“Love Your Enemies.” Seriously?

This Sunday, my church small group just happened to be studying a familiar passage in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.

 “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 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. ⁴⁶ For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷ And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸ Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matt 5:43-48).

Our conversation quickly–no one should be surprised–turned to ISIS and the horrific attacks on Paris.

What does it mean to “love your enemies” when your enemies are not just difficult co-workers or crotchety next-door-neighbors but are quite literally people who would destroy your life if only given the chance?

In asking his disciples to pray for “those who persecute you” (διωκόντων), he would have likely had in mind those who quite literally persecute others on the basis of religious ideology (1). Jesus hearers (and Matthew’s readers) would have quite familiar with serious, religious persecution. Jesus tells them to love their enemies and prayer for their persecutors.

Was this a radical shift from the Hebrew law, a break with the Torah? Not exactly. Take the first sentence of Jesus’ command:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”

The first part of the command,  “You shall love your neighbor,” appears in Leviticus:

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (Lev. 19:18)

The second part, “hate your enemy,” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Old Testament. It may have been assumed by some Hebrews that to love the neighbor (a fellow member of one’s community) implies a hatred of the non-neighbor, the stranger, and the enemy. Such an interpretive assumption may have developed over time, and may even have been taught by some rabbis. But there are other texts in the Hebrew Scriptures that urge just and human treatment of foreigners, strangers, and even “enemies.”

For example, Exodus commands the just treatment of an enemy’s property and goes on to encourage respect for the foreigners in their midst:

When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back. When you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would hold back from setting it free, you must help to set it free. (Exodus 23:4-5).

David Garland explains that,

It was not uncommon in the ancient world for a farmer to pray to the gods for the protection of his own animal and for the animal of his rival to break its leg. The Hebrew Scriptures, however, enjoin loving the neighbor. The neighbor is carefully defined as the fellow Israelite, although it is also extended to the resident alien (Lev 19:18, 33–34; see Deut 10:18–19). Nowhere does the Scripture explicitly say that one is to hate one’s enemy, although it might be inferred from some passages (see Deut 7:2; 20:13–18; 25:17–19; Pss 137:8–9; 139:19–22). Explicit commands to hate the enemy, the sons of darkness, do appear in the Qumran Literature (1QS 1:3–4, 9–10; 10:17b-18; 9:21; 11QTemple 61:12–14); and one should not ignore the impressions of outsiders about Jews. Some believed that hatred of everyone but Jews was part of their religion (see Tacitus, Histories 5.5; Juvenal, Satires 14.102).

Let’s not forget all the “divine commands” in the OT to destroy the enemies of Israel, such as the Canaanite conquest and other episodes we’ve discussed at length. It’s difficult to disentangle aggressive and unmerciful violence against from hatred. Is it possible to kill someone else without also hating them? If the killing is from a position of defensive, self-protection, sure.

But if it’s from an aggressive, even unprovoked position, it seems unlikely. Unless one is so utterly convinced that God has commanded it, such that the killing has nothing to do with emotions about the object of your violence (your “enemy”) but everything to do with emotions about the object of your (religious) devotion (your God, whom you believe has commanded you to kill the unbeliever in your midst).

So there is some ambiguity present about hatred and violence in the Old Testament. Interpreters may have sought to clarify the ambiguity by more aggressively distinguishing between “neighbor” and “enemy.”

But, Garland concludes:

Jesus says that both enemy and neighbor (the far and the near) are to be treated in the same way. He rejects conventional wisdom by demanding the love of the enemy.

Back in the world of today, we are still left wondering how, as Christians, we are to apply Jesus’ difficult command in the context of terrorism and ISIS. I don’t venture to make any strong claims about whether–or to what extent–the Sermon on the Mount requires the response of a wholesale pacifism. I’m not convinced that it does.

There is an appeal to the Lutheran “two kingdoms” approach to the Christian life and to the Sermon on the Mount. The complicated nature of the world and the darkness and injustice present in it requires at times an approach like that of Niebuhr’s “Christian realism,” which sometimes means that the state will need to use force to restrain evil. The other side of Christian realism is that the state (yes, our state, too) is too often a cause of evil rather than merely a restraining force.

The Sermon on the Mount tells us that evil cuts through us all, that the world in its present state is fundamentally unjust (blessings rain down equally on the righteous and the unrighteous), and that the cycle of violence cannot be broken by more and more violence.

So Jesus calls his disciples to live in such a way that we relate to our enemies as if they are friends and neighbors.

But it’s a difficult saying. Who can accept it?

(1) Bruce, A. B. (n.d.). The Synoptic Gospels (p. 113). New York: George H. Doran Company.
(2) Garland, D. E. (2001). Reading Matthew: a literary and theological commentary on the first Gospel (pp. 76–77). Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing.