“You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father” (Mt 5:43-45). With these words, Jesus continues to raise the bar of discipleship and outlines what the pursuit of love truly is.
The command to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us is challenging today, but we may be a bit removed from the original power of those words. The inference that Jesus was making to his listener’s was that their enemies and those who were persecuting them, were the soldiers of the Roman imperial that were occupying Israel. Though we can still relate, and also be shocked by it and think that this command is impossible. And that is just the point. Apart from Jesus and our relationship and the transformation of our hearts and minds through our discipleship with Jesus, there is no way we are going to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
One reason is that for us our definition of love is limited to the romantic, emotional, sensual, or mere sentimental. It can also be reduced to the mere sublime of loving ketchup or mustard on a hot dog, loving our cat or dog, or even at best getting closer to what Jesus is talking about when we love the members of our families or close friends. But all of these perspectives of love would not make sense in the context of Jesus’ command.
The bond of friendship and family goes beyond mere attraction and is built through shared interests and experiences. Through sharing our lives with others, working through conflicts, trust is built, and relationships will hopefully grow and deepen. Jesus, though, is calling us to mature in our growth of loving even beyond friendship or familial ties. If we love those who willingly love us in return, greet only our brothers and sisters (if we actually get along with them, blessed that I get along with my sister ;)), only those in our clique, group, tribe, or political party, what is the recompense or satisfaction in that? Agape, in Greek, loving without conditions, with little or no chance of mutual exchange, is what Jesus is calling us to strive for.
Many of us could not conceive of loving our enemy or someone who is persecuting us, because we have, minimally only experienced doing no overt harm to others and at best, loved our friends and family. But do we risk going outside of our group, our like-minded safety net? Life is hard enough and it is often safer, we believe, not to take the risk. We continue to operate from a concept of love as an emotion or feeling, because it feels good. We want to be happy and feel good. We avoid suffering at all costs.
Jesus challenged “his disciples to love and pray for the very people who occupy their land, tax them heavily, and treat them with violence and injustice” (Mitch and Sri, 100). How could they love the Roman occupiers? How can we love, those that we feel in some form or fashion in a similar way? St. Thomas Aquinas can be of help. He defined the love that Jesus describes as willing the good of the other as other. We make an act of the will, a free choice to accept the person as they are, to see them, not from our limited finite perspective but as God sees them, as a person with dignity. Can we pray for, seek kinder thoughts and to be more understanding, be more patient, and resist reacting in kind? Can we resist judging and labeling others?
On our own, we may not even conceive of the possibility, loving our enemies, but we can be assured that if Jesus has asked us to strive for this height and depth of love, he will provide the means. We love others unconditionally by allowing Jesus to love us. To breathe, receive, receive, and abide in his love, we experience his love. As we do so daily, we experience more of and are transformed by his love, and begin to allow God to love others through us.
We strive to reach the summit of loving our enemy only with the help of the Holy Spirit. Jesus called his disciples and he calls us to “imitate God by being perfect in love… to reflect the Father’s perfect, committed, selfless, merciful love in their own lives… to go beyond external conformity to the requirements of the law and imitate the perfect love of the heavenly Father, who is love himself” (Mitch and Sri, 101).
Even when we fall short, how much better would our families, communities, countries and world be if we sought this goal? To counter divisiveness, fear, and hatred, we need to refuse to react and instead choose to engage in an act of the will to love one another as Jesus loves us. “Jesus summons us to a heavenly way of life; the saints show that it is possible to live this way on earth.” If the saints can love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them, then by following their example, and allowing ourselves to abide in God’s love as they did, then so can we.
Photo: Jesus lived his command of loving his enemies and praying for those who persecuted them most radically when while dying on the cross he asked his Father to “forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri. The Gospel of Matthew. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010
Spiritual Stepping Stones 