Love your enemies

A word for the week

Is it actually possible to love someone you hate? Not to feel warmly toward them, not to like them, but to love them in the way Jesus means here, when everything in you recoils? This is the command people most want to file away as a beautiful impossibility, a nice ideal no one could really keep. So let us take it at full strength and see what he is actually asking, because it is both harder and more possible than the soft version.

First, hear how far he pushes it. You have heard an eye for an eye, he says, the old law of fair payback, which was itself a limit on revenge. He goes past it entirely. Do not resist the evil person; turn the other cheek; give up your coat and your cloak too; go the second mile. Then the summit of it: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, pray for those who persecute you. He is not describing warm feelings. Look at the verbs. Bless. Do good. Pray. Every one is an action, not an emotion. He is not commanding you to feel affection for the person who wronged you. He is commanding you to act toward them for their good. That you can do, even while the feeling lags far behind.

Why would he ask something so against the grain? He tells us plainly: so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. There is the reason. God does not sort the world into the deserving and the undeserving before he sends the sunlight. The rain falls on the field of the cruel man and the kind man alike. To love your enemy is simply to treat people the way God already treats everyone, including you. You were not loved by God because you earned it. The sun rose on you on your worst day too.

Then the question that exposes us: if you love only those who love you, what are you doing that anyone does not do? Even the worst people love their friends. Even the crookedest man is warm to his own. Loving the lovable is not the way of Jesus; it is just being human, and it costs nothing. The whole of what he asks begins exactly where the natural warmth runs out, at the edge of the people who have hurt you.

Here is the mercy hidden in the command. When you hate someone, they live in your head rent-free; the hatred is a leash that ties you to them, and it slowly changes you into a smaller, harder version of yourself. To pray for an enemy, even through gritted teeth, even without meaning it yet, is the one move that begins to cut the leash. It does not excuse what they did. It refuses to let what they did keep making you into itself. That is why he asks it. Not to let them off. To keep you free.

Be perfect, he ends, as your Father is perfect. That word does not mean flawless; it means complete, whole, grown-up. A love that stops at your friends is a child's love, half-sized. The love that reaches the enemy is the finished kind, the kind that looks like God. None of us has it yet. We practice toward it, one blessed curse, one prayed-for enemy, one refused revenge at a time.