Love Your Enemies
Matthew 5:43-48
We have come to the end of Matthew 5, the first chapter in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is the King who is teaching His disciples about the Kingdom of Heaven. He is preaching about the righteousness that characterizes those who are in the kingdom. We have seen the character of righteousness in the beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-12)—attitudes that Christ Himself exemplifies. We have seen the influence of righteousness—light in darkness and salt to a corrupt world (Matt. 5:13-16). We have seen the standard of righteousness—Christ, who does not annul or remove God’s law but fulfills it (Matt. 5:17-20). And we have seen the contrast of righteousness—where Jesus shows the true intent of God’s law against the lowered standards of men (Matt. 5:21-48).
Everything Jesus has taught in this sermon so far has been difficult, if not impossible. Matthew summarized Jesus’ preaching as, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17). That is what Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount does. It shows us that we need a Savior who fulfills all righteousness (Matt. 3:15) and provides that right relationship with God for those who repent. Today we come to one of the most difficult passages in the whole Sermon on the Mount–not difficult to understand, but difficult to put into practice and obey. In our last study (Matt. 5:38-42) Jesus taught the difficult lesson that we are not to retaliate against those who hurt us, but we are to respond by doing good. Now in today’s passage, Jesus gives the most radical command of all–love your enemies (Matt. 5:43-48).
I’d like for us to consider four things from this passage:[1] (1) what the Jews had been wrongly taught by their tradition; (2) the command that Jesus taught: love your enemies; (3) how we are to love our enemies; and (4) the reasons why we are to love our enemies. First, let’s consider . . .
1. Tradition taught: Love neighbors; hate enemies. (Matt. 5:43).
Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” Here, as with the other commands of the law that He explains in this sermon, Jesus is reminding His disciples of what they had been traditionally taught by the scribes and Pharisees. Their teachers of the Law had often misinterpreted or misapplied God’s law. So, Jesus sets their wrong teaching in contrast to His authoritative teaching about God’s true intention in the commandments of the law.
The Jews had muddled and dumbed down the commandments of God to the mere letter of the law so that they could appear to keep them. Jesus exposes the sin in their hearts by teaching the true spirit of God’s commandments. They changed God’s command to love in at least three ways: by omission (leaving out part of God’s command); by restriction (limiting the extent of God’s command); and by addition (adding something that God did not command).
First, the omission: what did they leave out? The command to “love your neighbor” comes from Leviticus 19:18 which reads, “You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” Did you notice what they omitted?—the phrase, “as yourself.” That phrase qualifies the kind of love that we are to have to our neighbors. It removes the vagueness from the command to love. It takes love from the abstract to the concrete.
Let’s look briefly at the context for this command in Leviticus 19:
9 ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 ‘And you shall not glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather every grape of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I am the LORD your God. 11 ‘You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another. 12 ‘And you shall not swear by My name falsely, nor shall you profane the name of your God: I am the LORD. 13 ‘You shall not cheat your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of him who is hired shall not remain with you all night until morning. 14 ‘You shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind, but shall fear your God: I am the LORD. 15 ‘You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. In righteousness you shall judge your neighbor. 16 ‘You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people; nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor: I am the LORD. 17 ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him. 18 ‘You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Lev. 19:9-18)
Notice that loving our neighbor would include sharing with the poor and the alien; compassion and absolute honesty and justice in our relationships with others; impartiality; a refusal to be a party to gossip or slander; an absence of malice toward anyone and a refusal to bear a grudge; taking care never to put another’s life at risk and never taking private vengeance upon another. To love your neighbor as yourself means to care as much about your neighbor as you do about yourself. It means to give as much attention to him or her as you do to yourself. It means to love as you want to be loved. As Jesus will teach later in this sermon, it means the golden rule, “whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them” (Matt. 7:12).
So they diminished the commandment by omission. But even when they included “as yourself” they limited the command by restriction. They restricted whom they considered to be their “neighbor.” You can see this attitude in the lawyer who came to Jesus in Luke 10 asking “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25). Jesus responded by asking, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?” (Luke 10:26). The lawyer answered by combining Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself’” (Luke 10:27). Jesus told him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live” (Luke 10:28). But then Luke adds, “But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (Luke 10:29). He wanted to restrict the term neighbor so that he could justify himself. That is exactly what the scribes and Pharisees did with this command. Jesus goes on to illustrate who is our “neighbor” with the parable of the Good Samaritan. We are to be a neighbor to anyone in need that we can help regardless of their race, religion, or social status.
