Love Your Enemies

“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.”

(Luke 6:35-36 ESV)

This is a hard word of Christ. At least for me it is a hard word. How does one love his enemies? I never could do this on my own strength. It is simply impossible. In this imperative, there are several hidden but critical ideas that must first be dealt with.

The first thing I must deal with is the question of who I am. If I have some idea that I am better than my enemy because I am ‘wiser’, ‘more holy’, ‘more pious’ or any such thing, I will never be able to love my enemy. Love does not recognize condescension. I must realize that I and my enemy suffer equally from the effects of law and sin. We are both beggars.

Paul said it best: “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” (1 Timothy 1:15 ESV)  

If my attitude is that I have it all right and my enemy has it all wrong, there is no room for me to be able to do him a kindness or to love him. I will ever see him as inferior to myself and anything I do for him will not be love, but charity from my pity. When I come to understand that my enemy and I are on the same footing, under the same influence of sin, the world, and the devil, I can begin to have empathy for him. I can begin to love him when I recognize our base commonalities, regardless of our differences.

It will come down to how I read this statement:  "he[God] is kind to the ungrateful and the evil". Do I view myself as ungrateful and evil? How do I view my enemy? You see, relative to God we are all ‘ungrateful’ and ‘evil’. Christ is not telling his disciples that their enemy is ungrateful and evil, but that they are.  And being evil, how much mercy has God shown them in loving them? It is from this understanding of God’s mercy toward us as ungracious and evil beings that we may truly love our enemy by extending the grace that God has extended to us.

It is, in a way, an easy thing to extend outward friendship toward our enemies. We can by force of will behave civilly to almost anyone. But Jesus is not calling for civility here, but love. Love is a different thing entirely. Love as in patience, kindness, keeping no record of wrongs done. That is not civility, which is an outward obligation to treat others with respect, but a deep and true love. Love that sees a person as being more important than ourselves. And Jesus asks us to extend this kind of love not to those who love us back, but to those who do us wrong and use us harshly.

The bottom line is that all of humanity is born condemned. Your enemy does not choose to do you wrong, he is under the compulsion of 'powers and principalities' that he may know nothing about. We are all sinful at heart. Before God there is not a negotiable difference between Adolf Hitler and Mother Theresa. It is only through the grace of God that we are redeemed before God. Therefore, our enemy is just as we are had God not been merciful to us. We can claim no superiority in ourselves, because what we are other than human is only of God. Knowing this, we may begin to love our enemies and do good.

God Bless