Loving Your Enemies
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Matthew 5:43-48 is one of the hardest passages in the bible. People usually know two things about Jesus—that he said not to judge, and that he loved people! This is the “he loved people” bit.
The passage
First, we have Jesus’ statement about a common idea floating around in culture at the time: “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy’” (Mt 5:43).
This is kinda right and kinda wrong. Yes, the bible does speak of loving your neighbor (Lev 19:17-18). And yes—if you squint just the right way you can twist it to support hating your enemies, too. The Psalms have some hard sayings like this: “Do I not hate those who hate You, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies” (Ps 139:21-22).
There is a right way and a wrong way to understand these harsh psalms—but more on that later. For now, it’s enough to know that God has never wanted us to hate our enemies. But this is where popular piety was in Jesus’ day = love your neighbor, and feel free to hate your enemies if necessary.
This is wrong. Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has combatted a lawyerly way of reading the bible. This is an approach that always wants to minimize personal responsibility and find loopholes that make compliance easier. It’s a rules-based approach to a relationship with God. It’s the same thing the lawyer tried to pull with Jesus that prompted the parable of the Good Samaritan.
As he does throughout this sermon, Jesus continues his “you have heard … but I say to you” pattern. How does he correct this misreading of scripture? He says: “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you …” (Mt 5:44).
This means what it says. There is no hidden meaning in the original Greek that can give you something easier to swallow. We’ll come back to this in a bit. For now, let’s think about why Jesus gives this command. What’s the purpose of this almost impossible task? Jesus tells us: “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven …” (Mt 5:45a).
What is Jesus saying?
He’s saying that if you don’t love your enemies, you’re not one of God’s children. If you don’t pray for your enemies, you’re also not one of his children.
Why does Jesus say this? “… for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Mt 5:45b). Jesus is saying that God has a common love (or common grace) for everyone—not just his adopted children. So, if we claim to be Christians, we must be the same way. We must have an authentic, baseline love for everyone, not just our covenant brothers and sisters in the faith.
Why is this important?
Jesus explains: “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?” (Mt 5:46-47).
Being kind and loving to people who are already like you doesn’t make you a Christian. There are plenty of non-Christians who do that all the time. Nice people. Kind people. Caring people. That isn’t counter-cultural. It isn’t revolutionary. So Jesus says this ain’t enough. Being a Jesus person means more than that. A lot more.
But this is the cultural attitude Jesus is up against. When a lawyer asked Jesus what he had to do to gain eternal life, Jesus recited the two commandments which summed up a believer’s whole duty to God—love for God and your neighbor. The lawyer agreed, then immediately tried to minimize the command to make his target smaller: “But wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (Lk 10:29).
Jesus corrected this legalistic, lawyerly way of understanding scripture with his famous parable of the Good Samaritan. He said that your “neighbor” was anyone who was in distress—not just your covenant brother and sister.
So, Jesus sums it all up: “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). He doesn’t mean “perfect” in the sense of “without fault” (e.g., “a flawless diamond”). Nobody is without fault! Instead, Jesus means “perfect” in the sense of “meeting the highest standard” (e.g., “my birthday was just perfect!”). The standard at issue here is this baseline, common love for everyone. One British translation does a good job by translating Matthew 5:48 like this: “Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete” (NEB).
Does Jesus contradict Scripture?
There are several Psalms that show us raw, honest, unfiltered emotion. They ask why. They ask if God cares. They demand justice for evil. They complain about harm, injury, and heartache. They’re “real.” Read Psalm 109 and see for yourself. This all seems to contradict what Jesus says in our passage. Has something changed?
The best answer is that psalms like these teach us that we can be honest and open with God when we’re hurting. We don’t have to pretend we understand. We don’t need to pretend we immediately accept everything. We can ask. We can plead. We can beg for justice. We can want evildoers to be punished. These psalmists almost never beg for the opportunity for personal retribution. Instead, they ask God for justice (see Rev 6:10).
There is a very small, but important, difference between (a) praying for God’s vengeance upon your enemies, and (b) hating them. Jesus is saying we must do more than just pray for justice. We must love our enemies, too.
What does it look like to love and pray for your enemies?
Here is where we need to set aside easy and cheap answers.
- Some people say to love your enemies means giving them the gospel. Yes, but that’s a very safe answer. It’s Christianese. We can do better than that.
- Others say that Jesus is really talking about “enemies” who persecute the church, so we ought to pray for our brothers and sisters who die for their faith around the world. Yes, but that’s too abstract and easy. It’s a cheap answer that doesn’t ask anything from you because you don’t know the people half a world away. This is correct, but it’s not good enough.
- Still other Christians opt for half-measures and try to be kind to everyone, but that’s perhaps the cheapest cop-out of them all. Love is not kindness or a “bless your heart” facade. Jesus is demanding a whole lot more.
“Love” means a deep affection. It’s much, much more than being polite to someone. Jesus is speaking about our attitudes. He tells us to care about and have deep affection for the people who hurt us, who do us wrong. We only wrestle with what Jesus is saying when we apply his words here to the people in our life who are hurting us. Anything else is an evasion.
Jesus says to love and pray for the people who hurt you. As he was crucified, the bible tells us: “Jesus was saying, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’” (Lk 23:34). As Stephen was being stoned to death he called out: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60).
Set aside the cheap and easy examples. This isn’t about praying for the person who cuts you off in traffic. This is about the people who actually hurt you, harm you, and are cruel to you.
- We can each think of these people.
- We can hold them in our mind’s eye.
- We can see them right now.
- We remember what they did.
- What they’re still doing.
- How they hurt us.
- How they betrayed us.
- The ramifications of it all.
We remember it, and a sour scowl comes on our face. We shake our heads to banish them from our thoughts. Jesus says these are the people we must love and pray for.
Will we pray for them? Not a gloating sort of prayer (“Lord, I pray for Steve because he’s a no-good son of a you-know-what who needs judgment!”), but a prayer for the person’s salvation and well-bring. For us to not hate. For us to be willing to forgive.
Why does Jesus want us to do this?
So he can change you from the inside out. So people know we’re different. We sometimes forget why we’re here and disconnect Jesus’ commands from the larger picture.
- The Christian story is about God rescuing a family, through King Jesus, to love him and be with him forever. This is the sum of Genesis 1 to Revelation 22.
- Our job is to be a living part of a local church, which is sort of a forward operating base in hostile territory from which we sally forth to convince outsiders to join the Jesus family.
- The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus telling us how to be countercultural—what it means to be Jesus people.
If there is no Jesus counterculture, then there is no Jesus culture at all. If that’s true, then what are we calling people to join?
- Are we here to push truth, justice, and the American way? You don’t need the church for that. Just see the new Superman movie.
- Is it our primary job to love immigrants, help poor people, and foster so-called “inclusion” in society? You don’t need the church for that—just go join an advocacy group.
- Do you want to make a difference in your community? Run for city council.
It isn’t the church’s main job to do any of these things. It is the church’s job to call people to defect from Babylon and join the Jesus family, and that means being part of a Jesus counterculture which trumpets and lives out Jesus values, Jesus attitudes, and Jesus’ message.
If we claim to be Christians, then we must commit to the Jesus counterculture so his message of love and forgiveness has some teeth to it! One of the soldiers for whom Jesus prayed believed in him just after Jesus died! “When the centurion, who was standing right in front of Him, saw the way He breathed His last, he said, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God!’” (Mk 15:39).
The attitude behind everything Jesus says is in our passage: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44). If we claim to be God’s children, we must try to make this our attitude, too. It isn’t easy or pleasant. But it is our duty to try.
Tyler Robbins 2016 v2
Tyler Robbins is a bi-vocational pastor at Sleater Kinney Road Baptist Church, in Olympia WA. He also works in State government. He blogs as the Eccentric Fundamentalist.