It is true that in the context of the command in Leviticus 19, “neighbor” is clearly “the children of your people” (Lev. 19:18), meaning fellow Israelites or Jews. So, the tradition of the scribes and Pharisees limited “neighbor” by excluding Gentiles and even some Jews whom they considered to be unworthy. But this was a blatantly unwarranted restriction because Leviticus 19 also includes “the poor and the stranger” (Lev. 19:11). In fact, later in that same chapter, Moses writes, “The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” (Lev. 19:34).
So they had diminished the command to love by omission, limited it by restriction, and also they eliminated it by addition. The second phrase that Jesus quotes in Matthew 5:43, “and hate your enemy,” is not a command found in the Scripture. God never commanded His people to hate their enemies. So where did the Pharisees get this teaching? Well, they made two big Scriptural leaps to get there.[2] First, as we just saw, they limited the term “neighbor” to their fellow Israelites. And then secondly, they used God’s hatred for evil to allow personal animosity against groups of people.
For example, they may have looked at passages in the Old Testament like Deuteronomy 7:2 which commanded the Israelites concerning the Canaanite nations: “… when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.” (Deut. 7:2). These were unique commands given to Israel at a unique time in their history. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes: “The wars of Israel were the only ‘holy wars’ in history, for they were the wars of God against the world of idols.”[3] But even during these wars of judgment against the nations, the Israelites were never commanded to hate their enemies. The Bible says God takes “no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Eze. 33:11). These were special commands on a national level, and they were not to be used as an excuse to hate your enemy on a personal level.
The Pharisees may have also looked at various Psalms that spoke in the strongest terms against God’s enemies. For example, in Psalm 139 where David writes: “Do I not hate them, O LORD, who hate You? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.” (Psalm 139:21-22). These are often called the imprecatory Psalms because they invoke judgment, calamity, or curses on God’s enemies.
What are we to make of these Psalms? They don’t sound very loving. First, none of these Psalms talk about hating your personal enemies. In fact, they have nothing to do with your enemies and everything to do with God’s enemies. John Stott comments: “So there is such a thing as perfect hatred, just as there is such a thing as righteous anger. But it is a hatred for God’s enemies, not our own enemies. It is entirely free of all spite, rancour and vindictiveness, and is fired only by love for God’s honour and glory.”[4] And secondly, we don’t know if a person is God’s enemy for all of eternity or God’s enemy who will come to Christ through the gospel. We were all once enemies of God before “we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son” (Rom. 5:10; Col. 1:21). So, we pray for people be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.
The rabbis also turned a blind eye to other commandments which told them to do good to their enemies. For example, we read in Exodus 23: “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden, and you would refrain from helping it, you shall surely help him with it.” (Exo. 23:4-5). They were to take the same care whether the animal belonged to a brother or to an enemy (Deut. 22:1-4). The rabbis also ignored the teaching of Proverbs, which the apostle Paul later quoted as an illustration of overcoming rather than avenging evil,[5] “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.” (Pro. 25:21; Rom. 12:20).
By their omission, restriction, and addition, the teachers of the law had so distorted God’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” that they used it to justify their hatred.
Which brings us back to Matthew 5:44 where we see what,
2. Jesus taught: Love your enemies. (Matt. 5:44)
In Matthew 5:44 Jesus teaches, “But I say to you, love your enemies …” This was an unprecedented teaching in the ancient world. Even though the Old Testament implied it, nobody except Jesus taught you to love your enemies. Our ‘neighbor’ in the vocabulary of Jesus includes our enemy.[6] The command is in the present tense which means this is to be a continuous or habitual action on your part. This command goes far beyond Jesus’ commands of non-retaliation that we saw in the previous section. It’s not just refusing to take revenge on your enemies.
