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.

• 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.