Love Your Enemies

It helps me to remember the setting. Matthew places these words inside the long teaching we call the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 to 7), and his hearers were ordinary people in a corner of the empire under Roman rule. The crowd did not have abstract enemies. A little earlier in the same sermon Jesus mentions being forced to go one mile (Matthew 5:41), which his listeners would have recognised at once as the legal power of a soldier to make you carry his load. There were tax collectors working for the occupier. There were the long, raw years of distrust between Jew and Samaritan. So when Jesus says ‘enemies’, the people in front of him were not thinking of a mild irritation. They were thinking of someone who had genuinely cost them something.

That matters because it stops me treating this as a pleasant sentiment. As Matthew arranges the teaching, our verse comes at the end of a run of sayings that all follow the same shape, ‘You have heard that it was said… but I tell you’ (Matthew 5:21 onwards). This is the sharp end of how Jesus says the kingdom actually works, spoken to people with concrete reasons to hate.

The hinge of the whole verse is the little phrase ‘But I tell you’, and it is easy to read straight past it. Jesus is answering a saying his hearers knew, which paired loving your neighbour with hating your enemy. Loving the neighbour really is in the law of Moses (Leviticus 19:18). Hating the enemy is not. So Jesus is not correcting Moses; he is dismantling a popular shrinking of the command, the quiet edit we all make that lets us decide in advance who counts as neighbour and who does not.

The other thing the reflection on this page does not say outright is which word for love is being used. The Greek here is agape, the love of deliberate goodwill rather than affection or attraction, and I find that a genuine relief. I am not being told to manufacture warmth towards someone who has hurt me. I am being told to want their good and to act on it. Look at the verbs Jesus chooses: bless, do good, pray. Not one of them waits on my feelings. Every one of them is something I could start doing today, with gritted teeth, before my heart has caught up at all.

There is something almost unbearable about reading this verse and then reading on through Matthew, because the man who said it then did it. Within a few chapters he is arrested by people who hated him, mocked, and put to death by an occupying power. Luke records that, even there, he prayed for the very people doing it (Luke 23:34). He did not offer enemy-love as a clever ideal he had thought up. He went to a cross and showed it.

The short reflection on this page already points to Romans 5:8, that God loved us while we were still set against him, so I will not labour it again, except to say it is the engine of the whole command. We do not love our enemies to earn anything. We love them because we are among the enemies God has already loved. Paul takes exactly this teaching and turns it into something you can do with your hands in Romans 12:20-21: plain kindness to the person who has wronged you, and a flat refusal to let evil have the last move. The thread runs from this hillside, through the cross, into how I treat the neighbour who has fallen out with me.

I want to be honest about how heavy this is. The enemy in my life is almost never a soldier. It is the relative who said the cruel thing at the funeral, or the colleague who took the credit and let me carry the blame, or the friend who went cold and never told me why. Loving them does not mean I pretend the wound never happened, and it does not mean I have to feel fond of them, and it certainly does not mean I let myself be treated as a doormat. It means I will not curse them, and I begin to pray for them by name.

What helps me on the days when even that feels like a lie is to make the prayer small and completely true. ‘God, I cannot wish them well yet. Help me want to.’ That is allowed. The command gets my mouth and hands moving while my heart limps along behind, and over months, not minutes, the heart does start to follow. I have watched old resentments loosen this way. Not through one heroic act of forgiveness, but through stubborn, unglamorous praying for someone I would much rather have written off for good.

Of the four things Jesus lists, I have come to think prayer is the one that does the quiet work. Blessing and doing good can be managed at arm’s length, with the heart still cold. But you cannot pray for a person honestly, day after day, and keep them at the size of a monster. It is hard to go on hating someone you are bringing to God by name, asking him to deal kindly with them. The praying changes me more than it changes them.

And prayer is the form of love I can always reach for. I may never get the chance to do a kind deed for someone who would only throw it back. But I can always pray. It is the door left open when every other door has been shut, and it keeps the matter between me and God.

The very next line is the one that anchors everything (Matthew 5:45). Jesus points to the Father, who lets the sun rise over the wicked as readily as the good, and sends rain to water the fields of people who deserve it and people who do not. The light that warms a cruel man’s crops is the same light that warms a kind man’s. God does not ration his ordinary mercies by who has earned them, and the reason Jesus gives for loving our enemies is simply that this is what the Father is like.