Jesus says, “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.” (Matt. 5:44). Before we examine this verse, let me help you with a technical issue in the text. If you have any other modern translation other than the King James or New King James Version you probably noticed that Matthew 5:44 in your version is shorter. That is because those translations are based on earlier Greek manuscripts which do not contain the extra words. The longer version was probably introduced later by an ancient copyist who carried over Jesus’ longer teaching from Luke 6:27. There, Jesus teaches, “. . . But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you.” Whether these additional words actually belong in Matthew’s Gospel or not, they clearly express what Jesus taught.
So, who are our enemies? Our enemies are not just people we, for whatever reason, don’t like or have a hard time getting along with. That’s how we might define them, but that’s not how our Lord defines them. Jesus gives us a sense of who they are when He says that they are those who would curse you, that is, they slander you, speak lies about you, or cuss you out to your face; most probably because of your association with Him (Matt. 5:11). He also says that they are those who hate you, that is, those who harbor resentment and bitterness toward you as His followers. He says that they are those who spitefully use you, that is, they take advantage of you, or exploit you. And finally, they are those who persecute you, meaning they pursue you relentlessly to harm you or even to kill you because of your relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s what Jesus means by our “enemies”. They are the ones that He calls us to “love”.
What does it mean to ‘love’ our enemies? Jesus doesn’t leave us hanging. He goes on to tell us. So next we see . . .
3. How we are to love our enemies. (Matt. 5:44)
Again, Jesus gives us a sense of this when He calls us to actively “bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.” We show love to them with our words, our actions, and our prayers. That certainly gets our whole ‘selves’ involved in loving them, doesn’t it?
First, we love with our words. We bless those who curse us. If they call down disaster and catastrophe upon our heads, expressing in words their wish for our downfall, we must respond by calling down heaven’s blessing upon them, declaring in words that we wish them nothing but good.[7]
Second, we love with our deeds, “do good to those who hate you.” True love is not sentiment so much as service—practical, humble, sacrificial service.[8] The love we’re to show toward our enemies is, primarily, active. The word for “love” that Jesus uses is that noble word “agape,” which describes a self-sacrificing love that actively seeks the good of the one loved. Jesus’ command isn’t a matter of feelings and emotions, but a matter of the will conformed to Him in obedience.
Finally, we love with our prayers, “pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.” Prayer is essential because it is impossible to pray a blessing for someone without loving them. Jesus is our perfect example here. When Jesus hung in agony on the cross, he prayed for his persecutors: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” (Luke 23:34).
We’ve seen Jesus’ command to love our enemies and how we are to love them. Finally, Jesus lets us know why it is that we’re to do what He commands us to do. Let’s consider . . .
4. Why we are to love our enemies. (Matt. 5:45-48)
Jesus gives three reasons. First, Jesus calls us to keep this command because doing so will reveal our true identity as God’s children. In Matthew 5:45, He says that we are to love our enemies in this way, “that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
The intention of that phrase “that you may be sons of your Father in heaven” is not to tell us how to become one of His children; because Jesus already refers to Him as our Father in heaven. Jesus isn’t teaching us here that, if we love our enemies, we somehow “become” the sons of the heavenly Father. The Bible is clear that we become the children of God by grace through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross—completely apart from our good deeds. We never “earn” sonship. As John 1:12-13 says, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
What Jesus means is that we become clearly identified as children of God when we love as God does. When we love our enemies, we become, as it were, “clearly marked out” in this world as those who are sons and daughters of God because we love as He does.
How does God love? “He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). Our heavenly Father shows love to all—even to those who declare themselves to be His enemies. Even upon those who are evil and unjust, our good Father graciously and mercifully provides sunshine and needed rain. He extends what theologians (following Calvin) refer to as “common grace”.[9] God gives good earthly gifts to those who are worthy, and to those who are not. And when we treat our enemies as He treats His, we prove to the world that we are truly His sons and daughters.
A second reason we are to obey the command to love our enemies is, in doing so, we become distinct from the world. In Matthew 5:46-47, Jesus tells us, “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?“
To be a tax collector, in the culture of Jesus’ day, was to be someone who collected taxes from among the Jewish people for the Roman government. To be such a thing was to be a sell-out to one’s own people, a traitor. A tax collector was considered the most reprobate kind of sinner that you could ever think of. And to be a Gentile (some translations substitute Gentiles for tax collectors in Matthew 5:47) was to be someone outside the circle of God’s covenant promises. Everyone is capable of that kind of love.
