16 Jun 26 | Love Your Enemies
Jesus said love your enemies. He meant the actual ones you are thinking of right now.
The Gospel: Matthew 5:43-48
⁴³ "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' ⁴⁴ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. ⁴⁶ For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷ And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? ⁴⁸ So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Today’s Focus
Jesus commands love of enemies grounded not in strategy but in family resemblance to a Father whose indiscriminate generosity extends to the bad and good alike, calling the community to a perfection defined as the completeness of love that reaches beyond reciprocity to the undeserving.
In the Margins
You have heard it said love your neighbor and hate your enemy. The first part comes from Leviticus 19:18. The second part is not in the Torah. It represents an inference the tradition had drawn and in some cases made explicit. Documents from the Qumran community, the group associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, contain instructions to love the sons of light and hate the sons of darkness. The hatred of enemies had been given theological justification. Jesus is not addressing a fringe view. He is addressing an assumption embedded in serious religious practice.
But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. The command is jarring by design. The Greek word for love is agapaō, the love of total self-giving, the love that does not seek its own. Jesus is not asking for warm feelings toward those who hate you. Feelings are not within the command. He is asking for the decision to seek their good, to pray for them, to refuse to reduce them to their enmity.
The reason He gives is unexpected. Do this so that you may be children of your heavenly Father. The love of enemies is not presented as a strategy or an ethical ideal. It is a family resemblance. God makes His sun rise on the bad and the good and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. The indiscriminate generosity of creation, the fact that sunlight and rainfall do not check moral records before falling, is the character of the Father. To love only those who love you is to love at the level of tax collectors. To greet only your own circle is to do no more than pagans do. There is nothing in that which carries the family resemblance to a God whose generosity extends to those who have rejected Him.
Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. The Greek word teleios, translated as perfect, does not mean morally flawless in the performance sense. It means complete, whole, having arrived at its intended end. A teleios person is one who has reached the destination they were made for. In this context the Father’s perfection is specifically the completeness of love that extends to the undeserving. The call to perfection is the call to let that same completeness characterize the community Jesus is forming.
This is the most demanding passage in the Sermon on the Mount, and also the most honest about what distinguishes the community of Jesus from every other human community. Every group loves its own. That is not distinctive. The love Jesus describes has its source not in the deserving of the recipient but in the nature of the one who gives it, which means it can extend where human love, which is always calculating and conditional at some level, cannot.
Reflection Question
Who is the person you find it most impossible to pray for right now, and what would it mean to pray for them today not because they deserve it but because that is what the Father's love looks like?