Thoughts for the Day

Love your enemies …                                      Matthew 5:43

This is a bombshell in Jesus’ teaching about love.  I wonder if he worked up to it, or just dropped it.  Did Jesus really say this?  Yes!  Both Matthew and Luke record it alongside several verses of explanation, which is just as well.  Let’s face it, it is radical, counter-intuitive and utterly counter-cultural.

As so often, the context is instructive.  “You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ “ But, just a minute, where did the extra ‘hate your enemy’ bit come from?  It has no biblical basis, but what a typically human addition!  How easily we can put boundaries (physical or otherwise) around our neighbourhood and become suspicious and then hateful towards those on the other side of the ghetto wall, whichever side we may be on.  Living under foreign occupation, Jews at this time surely had plenty of enemies to hate and had made this all too logical sounding extrapolation of God’s command to ‘love your neighbour’ to justify it.

So, into this context, Jesus drops this bombshell.   Love your enemies.  But why?  Not hating them would surely have been challenging enough, but actually loving them?  Jesus’ answer is nothing to do with the enemies and everything to do with God.  It’s not because our enemies necessarily deserve to be loved by us, but because for some unfathomable reason God loves his enemies too.  The Message captures it really well.  “If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? … Grow up!  You’re Kingdom subjects.  Now live like it.  Live out your God-created identity.  Live generously and graciously towards others, the way God lives toward you.”  And let’s be thankful God does love his enemies, since, as Paul reflects in Romans, we were once numbered among them!