Love Your Enemies: The Most Challenging Command Jesus Gave

For me, the most challenging command Jesus ever gave is to love my enemies (Matt 5:43–48; Luke 6:27–36).

What does it mean to love? Who is an enemy? Why did Jesus command his followers to love their enemies, and what does that actually look like in action?

Exploring “love your enemies” in context

Jesus’s command to love our enemies appears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, so we’ll begin by looking at both contexts.

Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:43–48)

In Matthew’s Gospel, the command to love enemies flows from Jesus’s insistence that he has come not to abolish the law (the Torah) or the prophets, but to fulfill them (Matt 5:17). The command appears at the end of what are sometimes called the “antitheses”: Jesus’s litany of statements that begin, “You have heard it said … but I say to you …” (Matt 5:21–48).

After Jesus says, “You have heard it said,” he cites a command from the law of Moses, the Torah. When he says, “but I say to you,” he does not go on to set aside the Mosaic command. Instead, he expands or deepens it to include the attitudes of the heart that might lead to the breaking of that command. For example, you shall not murder and you shall not harbor the kind of anger and resentment in your heart that leads you to hate and perhaps even desire to murder.

The command to love enemies is the last of the six antitheses. It’s a little different from the previous five in that Jesus gives a brief quotation from the Old Testament and then a saying that does not appear in the Old Testament.

The command “Love your neighbor” (Matt 5:43) is from Leviticus 19:18. Other verses in Leviticus 19 define a neighbor as a member of “your people” (Lev 19:16) and “a fellow Israelite” (Lev 19:17). Toward the end of the chapter, the definition of a neighbor is extended to include foreigners living in Israel’s midst: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself” (Lev 19:34).

Then Jesus adds, “You have heard that it was said … hate your enemy” (Matt 5:43). This is puzzling because the Torah nowhere commands Israelites to hate their enemies. It may be that some people understood the flip side of “love your neighbor” to be hatred of enemies, especially those who posed a threat to Israel. Jesus accepts the first half of the statement (“love your neighbor”) but rejects the second half (“hate your enemy”).

For Jesus, the neighbor is everyone, no exceptions—perhaps especially people you don’t want to love or find it difficult to love. Not only fellow Israelites or Levites, and not only the resident alien dwelling among the tribes of Israel, but the outsiders, as well: the Syrians and Assyrians and Babylonians. Even the people who persecute you. Even the hated Romans, who during Jesus’s day ruled Israel with a heavy hand.

For Jesus, the neighbor is everyone, no exceptions—perhaps especially people you don’t want to love or find it difficult to love.

Immediately following the command to love enemies, Jesus gives instructions about fasting, almsgiving, and prayer. These are the three pillars of faithful Jewish worship, which he expects his followers not only to perform, but to enact from the wells of their hearts (Matt 6:1–21). Jesus’s instructions on prayer (including the Lord’s Prayer) provides a clue for how loving enemies might be possible: with God’s gracious help. Loving enemies is impossible without God’s grace and the Spirit’s work in our hearts. Our ability to forgive flows from our recognition of how deeply and thoroughly we have been forgiven (Matt 6:12; see also Luke 7:47).

Luke’s Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:27–36)

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus gives the command to love our enemies (Like 6:27–36) just after the blessings (“Blessed are you who are poor”) and woes (“But woe to you who are rich,” Luke 6:20–26). The context subtly implies that the poor and the rich must not despise each other. The warnings to the well-fed do not authorize the hungry to hate them; the rich must not look with disdain upon the poor.

A few chapters later in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable that further expands the meaning of the command “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). An expert in the Torah, who wants to test Jesus and justify himself, asks, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:28). Jesus responds by telling a story about a Samaritan—an “other” or foreigner from the perspective of a Torah-observant Jew—who fulfills the command to love his neighbor. In this case, his “neighbor” is a stranger whom he does not know, but who clearly needs help.

Jesus flips the Torah expert’s question upside down: The question is not, “Who is my neighbor?” (as if one could include some and exclude others) but, “How can I be a neighbor to anyone in need?” In this case, the perceived enemy is the one who shows what it means to love. The Torah expert correctly perceives the point: The neighbor (his enemy?) was the one who showed mercy (Luke 10:37).

Jumpstart your personal study of passages like Matthew 5:43–48 and Luke 6:27–36 with Logos’s Factbook.

Love of enemy as imitation of God

The emphasis on showing mercy loops us back to the command to love our enemies.

In Luke’s Gospel, such love is an imitation of God. The summary of the section exploring the command to love enemies concludes with Jesus’s instruction, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). To love enemies, then, is a form of mercy that mirrors the divine mercy, for God is also “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35).