That reframes the whole command. Enemy-love is not a heroic extra for unusually holy people. It is the family likeness, the ordinary mark of a child who resembles their Father. When I bless the one who has wronged me, I am not straining above my nature. I am being drawn into God’s habit of generosity, the open-handed kindness he has been showing me all along.

Someone stuck in a cruel marriage is told to love their enemy, and the sentence stops right there, as though love meant staying, meant silence, meant never ringing a solicitor or a refuge or a friend. Jesus asks nothing of the kind. You can pray for a man from behind a locked door and still refuse ever to be alone in a room with him again. Enemy-love was never meant to disarm the person being hurt while leaving the one doing the hurting fully armed. If you lead anything in a church, that distinction is not a footnote. It is safeguarding.

I have also heard the verse flattened into general niceness, aimed at whoever we currently find awkward: the councillor we voted against, the neighbour with the wrong poster in his window. That costs nothing, which is how you can tell it is not what Jesus meant. He wants the good of the person who has actually taken something from you, and he never once suggests you stop calling their wrong a wrong. In this same Gospel he denounces the scribes and Pharisees to their faces, at length and in public (Matthew 23).

If I were teaching this verse I would not open with the word love. I would open with what was being done to these people: cursed, hated, mistreated, persecuted. Words first, then the cold feeling behind the words, then action, then power organised against you. That is roughly how trouble grows in an ordinary parish too. Someone says the cruel thing at the meeting, the coldness sets in, and then, if they hold any of the levers, they pull them.

And Jesus does not answer with one blanket rule. He replies to each hurt in its own currency. Bless answers the curse, speech for speech, so that my mouth never becomes theirs turned round. Do good answers hate, because hatred works in the dark and a kindness done in daylight is its flat contradiction. Then, for those who mistreat and persecute, the stage where you are least likely to hold any power at all, he says pray. Teach it in that order and nobody in the room can pretend the command is vague. It tells you what to do with your mouth, what to do with your hands, and what to do when neither is any use to you.

This is a good verse for a communion table, when a congregation that has quarrelled all year kneels at the same rail anyway. It suits a hard church meeting, the one about money or the split nobody wants to name, read aloud before anyone is allowed to speak so the argument at least starts from the right place. It belongs at a funeral where the family rift is common knowledge, because it names what forgiveness costs without pretending the wound was never there.

It does not belong in the first phone call after someone has been hurt. I would not quote it to a woman an hour out of a violent house, or read it to a congregation still reeling from a safeguarding disclosure, or use it to hurry a grieving parent towards some gracious sentence about the person who killed their child. Enemy-love is taken up in a person’s own time, once the danger has passed and the wound has had air. Handed over too soon, the very words that free a healed heart will flatten a bleeding one. Jesus is not in the hurry we are.

I would rather skip the part of this verse where it does not work. Loving an enemy is bearable if I can picture a thaw at the end of it: the colleague who finally says sorry, the brother who comes back to the table at Christmas. Then Acts tells me about Stephen, dragged outside the city and stoned, kneeling under the rocks and calling out to God not to hold the sin against the men throwing them (Acts 7:60). He was doing on the ground what Jesus had taught on the hillside. The stones did not stop. Nobody in that crowd is recorded as putting theirs down. He prayed, and then he died.

I do not think this verse promises that loving an enemy will change the enemy. Jesus never says bless those who curse you and the curse will lift. He says bless them, and stops. There is no clause about outcome anywhere in the sentence, and I have looked for one, in the years when I badly wanted this command to come with a guarantee attached. People reach for the neat line here, that Stephen’s prayer somehow bought Saul’s road to Damascus later on. I would love that to be provable. Acts does not say it, and I cannot tell you it is true. What I am left with is only this: a man obeyed the command exactly, it cost him everything, and heaven did not step in to make the obedience pay. Some nights that is a harder thing to build a life on than a promise of a happy ending, and I resent how little it offers the person who prays and is not spared. But I notice Jesus never offered the other thing. He only ever offered himself, doing the same.

Turn a few hundred pages back from Matthew and you come to Psalm 137, sung by people sitting by the rivers of Babylon with their captors demanding a cheerful song from them. It ends with a line so violent I have heard it read aloud and then hurried past: a blessing pronounced on whoever seizes Babylon’s little ones and dashes them against the rock (Psalm 137:8-9). That is in the same Bible as ‘love your enemies’, and for years I could not hold both at once. I assumed one of them had to be the mistake.

Now I think I was reading it wrong. The psalmist is not going out to do it. He is handing the worst thing in him to God, in words, out loud, instead of pretending he does not feel it or walking down to Babylon with a rock in his hand. That is not what Jesus asks, and I will not pretend it is. But it is not the opposite of what Jesus asks either. Both refuse to let the enemy’s cruelty become the business of your own hands. The psalm says: bring God your worst wish and let him decide what to do with it. Jesus reaches further in and changes the wish itself, so that what you carry to God is no longer their ruin but their good. I used to think Psalm 137 was the coarse ancestor this verse had grown out of. Now I think it is the honest floor Jesus is asking me to get up from, and I would not trust anyone who claimed to have started somewhere higher.

It is worth sitting with what ‘curse’ meant to the people in front of him. Go back to Numbers and there is Balak, king of Moab, watching the Israelite camp spread along his border and doing what his world told him to do about it: he sends money to a professional, Balaam, and hires him to come and curse them (Numbers 22 to 24). Nobody in that story treats a curse as an insult. Balak is buying something he believes will land, a strike he can pay for, and when the first approach fails he simply sends grander men with a better offer. That is the air the word was breathing when Jesus told a hillside full of people to answer a curse with a blessing.

So ‘bless those who curse you’ is not a request that I mind my language. Someone has spent something real trying to make me smaller. Jesus tells me to spend the same coin the other way round, aiming good at the very person who paid for my harm, or prayed for it, or just lay awake wanting it. I find that bracing rather than meek. It is not surrender with a nice word laid over the top of it. It is answering a weapon with a weapon, except the one he puts in my hand cannot do damage. It only ever does good, to them and, I have found, on its way out through me.

A chapter later Jesus teaches the prayer most of us can say without properly waking up, and sitting in the middle of it is the line about being forgiven our debts as we forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12). Then he does something that still unsettles me. Of everything in that prayer, the debts line is the one he circles back to once the prayer is finished, and he sharpens it: forgive people and your Father forgives you, refuse and he does not (Matthew 6:14-15). No other petition gets that treatment. Bread does not. The kingdom does not. Matthew is making sure nobody files ‘love your enemies’ under lovely ideas from chapter five and then prays on regardless in chapter six.

He comes back to it again when Peter asks how often he has to forgive and offers seven, plainly rather pleased with himself (Matthew 18:21-35). Jesus answers with a servant let off a debt he could not have paid in ten lifetimes, who walks out of the throne room and takes a man by the throat over pocket money. What gets me is the speed of it. Not years later. Within the hour, the size of what he had just been let off had already gone clean out of his head. I recognise him more than I would like to. I have prayed that prayer on a Sunday and rehearsed a grievance in the car park, and Matthew keeps setting these two things side by side because he knows exactly what I am like.

With children I have found the whole thing turns on one question, and it is not what love means. It is ‘who is your enemy’, asked seriously, and then believing the answer she gives. At nine, the answer is the boy who takes her pencil case every day and holds it over her head until she cries. That is a real enemy. Telling her it is not, because a proper enemy is a Roman soldier or someone being persecuted in a country far away, is how you lose a child’s trust in a single sentence.

So I ask what she wants to happen to him. It is always some version of him being caught and made to feel exactly as small as he made her feel, and I am not going to tell her that wanting that is wicked. It is honest, and honest is where this starts. Then I ask her the other thing: what would it look like to ask God for something genuinely good for that boy, not his humiliation, while still telling a teacher, still keeping her things where he cannot reach them, still not being his friend if she does not want to be. Children take that distinction faster than adults do. They already know the difference between wishing someone well and being made to sit next to them at lunch. The one thing I will not do is tell her that praying for him will make him stop. I do not know that it will. I would rather she trusts me now, over a pencil case, so that she can still trust me at forty when the enemy is someone who has taken something she cannot replace.

• Whose name do I least want to bring to God right now, and what would it cost me to pray for their good this week?
• Where have I quietly edited this command, quietly deciding that someone has put themselves beyond the reach of my love?
• If I really believe I was once God’s enemy and was loved anyway, how should that change the way I talk about the people I find hardest?
• What is one small, doable thing (a kind word, an insult swallowed, a prayer) I could offer an ‘enemy’ before my feelings are anywhere near ready?

If you would like to stay with these words, you might read more of the Gospel of Matthew, or find a verse for exactly where your heart is today on our page of Bible verses for how you feel.