Love your enemies.

Matthew 5.43-44, Luke 6.27-28.

Sometimes I joke the two commands Jesus said are most important—love God and love your neighbor Mk 12.29-31 —are respectively the easiest and hardest commands. It’s really easy to love God. But the neighbors are such a pain.

Some respond with a laugh. Others disagree: For them, it’s actually a struggle to love God, because he’s invisible and unknowable. (He’s not, but they’ve never been taught how to interact with him, and their churches have been no help.) Whereas the neighbors are sometimes difficult… but sometimes not. And at least they’re visible.

Of course, sometimes their definition of “neighbor” isn’t quite what Jesus has in mind. When asked to define a neighbor, Jesus told the Good Samaritan Story, Lk 10.29-37 and deliberately picked someone Israelis would not care to identify as a “neighbor.” Samaritans were considered heretics of mixed-race ancestry, who insisted they were the real descendants of Israel, and all those Judeans down south were the real heretics. Yet in Jesus’s story, the Samaritan stepped up and helped the half-dead victim when Levites, the most Israeli of Israelis, would not.

Ask Christians who their neighbors are, and sometimes they’re fully aware of Jesus’s story, and try to love the unloveable. But most of us will only think of neighbors as good neighbors—as people who are friendly to us. The less-than-friendly neighbors “aren’t neighborly,” or “aren’t good neighbors,” and therefore aren’t neighbors. We figure they abdicated their status. We only love those who love us. Kind people are easy to love. Unkind people not so much.

In the Law, God obligated the Hebrews to love their neighbors:

Leviticus 19.17-18 Schocken Bible

17You are not to hate your brother in your heart;

rebuke, yes, rebuke your fellow,

that you not bear sin because of him!

18You are not to take-vengeance, you are not to retain-anger against the sons of your kinspeople—

but be-loving to your neighbor [as one] like yourself;

I am YHWH!

And God usually tacks “I am the LORD”—declaring his name YHWH/Jehovah—onto any commands he considers uniquely holy. Don’t hate sinners. Rebuke them, but don’t hate them, don’t take revenge on ’em, don’t stay angry with them; love them. Like God loves ’em.

Like you love yourself. Okay yeah, some of us don’t love ourselves; we got issues. But more often than not, people definitely love ourselves, and prove it regularly with selfish behavior. Now, turn that selfishness outward, turn it into selflessness, and there ya go: You’re loving your neighbor as yourself.

Pharisees strove to follow every command in the Law, including “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and were quite familiar with it ’cause more than one of their rabbis had claimed it’s one of the most important commands. Yet Pharisees were always on the lookout for loopholes, which let ’em look like they followed every command but not really. And if the LORD didn’t explicitly command ’em to love everybody, it meant there were some people they were permitted to hate. Like enemies. Hence the saying “Love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.” Which Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, rebuked.

And Jesus didn’t pussyfoot around. He jumped right to the hatable folks, the people who are just plain hostile and vicious towards us. Persecutors. Mistreaters. Cursers.

Matthew 5.43-44 KWL

43“You hear people say this:

‘You will love your neighbor,’ Lv 19.18

and ‘You will hate your enemy.’

44I tell you:

Love your enemies!

{Bless your cursers.

Do good to your haters.}

Pray over {your slanderers

and} your persecutors.”

Luke 6.27-30 KWL

27“But I tell you who listen:

Love your enemies.

Do good to your haters.

28Bless your cursers.

Pray for your accusers.”

The words in braces are what the Textus Receptus added to Matthew by splicing in the sayings of second-century Christians—gospel commentators like Origen, Cyprian, Clement, and Tertullian—who were trying to combine the ideas of the Sermon on the Mount and Sermon on the Plain. It’s not inaccurate to say Jesus taught us to bless our cursers and do good to our haters; he said exactly that in Luke 6. He just didn’t say it in the original text of Matthew.

Back to the Romans again.

In the last passage, when Jesus rejects reciprocity, and talks about turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, giving up your tunic and robe, giving whatever is asked: For the most part he’s talking about the way first-century Israelis dealt with their Roman occupiers. Whenever the Romans mistreated the non-Roman citizens of Judea, the Galilee, Perea, the Dekapolis, and even Samaria, the Israelis wanted revenge. Wanted to get ’em back. Wanted to get ’em back seventy-sevenfold, like Lemekh ben Metušael in Genesis.

Genesis 4.23-24 Schocken Bible

23Lemekh said to his wives:

Ada and Tzilla, hearken to my voice,

wives of Lemekh, give ear to my saying:

Aye—a man I kill for wounding me,

a lad for [only] bruising me!

24Aye—if sevenfold vengeance be for Kayin,

then for Lemekh, seventy-sevenfold!

Lemekh was a psycho. But hey, if God was gonna punish people seven times over for smiting Cain ben Adam, Ge 4.15 couldn’t we call that a “biblical principle”? Couldn’t we claim we should get to smite our enemies sevenfold? If a Roman kills a Galilean, shouldn’t the Galileans therefore get to kill seven Romans? And you know there are various fleshly Christians who are looking for any excuse to take revenge on their enemies, real or imagined, and wouldn’t mind misappropriating any bible verses that might justify them.

The LORD’s commands in the Law are meant to mitigate such vengeful behavior. But of course, fleshly Israelis would again try to worm around it: Okay, we gotta “love your neighbor as yourself”; we gotta love our fellow Israelis. But “neighbors” doesn’t include foreigners! So we can hate Tyrians, Syrians, Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, Midianites, and Egyptians. And today, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians—and in Jesus’s day, Romans and Nabateans. You wanna hate Romans? Go for it.

But in this passage, the previous passage, and the next verses, Jesus is saying Absolutely not. You don’t get to hate the Romans. God loves the Romans. Jesus died to save you, and also the Romans. So you are to love the Romans.

Nowadays, when Christians teach on this passage, we aren’t thinking at all about the conflict between Israelis and Romans. We’re thinking about any conflict between us and our ill-behaving neighbors, coworkers, family members, or some dickish stranger who got on our bad side. And yes, Jesus’s teachings totally apply to all those people as well. The Israelis had their enemies; we have ours. They were to love their enemies; so are we.

And again: God loves those people. Jesus died to save them too. So we are to love our enemies. And not in any passive-aggressive way which isn’t really love—actual love, as defined in the scriptures and no other way.

Oh, it’s not easy. Wasn’t easy for the Roman-oppressed Israelis; isn’t gonna be easy for any of us whose enemies are making a serious effort to ruin us. But that’s what God’s strength is for. Fall back on it.