Is it ok to feel happy when the one who hurt you gets hurt?

"Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles lest the Lord see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him." (Prov. 24:17-18)

When one who has hurt us gets hurt, foolish and scoffing voices cheer us on. “Hover over your fallen enemy! Fist-thump your chest and boot-heal theirs! Your sentences are saws. Go slow with the cutting!” Naïve wisdom shudders. “No, no, we have no enemies” it urges us. “All is well!”

The wise push back both ways. To the naïve, the wise say soberly, “Enemies are real. Sadly, we cannot simply wish or shush such pain away.” To the fool and scoffer, the wise say, “Should your enemy fall, this is no time to gloat.” Why?

Enemies are mirrors. In them we see ourselves—the noble human beings we are and the grotesque figure we too could become if led into temptation.

But, doesn’t it feel good when one who has hurt you, finally “gets what is coming to them?” Yes and this feeling is not wrong, we can lean into the joy of it, but not without wisdom. The celebration we feel when an enemy falls must become a wise joy, or else only more pain awaits us.

How Do You Know If the Joy You Feel is Wise?

To begin, when our enemy falls, we need more, not less, self-awareness. If your enemy falls, pay closer attention to your emotions.

Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles

“But I don’t understand” we might say. “How can I not feel happy when the one who has hurt me can’t anymore?” Perhaps, we find an answer when Jesus echoes this ancient proverb. After his students realized the power of Jesus’ gospel over our apex enemy, Jesus said:

Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." (Lk. 10:20)

We do rejoice! We are happy! But our happiness isn’t sourced with the news or sight of our enemy’s pain. Instead, we locate the reason for our happiness with the love of God. Remember, Jesus seems to say, it is a wonder of grace, a marvel of mercy, that your names are called beloved and written with the ink of peace into God’s family tree. Set your gaze there. Adore the One who has cherished your name and restored your hope. We get to meditate now on the beloved one that God said we were all along and to finally let go of the false narrative of our unlove used constantly by our enemy to slander us and tear us down.

The wise celebrate that we and those we love have been relieved and rescued from evil but this is a thrill of heart different in kind from one who vampire-tastes a pulsing glee within the neck of our enemies’ harm.

Perhaps Jesus is like a YMCA basketball coach saying to his young team, "remember who you are, regardless of what the other team chooses to do, you play your game, not theirs, ok?" Or perhaps Jesus invites us to touch again an ancient wonder and scar.

The wonder? That even an enemy is a human being made in God’s image.

The scar? The once-Eden of God’s world knew nothing of such sorrows. The fall of a creature, any human creature, is a tragic thing.

We, by our resistance to reveling or revenging raise the banner of our allegiance to a different wisdom, a different way of being in the world.

But Why Should It Matter that Our Happiness is Wise?

lest the Lord see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him.

A shocking problem emerges.

We victims are tempted to perpetrate the same harm we once suffered and protested.

The wise reminds us that God judged our enemy because our enemy treated sin against us as a good and our harm as a pleasure, and we suffered because of it. God, like the good Father in the prayer Jesus teaches, finally “delivered us from evil.”

But If we now believe that God should allow us to perpetrate the same wrongs our enemy once did, we are asking God to turn a blind eye to what we once begged him to see. So we also need, Jesus says, to pray that we are delivered from temptation. When we see the fall of another we can begin to believe that we are righteous because we were wronged.

The wise say otherwise and warn us not to confuse our being rescued from this one thing with our being righteous in all things.

Early Christians picked up and carried on this teaching.

if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. (Gal. 6:1)

The wise warn us that the same God who heard our cry and delivered us from evil, might do likewise to defend anyone that we choose to victimize. Like a child defended by her parent when her toy was taken by another. If the once crying child now uses her recovered toy to hit the child who took it, the parent will now defend the original child she scolded, and scold the second child she originally defended.

When Jesus speaks of love as a good that we offer wisely to God, our neighbors, even as ourselves, he says this wise love extends even to our enemy. Jesus fulfills in his teaching what a proverb like this one long foreshadowed.

As far as it depends upon us, we find our happiness, not in the fall of an enemy, but in the relieving rise of what is just, even if what is just applies to us too.

Instead of choosing the path of the enemy. We the once wounded, dance and sing, not over our enemy, but because justice has finally relieved us to remember again the grace we’ve all longed for, the once-Eden we were made to experience and the coming time when every tear shall finally be wiped away.