Read: Matt. 5:43–48
Most of us are pretty good at loving our enemies…in theory. It gets considerably harder once they have names, faces, and a backstory. It’s one thing to love an enemy you’ve never met. It’s entirely different to love the person who brought some of the greatest pain you’ve ever experienced into your life.
Jesus does something startling in the Sermon on the Mount. He pushes love beyond simply the people who love us back. Loving our family is good. Loving our friends is good. Loving people who agree with us is good. But Jesus essentially says everybody does that. Even the Oligarchs do that. The distinctive thing about the kingdom of God is what happens when love moves beyond reciprocity.
What happens when the other person doesn’t like us? What happens when they’ve hurt us, opposed something we care deeply about, voted differently, or have said things about us we can’t simply unhear? Jesus doesn’t tell us we have to agree with them. He doesn’t say boundaries are wrong, or that truth isn’t important. He tells us to love them and pray for them.
Sunday we talked about the danger of becoming so concerned about defending Christianity that we begin behaving in ways that contradict Christ. Enemy-love is one of the clearest tests of that, because the question is not simply whether the other person is behaving like Jesus. The question is whether we are.
So my challenge for today is, think of one person you find it genuinely hard to love and pray for. Not a prayer that God would finally straighten them out or that they would recognize how right you have been. Pray for their good, their family, their relationship with God, their fears, their needs, and whatever burden they may be carrying that we cannot see. Bless them.
We may not feel differently when we are finished. That is okay. Christian love has never depended entirely on whether we feel like it. But, over time, I have a feeling that as we replace bitterness with blessing, we WILL start to feel differently about them.