Noted…
Jesus has combatted a lawyerly way of reading the bible. This is an approach that always wants to minimize personal responsibility and find loopholes that make compliance easier. It’s a rules-based approach to a relationship with God.
Well said. Rules have their place, but human nature is to make a game out of it. How do I use the rules to technically comply but do what I want?
I think a complication in loving our enemies, though, is the situation of conflicting loves. That is, if a guy breaks into your house and threatens your family and demands your valuables, how do you love him?
You have your family to love. And yourself in the sense of ‘actively caring for,’ because we are stewards of ourselves and those in our charge. So loving this intruder might be compatible with loving others I have a higher duty to.
There is a way to love the intruder. It’s just very constrained by other loves.
So what we have of Jesus’ message is compact and focused on the heart problem of weaseling out of obligations using the “rules.” Application can be tricky.
But is there a love problem among Christians these days? Absolutely. I often hear/read rhetoric that seems to not even recognize that various enemies (perceived and actual) are human beings.
We even have Christians vocally opposing “empathy.”
I know there are various arguments about the definition. Most people just mean “caring,” basically, and going to the trouble to try to understand how someone sees things.
I would content that this is the basic minimum of loving our neighbors and enemies: being mindful that they are human beings made in God’s image and we should try to understand how they think and what they are going through.
In the case of the armed intruder, we’ll have to do it after the crisis has past, but we can still do it.
And as for all the political/ecclesiastical fighting these days: They are all humans. They all deserve ‘empathy’ in the sense of seeking to understand. We can’t even answer someone properly if we don’t understand their point of view.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
This passage and the one before it (“turn the other cheek”) were very difficult to prepare for preaching. There are so many caveats you could (and maybe should) toss out that the basic message can quickly become lost. Love (Mt 5:43-48) and non-violent resistance (Mt 5:38-42) don’t mean we become pacifist doormats. Of course we don’t let people destroy our families or drain our bank accounts.
The core idea seems to be about attitude. Are we willing to pray for and show affection towards people who are very cruel to us? Are we willing to not respond in kind when someone does something terrible to us?
This is all very hard. When I preached this passage (Mt 5:43-48) I gave two examples of people who had deeply hurt me and my family. I shared that I wouldn’t be sad if I learned they were dead. I didn’t want them to die, but if I learned they had died I wouldn’t care. We all know people like this who have hurt us. This is the level at which Jesus wants us to apply these words. I prayed for those two people yesterday night and it wasn’t easy. I didn’t like it!
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
While I would agree that God (even in the OT) did not intend that loving your neighbor meant hating your enemy, still the children of Israel did go to war with other nations, and kill those who could literally be seen as Israel’s (God’s) enemies.
I heard a combat veteran once say that you don’t go to war because you hate the enemy, but you go because you love your country and the people in it (i.e. your “neighbor”). My own father (two tours in Vietnam) didn’t speak much about what happened in combat, but he did tell me that one of the things that made combat hard was seeing dead enemy soldiers who had pictures of their wives and children with them.
As regards self-defense, if someone was breaking in and attacking my family and I decided that shooting them was the best or only option, I’d do it without a twinge of conscience. The way I see that fitting into scripture is that it should never be out of hatred for them. If they survived, I could do my best to show them love afterwards, but love for my family would take precedence, similar to what Aaron said.
Dave Barnhart
There are so many caveats you could (and maybe should) toss out that the basic message can quickly become lost.
Agree. I think this is why Jesus is often so terse—if that’s the right word—in the Gospels. The truth might be complex but how do you communicate with the right emphasis in the moment? I heard someone once describe the sermon that died “the death of a thousand qualifications.”
So preaching and teaching are an art. It reminds me of parenting, too. Kids don’t hear your point if you bury it in a long lecture or you nag so much it just becomes background noise to them. I love how Jesus embodies the “word fitly spoken,” as Proverbs puts it.