What the Pharisees and scribes were teaching was something that everyone in the world pretty much already did: love your neighbors and hate your enemies. But here, Jesus is calling us to do something higher and nobler than merely what comes naturally. He calls us to do something that the people of this world do not do and even can’t do. He calls us to do something that only He can do and that only He can enable us to do. He calls us to love those who are our enemies. And when we do this, we show that we are clearly ‘not of this world’. We show that we are indwelt by Jesus Himself; because the fruit of His Holy Spirit indwelling us is, among other things, “love” (Gal. 5:22).
And finally, we are to obey this command to love our enemies because, in doing so, we live consistently with our glorious destiny. Jesus closes with these words, “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). This verse concludes not only this section on loving your enemies but also the whole section we have been studying on surpassing righteousness.
The word “perfect” means “to be brought to completion” or “to be fully accomplished”. And I believe it’s best to see it in its context. Jesus isn’t saying that we can expect to be as “perfect” (in an absolute sense) as our Father while we are on this earth. Rather, He is saying that, with respect to the command to love, we are to be as complete in that love as our Father is. We are to love, as it were, without any limitations or boundaries. In Luke 6, Jesus teaches, “. . . Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful” (Luke 6:36). In Leviticus 19, God tells us, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2). We are to love in a way that is complete and full, even to the degree of loving our enemies, just as He also does.
I believe this is intended to be taken as a command. That’s why the word “therefore” is there. But I can’t help but notice that it is stated in the future tense; that is, that we “shall be perfect” as our Father in heaven is perfect. It’s not only a command but a promise. Jesus not only commands us to love our enemies; but He also entices us with the promise that, one day, we will be perfected in love as our Father in heaven is Himself perfect in love. And that makes this a wonderful call to become increasingly now (though imperfectly so) what we will one day completely be in glory!
We will never be perfect in this life. But God calls us to perfection. That means as Christians there is always room to grow. We keep striving toward the goal of perfect holiness, perfect righteousness, perfect love. And so, we should love our enemies; because when we do so, we’re acting in a manner that is consistent with our glorious destiny in Christ. John Piper comments, “Loving your enemy doesn’t earn you the reward of heaven. Treasuring the reward of heaven empowers you to love your enemy.”[10]
It sounds humanly impossible, doesn’t it? And of course, it is. As someone has said, coming to terms with the last command in Matthew 5—to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect—is the fastest way to drive us to the first promise in the chapter – “Blessed are the poor in spirit . . .” (Matt. 5:3). Come to Jesus who loved you when you were still His enemy. Acknowledge your inadequate love. Mourn over your sin in repentance. Humbly call out to Jesus to save you, to reconcile you to God. He will pour out the love of God in your heart by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:1-10).
Only a living and loving relationship with the heavenly Father, an assurance that you have been forgiven in Christ, a sure promise that all blessing awaits you in glory, can enable you to love your enemies. God doesn’t ask you to do anything He did not first do Himself. God loved us when we were His enemies. And now he calls you to love your enemies as well. What would happen in your family, in our church, in our community, in our world, if we loved that way?
Love your enemies, because the kingdom of heaven is ours. Love your enemies, because in this way they might become coheirs of the kingdom with you. Love your enemies, because that is why Jesus Christ came into the world and died, “that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:17).
[1] Greg Allen, https://www.bethanybible.org/archive/2004/120504.htm. I adapted Allen’s outline and some of his points in developing this sermon.
[2] Ray Fowler, http://www.rayfowler.org/sermons/matthew/radical-love-over-hate/
[3] The cost of discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1937: 6th and complete English edition, SCM, 1959), p. 132.
[4] John R. W. Stott and John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 117.
[5] John R. W. Stott, 116.
[6] John R. W. Stott, 118.
[7] John R. W. Stott, 118.
[8] John R. W. Stott, 118.
[9] Commentary on a harmony of the evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, I, by John Calvin (1558: translated by William Pringle, 1845: Eerdmans, n.d.)
[10] John Piper, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/but-i-say-to-you-love-your-enemies-part-2
