“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

It’s hard to imagine how controversial that one little command would have been when Jesus first spoke it. We saw in a previous post that the Jews in the first century had twisted God’s Word to justify their hatred for the gentiles—even to the point of letting gentiles drown instead of helping them.

In the face of that self-righteous hatred, Christ confrontingly said:

“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:44–48)

This is not just a rebuke and corrective to the rabbinical tradition. This is essentially the Son’s commentary on the Old Testament law, unpacking the fullness of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. We can boil down Christ’s teaching here into three simple directives, the first of which is to love your enemies.

Jesus begins by saying, “But I say to you, love your enemies” (v. 44). As we’ve already seen, Israel’s religious brain trust had a hard time distinguishing between their neighbors and their enemies. That was essentially the issue that prompted the Lord to invent the parable of the good Samaritan.

Luke’s gospel records that story of a scribe confronting Jesus, hoping to “put Him to the test” (Luke 10:25). He pointedly asked Christ how to inherit eternal life, and Christ prompted him to recite a variation on the first and second great commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (v. 27). Christ replied, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live” (v. 28), but the scribe wasn’t satisfied. “Wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (v. 29).

The ensuing parable no doubt offended the sensibilities of Israel’s religious leaders, and not just because the priest and the Levite in the story showed such casual disinterest in helping their fellow countryman who had been robbed, beaten, and left half-dead by the side of the road. The real offense came in the form of the parable’s hero, a Samaritan whom all the Jews would have considered an avowed enemy. Christ’s story not only exposed the haughty self-righteousness of the religious leaders, but it provoked their injustices too. There were no ethnic or religious lines that excused Israel’s animosity—anyone in their path with a need was to instantly become a potential object of their love.

In reality, Israel had been commanded in the Old Testament to treat both their neighbors and their enemies with the same kind of love. But Jesus, in classic rabbinical style reasoning from the greater to the lesser, immediately turned their attention to those hardest to love—those who were most offensive, objectionable, and distasteful. If you can faithfully love those kinds of people, you can love anyone.

It’s worth noting that the love we are instructed to show to our enemies in Matthew 5:44 is not emotional but volitional. The Greek word here (agape) speaks of the love of the will. It’s not related to any personal fulfillment; rather, it is focused on acting for the other person’s welfare and benefit. It’s not interested in reciprocation. It is the love of unmitigated benevolence, prompted by a pure and invincible goodwill toward any needy person we encounter. Luke’s gospel expands on Christ’s words in Matthew 5, adding two practical applications of the love we are to show our enemies: “Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you” (Luke 6:27–27). One commentator captured the weight of the Lord’s exhortation this way:

“[Love] indeed, sees all the hatefulness and the wickedness of the enemy, feels his stabs and blows, may even have something to do toward warding them off; but all this simply fills the loving heart with the one desire and aim, to free its enemy from his hate, to rescue him from his sin, and thus to save his soul. Mere affection is often blind, but even then it thinks that it sees something attractive in the one toward whom it goes out; the higher love may see nothing attractive in the one so loved, . . . its inner motive is simply to bestow true blessing on the one loved, to do him the highest good. . . . I cannot like a low, mean criminal who may have robbed me and threatened my life; I cannot like a false, lying, slanderous fellow who, perhaps, has vilified me again and again; but I can by the grace of Jesus Christ love them all, see what is wrong with them, desire and work to do them only good, most of all to free them from their vicious ways.”^[1] R.H.C. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Matthew's Gospel, (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1964), 247.

After humbly stooping to wash the disciples’ feet, Christ told them, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you” (John 13:34). Make no mistake—the disciples were not lovable men. In the years they spent with the Lord, they were quarrelsome, jealous, selfish, vindictive, and occasionally at odds with Christ Himself. Yet He perpetually put their needs above His own, He laid down His life for them (John 15:13).

In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ commands that we show that same kind of love to our enemies.

Pray for Your Persecutors

Jesus’ words become more intense as He continues: “Pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).The Lord promised His disciples—and, by extension, all believers throughout the history of the church—that they would face persecution for His sake (John 15:20). In Matthew 5, He instructs us how to respond. This is reminiscent of His statement at the end of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness” (Matthew 5:10).

The Lord Himself exemplified this attitude on the cross when He said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). And God answered that prayer. He forgave one of the thieves (v. 43). He certainly forgave the centurion who was standing there (Matthew 27:54). And He forgave many people in that crowd, because they were regenerated on the day of Pentecost. In the agony of the cross, Christ was pleading with the Father for the sake of those who were inflicting His pain. That is how we are to desire the well-being of those who persecute us.

Stephen used one of his final breaths to cry out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them!” (Acts 7:60) And who was standing right in front of him with the garments of the witnesses at his feet? Luke records that it was “a young man named Saul” ( v. 58)—a man who devoted his life to the persecution of the early church, only to encounter the Lord on the road to Damascus and become an apostle himself. God obviously answered Stephen’s prayer on behalf of the Apostle Paul. In that sense, Paul was the fruit of Stephen’s prayer. Stephen understood what it means to selflessly love those who persecute you, as he was praying to God for their forgiveness and redemption while they were still stoning him to death.

Again, we should hear the words of Bonhoeffer, who served as a pastor in Germany and was put to death by the Nazis. Regarding the command to love our enemies, he wrote: “This is the supreme demand. Through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God.”^[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R.H. Fuller, 2nd rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 166. Faithfully praying for your persecutors is the noble high ground of godliness. Christ instructs us not just to forgo revenge but to petition Him on behalf of our oppressors and tormentors. Loving our enemies means pleading with God for their forgiveness and repentance.

Do you exemplify this kind of love? As we’ll see next time, every Christian should have this love for their enemies because it is the very same kind of love that God shows us.

(Adapted from Stand Firm)