(On the other hand, we have Paul, who doesn’t mind nuancing at length. So the word fitly spoken is sometimes the short, direct word, and sometimes the complex, thoroughly explained word… it just depends on the time and the audience I guess.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
One thing that we often get confused is the difference between thinking love is "wanting for that person what that person wants" and "wanting for that person what God wants". To draw a picture, I have been called for jury duty, and it is entirely likely that I will be called upon to issue a verdict for someone whose actions were not exactly "salt of the earth". Now if indeed guilty, that person still wants to be let off for that crime--but God's love tells me that I am to love that person by allowing judgment to proceed.
And to use DCBII's comment about his father, the enemy soldiers his unit killed obviously would want to live under that government, but we remember what Communist governments do to people and say "our best love for you is to fight what you're fighting for."
In a Biblical context, Jesus' love for us includes His clearing the temple of the money-changers, His rebukes of the Pharisees (which are often quite savage), and other things as well as the "easier" passages to reconcile with our cultural understanding of love.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Now if indeed guilty, that person still wants to be let off for that crime—but God’s love tells me that I am to love that person by allowing judgment to proceed.
The problem in this situation, like so many others, is that we don’t know what will be good for that person—what will help them. So love always seeks the loved one’s good, but we’re always working with incomplete information, and sometimes almost no information at all.
But I see the crime and punishment dynamic as being about loving neighbor rather than loving the criminal. It’s for everyone’s good if law is upheld and justice is, in our faltering way, upheld. So it’s kind of love of people in general vs. love of the accused. It may very well be that not being punished is what will do the accused the most good. But… conflicting loves.
This may be one of the reasons that NT so often links “love” with “faith” or “knowledge.” Though we can love as a motive regardless, we can’t effectively love in action without information.
Either way, though, our love for God has to supersede all the other loves, so we are never free to be disobedient to Him in order to do what will apparently help someone we are trying to love. (Conceded though: arguably, obedience is always what really helps that individual also, in the long run. Arguably. I’m not sure that’s really how it works in a cursed world, though.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
>>But I see the crime and punishment dynamic as being about loving neighbor rather than loving the criminal. It’s for everyone’s good if law is upheld and justice is, in our faltering way, upheld. So it’s kind of love of people in general vs. love of the accused. It may very well be that not being punished is what will do the accused the most good.<<
No doubt we need to always consider loving our neighbor, and to an extent that would include the accused. However, as part of a jury, I would also have to take this scripture into account:
Proverbs 17:15: “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord.”
Love on my part would include love for justice, or as you put it above, “loving neighbor rather than loving the criminal.” Being on a jury is a huge responsibility, and you want to get the decision right to the best of your ability, but it’s not up to the jury members to determine mercy or appropriate punishment for the guilty — that’s for the judge.
Dave Barnhart
....actually get to decide the punishment, which is why in many states, prosecutors in severe cases look to get a death penalty qualified jury.
That noted, while a guilty verdict can be mercy to one's neighbors, it also can be part of mercy towards the offender by making it emphatically known "your behavior was found to be sinful beyond a reasonable doubt." That can (but does not always) bring people to repentance.
Same basic idea with winning a war. It lets the losers know "the world is so against your way of governing, we risked our lives to fight a war." I remember talking with a pastor in Kiel, Germany, who was super grateful to have been captured during/after the Battle of the Bulge. They showed him (and basically all Germans) a movie of the horrors of the death camps as "this is why we fought your government.".
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
>>Some juries….actually get to decide the punishment, which is why in many states, prosecutors in severe cases look to get a death penalty qualified jury.<<
Yeah, you’re right, I thought about that after I posted. I’ve never served on a jury in one of those cases, and to my shame, I’d actually have to look up if juries in my state ever decide the punishment. Still, while I consider the responsibility of jury members to be very serious, and I’ve treated it that way when I have served, I wouldn’t let the idea of even possible capital punishment dissuade me from trying to decide guilt or innocence to the best of my ability without taking into account whether or not mercy might be better in this particular case.
As you imply in your last post, justice itself can be a form of love.
Dave Barnhart
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