The same is true in Matthew’s account (see Matt 5:45), but with a twist. In Matthew, Jesus concludes the section on loving enemies with the instruction, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48). The word for “perfect” is the Greek word τέλειος, which means perfect, complete (not lacking anything), or mature. The point, however, is the same. Loving enemies imitates God’s perfect and indiscriminate love (Matt 5:48). God sends rain and sunshine (two good gifts, both necessary for life) on the righteous and the unrighteous (5:45).

We know that God loves God’s enemies because Jesus died for us while we were still sinners, estranged from God (Rom 5:8). In the same way, God’s children should love both the deserving and the undeserving, both the friend and the enemy.

What does it meant to love our enemies?

Who is an enemy?

An enemy is not merely someone who disagrees with you. Enemies seek to destroy the ones with whom they disagree. Jesus uses “the one who persecutes you,” “those who hate you,” and “those who mistreat you” as synonyms for an enemy (Matt 5:44; Luke 6:27, 28).

Perhaps you have a personal enemy, someone who seeks to harm or undermine you. This could be as simple as a co-worker who slanders your good name or a family member who deliberately hurts you or a friend who turns against you. How painful it is when a former friend or member of your own household or extended family turns from harmony toward discord.

Maybe you don’t have anyone you consider to be an enemy on a personal level, but you can think of someone who’s an enemy of the gospel. This could be a public figure who acts in a way that harms you, the members of your community, or the church. These are enemies in a more general or abstract sense: Someone who sows discord or enmity rather than peace (shalom) or reconciliation, someone who breaks rather than builds up.

Equally true, though, is that our enemies are human beings made in God’s image (Gen 1:26–27). They are persons whom God loved so much that God sent his Son to die for them (John 3:16), so that they and God may not be at enmity with one another anymore but may rather be in harmonious, reconciled relationship (2 Cor 5:19).

It can be an immense challenge to look at an enemy and view them as a person beloved to God who bears God’s image, a person for whom Christ died. This is the imaginative leap that Jesus is asking his followers to perform when he tells them to love an enemy. It’s a call to resist being an enemy to someone else.

To be sure, the image of God may be deeply blurred or distorted in a person of enmity. It does us good to remember that God’s image is marred and imperfect in all of us. As the apostle Paul says, all human beings without exception sin and fall short of God’s glory, so that none of us have any excuse to lord it over one another or to boast in our own achievements (Rom 3:10–24, 27–30).

What does it mean to love?

The kind of ἀγάπη (agapē) love that Jesus expects of his followers is the same kind of self-giving love that he displayed in his life and death (e.g., Phil 1:1–8; Col 3:13). To love in this way is to will the good of the other person and to do whatever is in your power to bring about that good.

Acting with goodwill toward enemies does not mean that we give up on justice, just as God’s indiscriminate love does not mean that God fails to judge the wicked. God’s justice demands an accounting of all those who wreak havoc in the world, who disobey God’s laws and rebel against God’s good purposes for the world (1 Cor 15:24–26).

Love is a decision to renounce our right to revenge. It’s a decision to actively seek to overcome our own anger and bitterness.

Willing the good of an enemy might mean hoping and praying that they may turn from stubborn wrongdoing toward repentance, from anger toward compassion. It could mean recognizing the way that people get trapped in systems larger than themselves, or the way that people’s destructive actions can sometimes emerge from deep wounds in their past or present. At the very least, as Paul writes, “Love does no harm to a neighbor” (Rom 13:10). This is just as true in our in-person interactions as our posts on social media.

When Martin Luther King Jr. preached a sermon on loving our enemies, he pointed out that we don’t have to like our enemies in order to love them. Love is not emotional warmth. It’s a decision to renounce our right to revenge. It’s a decision to actively seek to overcome our own anger and bitterness. This might be done through prayer, Christian counseling, and an accountability partner or small group.

Practically, how can we love our enemies?

How, then, do we love, in a practical sense?

In one version of Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon on loving our enemies, he proposes that we should start with self-examination: Have I done anything to prompt the hatred of my enemy? May I do anything to make amends or, even if I have done nothing wrong, to take an initial step toward reconciliation? He also insists that we must try to find an element of good in our enemy, no matter how hard. All people were created by God in God’s image. If I was redeemable, then so are they.

The Apostle Paul echoes Jesus’s instructions when he tells his brothers and sisters in Christ to bless and pray for their persecutors (Matt 5:44; Rom 12:14; see also 1 Pet 3:9). Praying earnestly for an enemy might mean praying for their heart to be softened and turned toward repentance, or asking God to heal their woundedness, or interceding earnestly for their salvation. Such prayers rise to God’s throne room. They can also slowly transform our own hearts.

Finally, Paul writes that we must not return evil for evil (Rom 12:17). Even when someone harms or does evil to us, we must not repay them in the same coin. Instead, he urges Christians to overcome evil with good (12:21). Evil can never be overcome with more evil. It can only be overcome by love.

Eklund’s recommended resources for further study

• Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” pages 45–56 in A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, 2012).

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