holy without paying the price of honesty.

But that is not what Christ meant.

To love your enemies is not to become stupid. It is not to become available for further abuse. It is not to pretend evil was merely unfortunate misunderstanding. It is not to erase memory, flatten consequence, or baptize cowardice as reconciliation.

It is something harder than that.

It is the refusal to let hatred become your final author.

That is why Marina’s witness mattered then, and why it matters more to me now. Back in 2013, I was still standing inside institutional Christianity with more confidence than wisdom. I believed in the Church’s language more easily than I do now. I had not yet learned how often institutions prefer image to truth, process to courage, and self-protection to repentance. I had not yet seen as clearly how quickly Christian language can be deployed against those whose only real crime is that they remember.

Years later, that old event lands differently.

I do not look back on it as a nice parish program with a notable guest. I look back on it as a warning and a witness. Marina Nemat did not come offering cheap absolution. She came as someone who had passed through terror and still insisted that the human soul must not be handed over entirely to vengeance. That is not softness. That is moral defiance.

Some teachings of Jesus only become legible after wreckage.

“Love your enemies” is one of them.

Not because suffering makes the teaching easier. It does the opposite. It strips the verse of all its decorative uses and leaves it standing there, severe and exposed.

Which is where the truth usually is.